Wanderstop REVIEW - you have so much time
Rhianne Ward
Here's a little conundrum I've faced recently. I live in this flat. It's a rental, and kind of a piece of shit. Insulation is terrible so we're either too cold or too warm at all times of the day, everything in the kitchen is in a perpetual state of collapse, and the shower room always has this weird sewage smell that lingers, despite living on the top floor of the building. Also, the shower drain blocks all the time, though considering how much hair I'm regularly shedding, that one's probably my fault. I could go on for a while. We do have a balcony, which is cool, but it's rarely used since the sun tends to blast directly in our faces during the day, and at night it's too cold to appreciate. On top of that, for a while, it didn't have anything on it; no plants, no furniture…nothing. Until now.
I bought a table and two chairs for the balcony! It cost around £60 which is pretty dear as far as general spending money goes for me, but it's a nice wee setup. The thing that stopped me from pulling the trigger on this was, simply put, I'll probably not have the ability to bring these items with me when I inevitably move out. I don't plan to any time soon, but I know it'll have to happen someday, and when it does, I'll probably have to leave a lot of things behind. These parts of me, imbued with purposes and memories, and I'm expected to let them go. In a life as short as this one, why waste on these petty pleasures, knowing that, one day, they'll be forgotten. Lost to time.
Wanderstop is the latest game by Davey Wreden, creator of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide, two of the most compelling games about games ever made. They are truly profound and deeply personal works, so naturally, when this next project was announced, it was met with a mix of anticipation and apprehension. The Stanley Parable guy made…a game about making tea. What? What could you possibly say about games as an art form, while trapped within that framework? Rather a lot, as it turns out, but I'll get to that later.
I don't typically enjoy games like Wanderstop. I like them fine, and I see the appeal of them, but truthfully I can't bring myself to keep coming back. These games are usually about mundane activities, like running a farm or maintaining an island or cleaning a house…stuff that would normally feel like chores in real life are given this newfound energy in the realm of gaming. It is relaxing, in a sense, to find a loop and stick with it, but I get bored easily so I tend to drop them at the earliest convenience. I prefer games to have a challenge, with clear and achievable goals. I don't have the time nor the energy to dedicate to micromanaging a second life in a virtual world. It's the same reason I don't like multiplayer games; there's no end to strive for, no comfortable place to call a conclusion so I can move on to the next thing.
Wanderstop resists this at every turn. You are Alta, a fighter who crashes out after a series of losses and seeks out a legendary warrior to train her back up to her former winning self. However, while running through the forest to find them, she passes out from exhaustion, and winds up at Wanderstop, a quaint tea shop in a clearing, run by a big cheery guy called Boro. Alta, unable to muster the energy to reach her destination, is offered a job at the shop, making and serving tea for the various customers who swing by. She hates it, and wishes to leave as soon as possible, but concedes that she doesn't have the strength to go anywhere else, so reluctantly accepts Boro’s offer.
From there, you are tasked with running the shop. You collect seeds, harvest fruit, sweep up leaf piles, trim weeds, and so on. When customers arrive, they bring requests. Some ask for specific brews - tea infused with Azzy Fruit, for example - but typically you'll be expected to fulfil a certain vibe for them. Looking for something to increase your focus? That'll be Sweet Meeliums. Want to return to a time of Innocence? Biteberry is the way to go. It's not too complicated, though; your guide book will helpfully tell you everything you need to know about every plant you need to use. And of course, no cup of tea is complete without tea leaves! You'll need to scavenge the outskirts of the clearing, basket in hand, looking for tea bushes to process into something usable. While you're walking around there, you might spot the path into the forest. Where you need to be. Where you're supposed to be. What the hell am I doing here?
A couple weeks ago, I had to take time off work. It was a decision months in the making; I was stressed constantly, and at the end of the shift, bringing that bad vibe home with me. When I wasn't on the clock, I was thinking about how long it would be before I was back on it. My dreams were plagued by my job - what I'd forgotten, what I'd missed, or what I might screw up later. I was getting paid to exist in a prison of anxiety and dread. I would make mistakes regularly, and tear myself to shreds over it. Eventually, it only took one more mistake, and I spiralled. I went home, dizzy from adrenaline, passed out immediately, and woke up the next day to a strain in my chest so strong I thought to myself, ‘if I go into work today, I will die’. I felt guilty, knowing that my absence would inevitably lead to my coworkers having to cover my shifts, but I had to do something. Anything. I called in sick, stayed home, and felt like the most pathetic piece of shit on the planet. After all, this was a test of my resolve - my ability to persevere through hardship - and I failed. I wasn't strong enough.
