Wanderstop review: "Exalting the transformative power of tea"

The closest we get to reexamining our lives in most cozy games is moving away from the city for a taste of rural life. In Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or Stardew Valley, your character throws in the towel at their fast-paced corpo job and immediately adjusts to being a laid-back landworker with absolutely zero ego. This colossal lifestyle change usually takes place within a simple opening cutscene, a quick dusting of lore before we get to the real meat of the game: growing turnips.

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). If you've ever worked yourself to the point of exhaustion, blamed yourself for just "not trying hard enough" when you know full well your resources are depleted, or felt like a failure for not being the best in the world at something – you might need to put some time aside for Wanderstop.

When going to therapy (or indeed starting any hobby or self-improvement pursuit) you'll often be told "you get out of this what you put in". The same is true of Wanderstop. The game offers a varied and largely self-guided experience, but it asks you to engage in its journey with an open heart. If you go into it expecting a narrative-driven game that explores difficult themes with care and honesty, you'll be genuinely touched by what Wanderstop has to offer. If you just want to make tea, farm collectables, and vibe – you'll find some of what you seek here, but it might not quite hit the mark.

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Chai harder

The game starts with a backstory for our protagonist, Alta, a world-famous champion fighter, armed with a custom sword and an unbroken winning streak. She's bold, brave, and doesn't care about anything other than beating the next opponent – her tunnel vision propelling her from battle to training session and back to battle again. Alta doesn't need breaks and Alta doesn't lose. Until she does.

One loss isn't too bad, so she berates herself a little and moves on. Train harder, go faster. Don't get lazy or complacent. Her schedule intensifies and she neglects rest for effort, only for it to result in another loss. And then another. And another. With every loss, Alta's inner critic becomes more cruel. It's because she's weak, or she doesn't try hard enough – surely she just needs to do better. In her panic, she resolves to find Master Winters, a legendary retired fighter who can train her back up to greatness. Unfortunately, Alta's quest is cut short by her sudden inability to lift her sword. She collapses in the woods, and awakens outside an unassuming little tea shop called Wanderstop.

Her savior is Boro, a kindly, somewhat spherical man with a tenuous grasp of the English language, who sits patiently with her as she comes to terms with her less-intense surroundings. What is initially an offer to make tea for Alta becomes an offer for a job at his cafe. Perhaps Alta, while she takes a much-needed rest, might like to attend to the calming daily duties of a tea shop proprietor? He exalts the transformative power of tea, the gentle pace of the day, the interconnectedness with the natural world. This kind of change works for the protagonists of all those other cozy games, surely it's worth a try?

Alta is, of course, resistant. Throughout the game she will try to run away, find excuses, distract herself, create needless objectives, and be outright unpleasant to anyone who tries to help. In all her battles against the strongest foes this world has to offer, she evidently never suspected her toughest fight might be against herself and her ceaseless craving for momentum. She wants to do what a lot of us do – try harder, work smarter, get better, find quick fixes. She wants to workout and practice with her sword because those are the only things she can understand as tangible self-improvement. What Boro asks is a far greater challenge – to merely sit and find peace.

Peace and tranquilitea

It's an attitude I can relate to all too well, and I'm unashamed to say that Wanderstop sparked a tearful examination of my own habits. The trajectory of the game wasn't a simple curve of self-realization resulting in a clean and tidy triumph at the end – that's simply not how mental health works. There are no definitive answers or permanent fixes, no easy ways out. Even when you feel like you're making progress, you're prone to stumbling back into old habits or taking a small failure to mean you should give up entirely. Progress is rarely linear. Alta's self-criticism is so raw and unfiltered that it catches in your chest as you hear it. I found myself thinking "but why can't she just stop and rest?" before realizing Wanderstop was holding a mirror up to my own impulses for overwork. It is a cozy game and a pleasure to play, but it won't shy away from showing you a big sad photo of yourself, pointing at it, and going "that's you, that is".

