Wanderstop Deconstructs Cozy Games To Brew Something Better

I’ve spent more of my life as a barista than doing any other work, and mostly liked it. Decorating the shop, coming up with new recipes, chit-chatting with coworkers — I’ve always thought it would be a near-perfect job, if you could avoid the bad bosses and worse customers. I’m now more convinced of that than ever, after playing a surprisingly touching game about tea, burnout, and the fantasy of an unstressful food service job.

Wanderstop is the first game from Ivy Road, a studio that includes some of the creators of The Stanley Parable and Gone Home. It follows Alta, a champion fighter who finds herself working at a charming tea shop set in a colorful glade, trading her stressful life for some low-key gardening and tea-making. That description might make it sound like a Stardew Valley clone, making it all the more surprising that it’s actually a heartfelt, narrative-driven deconstruction of cozy games that explores burnout, self-loathing, and working for more than a paycheck.

First Taste

Wanderstop isn’t subtle about its themes. Alta is a gladiator who finds herself unable to hold her sword after a series of crushing defeats ended her perfect streak in the arena. In search of a trainer, she passes out in the woods and awakens to meet Boro, the cheerful owner of the Wanderstop tea shop, who carries her to safety and suggests she help run the shop for a while while she recovers. The idea came from designer Davey Wreden’s own experience with burnout, and it’s immediately apparent that that’s what Alta is dealing with.

Fortunately for Alta, Wanderstop is blessed with the most patient customers imaginable, who emerge from the forest at irregular intervals and happily wait for as long as it takes you to make their drinks. They include a wannabe knight on a quest to make his kid think he’s cool, a cutthroat merchant determined to prove she’s better at business than you, and a rowdy child who just wants to play in the dirt and draw on the shop’s walls.

Wanderstop isn’t really a game about tea; it’s about how Alta’s encounters with these wanderers change both of them, hopefully for the better. Many of Wanderstop’s stories are left dangling, the fates of customers left uncertain in a way that runs counter to the heroic fantasy of most games. Try as she might, Alta can’t fix all of their problems with a cup of tea. She can make their day a little better, and sometimes offer more help, but they’ll sometimes end up disappointed in her or simply need to take care of things on their own. Wanderstop balances this harsh truth with humor, and the game’s writing often left me cackling at a customer one moment only to be overcome with emotion the next.

Alta is an extremely relatable character, determined to get back to the work she loves despite how much it’s hurting her. As much as I empathize with her, she doesn’t always make for a great protagonist, showing little sign of growth throughout the game. Part of that comes down to the fact that you can always choose reluctant or angry dialogue options, but even if you want to steer her in a healthier direction, she remains mostly stagnant. Only when she sees her own struggles reflected in another character near the game’s end did I really get the sense that Alta’s experience at Wanderstop was changing her.

Let It Steep

While she feels a little too passive, Alta’s slow growth is in line with Wanderstop’s dedication to elevating the moment-to-moment experience of playing over traditional notions of progress and challenge. Making tea isn’t even difficult, just time-consuming. And unlike in typical farming sims, there’s no way to speed up or automate the process, nor can you upgrade your tools or expand your shop. You’re not even getting paid for this.

How much you like Wanderstop will probably depend on how that sits with you. You won’t find the incremental progress and unending to-do lists of most cozy games, and as Boro asks Alta to help run the shop, he all but turns to the player to explain that productivity is not the point here. You can spend your time cleaning up leaves and trimming weeds or filling the planters around the clearing with flowers. You can take photos and hang them around the shop and tend to your garden. But none of this is required and the only reward is whatever satisfaction you feel for doing it.

If cozy games are a reaction to the power fantasy of action games, Wanderstop is a reaction to the fantasy of productivity and self-sufficiency that cozy games offer. Wanderstop provides an arguably greater fantasy — one where you have time to rest, where you work not to get rich or buy a bigger house, but because it feels good to do and helps others in the process.

Time doesn’t really pass in the clearing. There’s no day and night cycle, no clock ticking away the minutes of your shift. At a few key points in the game, you need to manually advance time by sitting at a shrine, which resets the clearing, shuffling the landscape around and removing almost everything you’ve done inside and outside the shop. The crops you planted and the trinkets you placed in the windows are all gone, and what remains are any photographs you hung on the walls — the memories you’ve chosen to preserve are more important than the work you accomplished, after all. The first time this happened, I was a little upset at the idea that I was losing progress, but that was quickly replaced by something close to relief. I didn’t need to worry about expanding my farm or collecting every decoration I could. Everything I did between resets was for the benefit of doing it, not for the rewards it offered.

Slow Pour

All that’s really required of you is making tea, in the most unwieldy way possible. First, scour the clearing for enough leaves to fill your basket. Drop them into a processing station until they clump into a dried ball, which takes a couple of minutes. While that’s happening, grow whatever fruit you’re adding to the tea by planting multiple seeds in specific patterns in your garden to crossbreed them. Take that all inside and climb a ladder to reach a rope dangling from the ceiling, and pull it to fill an enormous brewing machine with water. Flip a bellows a couple of times to boil the water, then kick a valve to send it swirling through a tube into an infuser and drop in your ingredients. Kick another valve to send the tea to a decanter and hop off the ladder. Grab a mug, place it under the brewing machine’s spout, and pull one more rope to pour the tea, then find whoever you’re serving it to.

Maybe it’s the barista in me, but I love this ridiculously complicated process. It reminds me of the careful weighing, timing, and measuring involved in making coffee, along with the mechanical joys of grinding coffee and running the espresso machine. At the end of the game, you have the option to make one last cup of tea for Boro. I chose the perfect recipe and realized that, lacking any dried leaves or the right fruit to make it, I’d have to start the process from scratch. It took at least five minutes to run through the steps for that one cup of tea, made for no reason other than that Boro might like it. He thanked me for the gift, made a quick comment on my choice, and we moved on with nothing having changed — a perfect encapsulation of Wanderstop’s counterintuitive commitment to enjoying the process more than the rewards.

If you’re looking for something that fits the cozy game formula, Wanderstop will probably leave you disappointed. It offers none of the satisfaction of building and expanding that the genre typically does, instead opting for a more ephemeral sense of accomplishment. But where the endless demands in farming games can make them stressful to play in spite of their friendly facades, Wanderstop left me feeling at peace like no other game has. Wanderstop asks you to let its stories unfold slowly and find joy in work done for its own sake, and I couldn’t be happier to oblige.

9/10

Wanderstop launches on March 11 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Inverse was provided with a PC copy for this review.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.