The customers of Wanderstop are an eclectic bunch. Each of them have bespoke designs, manners of speaking, and stories to tell. The first is a man dressed as a knight, who only did so to prove to his teenage son that he's cool. He's absolutely hilarious and really sweet, more than happy to whack out his phone and show you pictures of him and his child. The kid looks miserable or embarrassed in all of them. It is amazing. He asks for a drink, and then finally addresses the glaring omission from his life story: his very purple, very glowing, and very cursed leg. He says he had a run in with a witch in the woods, but don't worry, because he's done a bunch of sit ups so it'll probably buff out soon. You remind him that's probably not how curses work, but he brushes you off, because as a knight, he is honour-bound to weather this storm and defeat it.
Later on, he returns, but his tone is different. He speaks in riddles. If his eyes could be seen behind that helmet, they would surely be vacant. You go to Boro, asking for the tea recipe that will cure his ailment. Boro says…that there's no tea for that. You can't help him. He's just going to have to figure it out on his own. What? But this is a video game! I thought the point of this stupid tea shop was to help people with their problems! What are we even doing here??? Boro listens, then calmly remarks that while it is sad that we cannot help everyone who comes to the clearing, it is an inevitability. We can only do so much with what we have. Everything else is up to them. Slightly dejected, I continued on.
I sometimes have a hard time holding myself to the same standard as everyone else. If someone came to me - a friend, a coworker, or anyone else - and explained that they were miserable, and asked to talk to me about it, I would obviously let them. I don't know their situation, but if I can help them work through it just by being there to listen, then I'll do it without question. If I didn't, the guilt would drive me crazy. That being said, it rarely feels right to do this myself. It's not that I don't feel safe around my friends and family - on the contrary, they are always willing and eager to listen - but rather, I convince myself that my feelings aren't worth bothering about. After all, everybody struggles with something, so what's my excuse? I tend to convince myself that they're going to think I'm weak. I'm 25 years old! I should be over all of this by now! However, what ends up happening is I make an active effort to push those negative feelings down, so when someone asks me how I'm doing, I can muscle out an “I'm okay” without it feeling like a barefaced lie.
Given that I’ve been in such a bad place mentally that I had to stop going to work, I figured now was probably a good time to let at least a couple people know how I’m doing. Everyone I spoke to, without hesitation, asked if I was okay, and offered assistance in whatever I needed. It took me a couple days to accept this foreign concept of people caring enough about me to take time out of their precious, limited lives to help me. I’m a failure, after all; I couldn’t even work a job right. But, despite everything, people care, and they understand, and there’s nothing I can do about that. Damn those lovely souls and their infinite kindness!
I wonder if I don’t want to bother people with my problems because I’m afraid of having them feel like me: weak, powerless… unable to help anyone. I sometimes feel like I don’t do enough for my friends and family, especially since they’re so willing to turn out for me. I have to catch myself quietly wishing, in my darkest moments, that these connections didn’t exist, so I could just rot away in peace, no strings attached. It turns out that it’s the people in our lives that keep us alive. It stings when you can’t help them. I look at the ongoing atrocities inflicted on the people of Palestine, Ukraine, and everywhere else where there is war, and wish I could do something. I wake up every day to hear about the dozen or more new ways in which myself and my trans siblings are having our rights, liberties, and dignity stripped away. I want to push back against it, but I never have the strength. I’m tired. I’m so tired, all of the time, and so is everyone else, and I want to be able to take that weight away from them, but I can barely carry my own. Always, though, existing is enough. Making the active choice to be alive every single day is enough. You are enough, and so am I.
Occasionally, when the work runs out and you’re left with nothing but free time, Wanderstop encourages you to make yourself a nice cup of tea, find a comfortable-looking bench, and take a breather. You sit, the camera zooms out to a lovely view of the shop or its surroundings, and Alta delivers an anecdote from her life. It can be about her parents, her career as a fighter, memories from her childhood, and so on. There’s quite a lot of these, and listening to them feels…oddly invasive. In one, she recalls a time that her mother asked her a leading question about if she has a compulsion to count things incessantly. Alta lets us know that she doesn’t, and even thinks it in the moment, but tells her mum, “yes”. She receives a terse response: “there are ways to deal with that” and, most agonisingly, “don’t tell your father”. Another story involves a time when Alta was pinned by a chokehold during a fight. She escapes it, but after that point, she feels the choking sensation everywhere she goes. Desperate to seize back control, she starts writing down exact plans every night for the following day - training exercises for how best to prepare for this outcome again - with dedicated times for each activity. The choking subsides, but now every time she fails to carry out this important ritual, the feeling returns. So she keeps doing it. Every day. Forever.
