Sometimes, all one wants is just a good cup of tea. Arthur Dent, the protagonist of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, absolutely agreed with this. Wanderstop, the first game from developer Ivy Road, also agrees. Ivy Road is helmed by Davey Wreden, co-creator of The Stanley Parable, and Karla Zimonja, who worked on Gone Home and BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den, alongside C418 (Daniel Rosenfeld), who famously did the music for Minecraft. Both of Wreden’s earlier games, The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide have been comedic but with darker elements, and Wanderstop absolutely continues in this vein, although the darkness is always broken by some uplifting frivolity.
You play as Alta, who has dedicated her life to being the best champion swordfighter in the world, taking on opponents in the arena to show off her skill and talent. However, she was recently defeated several times, leading to a major crisis of confidence. She seeks training from a fabled master who resides in the forest, but after running through the woods, she becomes worn out and lost. She’s rescued by Boro, a kindly rotund man who runs the Wanderstop Tea Shop, in a beautiful secluded glade. Boro entreats Alta to spend a while regaining her strength by helping him to run the tea shop, and Alta begrudgingly accepts. There are several acts and the story explores not only Alta’s emotional trauma, but that of the other tea shop guests.
At heart this is absolutely a cosy game about making tea, just one which gets significantly more emotionally complex as time goes on. You could say it is critiquing the genre, although the core gameplay is essentially more or less the same as its stablemates. Boro gives you some ideas of what to do, but there’s no set deadline to do anything. You can progress the story by making different types of tea for the different patrons who arrive at the teashop, but other than that, you can spend your time pottering about, gardening, finding knick-knacks to decorate the interior, taking photographs, sweeping up leaves, and just chatting with guests.
Making tea is explained by Boro, and involves collecting tea leaves and then drying them, as well as growing and harvesting plants to add to the tea to give it a particular flavour. Plants are created by planting different colour seeds in different arrangements. A line of three seeds results in a plant that will grow further seeds, while a triangular arrangement allows for particular fruits to grow. You need to water these, but it’s instantaneous and you don’t have to wait around for things to grow. You can mix and match different coloured seeds to generate different plants, and likewise different guests will request different combinations of flavours. Some may require a little deduction work, although you can always look up the exact recipe within “The Book of Answers” inside the tea shop’s library.
Finally the tea is assembled within the huge machine which forms the centrepiece of the shop and is decidedly Wonka-esque, requiring you to pour a huge vat of water in, heat it to boiling, then transfer it through twisting tubes to the mixing stage, where you add the tea leaves and flavours. Finally it is sent to the decanting stage, where it funnels down into a tiny spout in order to serve it by the cup (sadly, you cannot brew a pot of tea, and you also never add milk, my inner British was slightly disappointed). Luckily, while you can overfill the cup it doesn’t matter and it can’t be spilt either, and normally you’ll have enough to serve both to the patron and to Alta herself, who will narrate her inner thoughts as she sips her drink.
Wanderstop is very easy-going and the writing is consistently very funny, particularly with the wide variety of different people who stumble upon the tea shop, each of whom has their own story which gradually unfolds as you serve them. I particularly liked Gerald, an excitable father who thinks he’s a knight and who continually embarrasses his son, or Nana, a ruthless capitalist who sets up a stall outside the tea shop in the name of competition, despite the fact that the tea shop offers all drinks for free. It helps that the visuals are so colourful and vibrant too, almost alarmingly twee, while C418’s music is consistently delightful.
While making tea might originally seem quite complicated, it’s quite straightforward once the stages are memorized, as is planting the necessary fruits required for each tea flavour. It does get somewhat repetitive as it goes on, but the different characters and their funny dialogue always makes each new brew worthwhile. Wonderstop might be the most traditional game Davey Wreden has helped create so far, but a lot of heart clearly went into it, and it is sincere in its objective of giving players a chance to pause, have a cup of tea, sit back and take stock. The excellent writing, great music and laid-back atmosphere make it a nice game to unwind with.