Whether through resignation, boredom, or perhaps an inkling of acceptance, Alta does eventually start to lean into the tea-brewing life. There's plenty to do in these long stretches of the game, each separated into seasons which bring new plants, customers, and activities. You can stay in one season as long as you'd like, but eventually your guests fall silent and have no further requests. At this point, you're encouraged to explore Alta's own needs, perhaps making her cups of tea, exploring at your own pace, or petting the resident flock of Pluffins until you can pet no more. Boro is remarkably relaxed about his shop, allowing you to decorate with trinkets, flowers, posters, photos, and even pens.

The game offers you quiet pockets of peace with no objective – yes, for Alta, 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 each layer. 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.

To make the tea, Alta has to first harvest leaves from the bushes. Once her basket is full, she'll need to wait for the leaves to dry. There's no fast-forward option, just a very slow countdown timer that sets the pace for the rest of the gameplay. Dotted around the clearing are plants that bear coloured seeds which can be harvested or crossbred into hybrids which then bear fruit. Each fruit has its own flavour and often comes with a quirk, such as making you say the word triangle a lot, or reminding you of your first best friend. These tasks are methodical and meditative without being creatively stifling. The game leaves room for you to fall into your own rhythm.

I fluctuated between trying to tick off every type of tea I could think of, then doing a bit of main story quest content, then going outside and seeing how many plants I could cultivate in one go. Every now and then, I'd get the clippers out and cut some weeds. Decorative trinkets hidden under thorny thatches, stamps in your gardening book, and conversational snippets are your most tangible rewards, but the game encourages you to treasure the joys of landscaping, the peace of a working garden, and the value of gentle toil above all else. You can decorate as much as you like – fill the entire map with plants, cover the walls in photos – but Wanderstop doesn't outright ask you to do much at all. That's what makes it such a treat. Offered alongside a beautifully told story and a collection of defined challenges is unrestricted access to a virtual garden of your own design.

A brewtiful process

The tea machine that takes up most of the tea shop is a whimsical creation right out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. All levers and spouts and chambers, each with the purpose, it seems, of elongating the tea-making process. There are many cultures throughout the world who take great pride in the time it takes to make tea, using the brewing time as a moment for meditation and taking care over each gesture. Clearly, Boro has taken a tea leaf out of their book and created the world's slowest machine. Alta can add flavors with delicate precision, or blindly chuck any old thing in there and see what comes out.

Customers will ask for specific brews, while Boro and Alta (and the Pluffins) can drink just about anything. With each sip of tea, we get to know our characters a little better as they share vignettes of their life outside the shop. After a while, you find your feet – growing fruit, picking tea, blending flavours, washing cups, petting birds, clearing weeds, sweeping leaves… until it's time to watch the seasons change again and move ever-closer to Alta's ultimate goal of leaving all this troublesome relaxation behind.

The gameplay is layered in such a way that there's never a lack of things to do (unless all you want is rest), with wonderfully tactile activities, a moving soundtrack (composed by Daniel "C418" Rosenfeld of Minecraft music fame) and a small cohort of endearing characters to meet. The UI is dressed up as a gardening guidebook, and tiny details all feel accounted for. It's easy to lose yourself momentarily in the process of brewing endless combinations, but the story hangs over your head – not quite there to strike an emotional blow, but certainly to poke and prod at uncomfortable parts of you until something clicks.

As unsurprising as it may be to those who have played creators Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide) and Karla Zimonja's (Gone Home and Tacoma) games, Wanderstop does narrative beautifully. It's bold in its exploration of relentless self-critique and pressure, and doesn't lean on the cozy aspect as an excuse for flimsy platitudes. Some of the best books you'll ever read don't have happy or neat endings. They're a pleasure to experience but they serve as the catalyst for new ideas and curiosity beyond the confines of their pages. If art is intended to imitate life then it must go on and on, it must be unpredictable, and it must leave you waiting and hoping and wondering.

Looking for more like this? Check out our list of games like Stardew Valley!