These vignettes are so personal and raw, but also leave a lot open for interpretation. Why did Alta lie to her mum? Why can’t she rid herself of the chokehold? The game lets you bring your own experiences to the table, and you are permitted to take away whatever feels right to you. My fear early on in Wanderstop was that it would come across as too preachy, or overly simplistic, but these tea drinking segments speak to a profound faith placed upon the player to make of the game whatever you will. The only person that can truly understand your life is you. You don’t need a video game to tell you that; self-reflection is what separates us humans from, for example, my flatmate’s cat who sometimes eats food so fast that she throws it up afterwards, and then never once learns from that experience. Sorry to make fun of you Nyx, love you lots, but you are dumb as hell.
Self-reflection, though, requires time and a willing participant, and therein lies the rub. How do we find the time or the energy to do any of that? The world is built around never stopping for even a second, lest you get left behind. Do you know how hard it is to do nothing? Like, truly nothing. No phone, no music, no TV… just you, alone, doing absolutely nothing at all. It is excruciating, at least initially. Every time I try to do it, I am instantly plagued by an overwhelming paranoia. What if someone is waiting on a tea order and they get annoyed because my selfish choice to take a moment for myself ends up jeopardising the shop? What if someone has messaged me something important? What if I take too long and they hate me for that? We've only got so much room for so many people, and eventually, all that inability to show up will catch up to me, and then I'll have nothing and no-one. What if the world ends right now, we have mere moments to live, and I don't get to say goodbye to the people I love, all because I wanted some peace and quiet? At a certain point, it gets to be a lot.
Near the end of Wanderstop, Boro delivers a line that I have been unable to remove from my brain ever since I read it: “boredom can be a wonderful luxury”. That sentiment gave me pause, because boredom is so often considered a negative state of being. But why? Why do we feel this incessant need for stimulation? Why can't humanity just chill out for a second? I'm sure there's a socioeconomic explanation for this, but knowing that doesn't really help. Oh cool, so not only do I have a brain that tries to eat me alive every time there's a moment of quiet, I'm also a sucker who succumbed to grand bourgeois machinations of enforced subservience. That's awesome.
But then I look at Wanderstop. Beautiful, profound, incredible Wanderstop. I wonder if perhaps while playing it, I had secretly hoped it would have all the answers. It doesn't, of course, and it knows that. It's not a self-help game. Rather, it wants you, in the gentlest possible way, to be done with it, whenever you feel comfortable. It makes no false promises though: whatever comes next may not be good. You might struggle, and spiral, and end up right back here. There are no guarantees in life, but making peace with that is the most important step to healing. Unfortunately, regardless of how things turn out, your life will not be the same. Bridges will be burned as you figure out the way you want to live your life. Despite this, you must do it, and there's no time like the present. This terrifies me. I was scared to be done with Wanderstop. What if I take the wrong lessons away and make things harder. Worse yet, what if I understand the game, see the path forward, and fail to follow it? I don't know how many more times I can disappoint myself. But it must be done. Onwards we go.
It’s pretty cold on this balcony. The table I bought is a bit small, so I can’t fit a computer mouse on it, but that’s okay. The cat peed on my spare duvet so I washed it, and hung it over the balcony railing. Normally I’d be worried about the whole thing tumbling down into the grass below, but if I push the furniture up against it, it secures the whole thing in place. It’s funny how things can have multiple uses. The chairs are pretty comfy. It’s cool that they have back support; only one other seat in my flat has that and it’s also this piece of shit office chair with a weird stain on it, and the cat sleeps on it all the time so it may as well not exist. This is preferable. Somebody is playing bagpipes nearby. Bagpipes are really loud so I can’t say for sure where exactly it’s coming from, but I’m pretty sure it’s someone across the road from me. I didn’t know someone on this street played bagpipes. That’s pretty cool. I know it’s someone actually playing them too and not a recording, because they keep making little mistakes and starting over. I swear to God, occasionally they start riffing. Bagpipe jazz…what a concept.
I never noticed that, far in the distance, beyond the city and up into the hills, there are wind turbines, visible from my flat. They’re hazy, but they’re there. They aren’t spinning at the moment - there’s not much of a breeze going on today. If I lived even one floor down, I probably wouldn’t be able to make them out past the skyline of civilisation. I could do with some plants here, maybe. This balcony is really messy, but it doesn’t have to be forever. It can be tidied up, piece by piece, and hey, when it’s time for me to leave, maybe the next soul who resides here will like what I’ve done with the place.
This is me being bored, by the way. Or practicing boredom, at least. It turns out that’s a difficult thing to do when there’s so much going on in the world. So many colours and flavours to experience. It can be overwhelming, at times, to know that I will only live to see a fraction of it. It’s a lot of pressure to live a life worthy of that splendour. I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely satisfied by how I end up spending my time left on the mortal plane, but at the very least, I think it will be good, and full of beautiful somethings. After all, we have so, so much time.
