Secrets Wanderstop Gameplay Top
Secrets Wanderstop Gameplay Top
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The joy I found in stumbling across these little kleptomaniacs, picking them up and shaking them around to drop whatever package or seed they’d stolen, was immense. And yes, you can
Far from just another “cozy” game, Wanderstop invites you into a colorful world filled with quirky characters and bizarrely flavored tea at the price of some uncomfortably insightful introspection.
There are a lot of open-ended dialogues in this game. That’s because the story moves in chapters, and with each chapter, we meet new customers while the ones from the previous one are simply… gone.
The only things that remain are Boro, the books, and the images we’ve taken. I hated this, in fact, I think I still hate it. It felt like the game was forcing me to deal with my own control issues, to accept that I couldn’t hold onto everything.
As Boro reminds Elevada at one point, just because you can’t take the decorations you love with you, is that any reason not to make your surroundings more beautiful while you’re here? Isn’t decorating for the sake of enjoying your own personal space enough on its own?
I've played quite a handful of cozy games in my time, and the trope of moving away to a distant island, away from your job and everything you've known your entire adult life, has been, well, overused. But I’m not one to complain. Many of these games—like Garden Witch Life, where the protagonist gets booted from her job, or Magical Delicacy, where Flora follows her dream to become a witch—follow the same cozy template: move to an entirely new place, start fresh, and build yourself a little world that consists of farming, tending to a new home, and forging a simpler, more fulfilling life.
I knew I was in for a musical treat as well when I learned C418, one of the Minecraft composers, was behind the soundtrack for Wanderstop. The music itself doesn’t just fill the empty spaces, it tells its own stories. Each customer has their own musical theme, so even though their conversations didn’t have any voice acting, they all felt deeply engrossing.
Operating the tea machine itself is rather uncomplicated for such a complicated looking contraption. A tall ladder rotates around the giant glass pots in the center of the tea shop – you climb to the very top and pull a rope to fill the first pot with water, then climb down to smack the bellows, keeping the thermometer bar balanced to get the water to a perfect boil.
There's nothing wrong with this angle, of course, but Wanderstop offers a far more realistic approach to the process of change. It's still a cozy game for the most part, but one that isn't afraid to point out the challenges that come with slowing down. The farming, harvesting, and tea-making serve as actively therapeutic actions, rather than mindless wholesome gameplay in search of gifts for romanceable residents (or to pay back a merciless tanuki landlord).
The game offers you quiet pockets of peace with pelo objective – yes, for Elevada, but also for you. It's beautifully told, avoiding any moral sledgehammering or definitive statements, it slowly unfolds a portrait of a person many of us can relate to and gives us time to digest Wanderstop Gameplay each layer.
At the same time, Wanderstop’s simple but satisfying tea brewing experimentation serves as a safe and entertaining space to do that deep digging. There aren’t many games like Wanderstop out there currently, but for all our sakes, I hope there will be soon.
It's not stuffy, either, or singularly shooting for emotional high-notes. Wanderstop has incredibly funny dialogue and a truly bizarre cast of characters with strangely high expectations of what a cup of tea might do for them.
Wanderstop is a narrative-driven, slice-of-life adventure game with light management and puzzle elements. Developed by Ivy Road, it places players in the role of Elevada, a former warrior who has chosen to leave her past behind and run a quiet tea shop in the middle of a mysterious, ever-changing forest.
Wanderstop constantly put me up against situations that were not just uncomfortable, but that intentionally went against the grain of what you normally expect from these types of games in order to make its point.