It’ll be different this time, you tell yourself. You’ve been down this road before, you know the mistakes to avoid so when you do the thing it won’t end up being the same kind of disaster. So off you go, embarking on the quest, only to find yourself hitting new pitfalls, different challenges and ending up in the same place once again. Then it hits you like a truck, the black dog of those who’ve succeed so much in the past: burnout. You find yourself questioning why you’re bothering to do this at all and start to look far afield, wanting to do anything else other than the thing that you’ve committed yourself to. But making that leap into the unknown is harder than doing what you already know, even with that lack of motivation hanging around your neck like an anchor.
What’s with the melancolic cold open I hear you ask? Well you can thank my somewhat lengthy history in reviewing Davey Wreden’s work, starting with the Stanley Parable, moving onto The Beginner’s Guide and now with his latest game Wanderstop. In rereading my reviews of his work and some of my own writing on burnout, I’ve found myself back in the same headspace once again, questioning whether or not what I’m doing right now (including writing this review) is what I really want to do.
Diving deeper into Wreden’s experience in building out Wanderstop shows that he’s still recovering from his past successes, still bearing the scars of what making a cultural touchstone means and the burdens its placed on his future work. Wanderstop then was meant to be a rebellion against that, something that reflected his desires to escape from what he’d created so he could heal himself. That simple idea, of pursuing something more simple and easy, is what led him to realise that that wasn’t the solution and he’s found himself back in a similar loop again. A better one perhaps, although time will tell if this game accomplishes that for him.
Wanderstop is a reflection of this journey that he and his team at Ivy Road have been on for the past 7 years. That means while it’s very much a cozy game today it’s genesis predates the formation of the tropes that form the basis of the genre. Instead the mechanics that have been included in Wanderstop are a commentary of the modern day game always pushing you to do something, to have an objective, pulling the player along by the nose to do keep making the number go up. Indeed Wanderstop’s entire premise is seemingly just for it to be there for you to engage with it as you want, there are very few things that are necessary for you to do in the game.
Which, to be honest, really grated on me for a good long while. I know myself as a gamer, I’m usually sitting down to play a game at 8:30PM or later at night after doing a full day of work, keeping the house in order and managing the lives of two young kids. This period of my life doesn’t lend itself well to high energy, intense mental load kinds of experiences anymore and so a game disrespecting me as a player by leaving not-so-subtle hints as to what to do isn’t exactly a turn off for me. To have a game state an objective, say it’s optional, and then never circle back around on it really irritated me for the longest period of time. This is a long way of saying I really didn’t get what Wanderstop was about for a good long while, until I started letting go of my preconceived notions about what I should be getting out of the experience.
Shamefully this was about half way through my playthrough. At that point I started actually having fun doing the various things that the game asks you to do, figuring out exactly what I did and did not want to spend my time on. It probably helped that the game erased much of the “progress” you made at every chapter, so the drive to do all the things dissipated quickly and was instead replaced with doing things that were, well just fun. Turning all the puffins into technicolor maniacs who’d then follow me around the place? Hilarious! Seeing if the game would could be soft-locked by planting all the seeds you had in stupid ways that didn’t help anything? Silly but also completely pointless, the game has many ways of subtly unblocking your progress even if you attempt to break it.
Probably the only part of the game that isn’t truly reflective of its core narrative around burnout and its treatment is the actual core narrative centered around the creation of various teas. It starts off easy enough, but the later half of the game is filled with wild and wacky orders that require multiple specific steps. Now, I will note that the game has a couple of built in mechanics to make failures of those procedures a non-issue but it is somewhat frustrating having to recreate complex tea instructions multiple times over when you miss a particular step. This, of course, should really only bother you if you’re trying to finish the game in a short of a time as possible which, again, isn’t the point.
This is one of the strange times when I’ve deeply connected with the core message of the game’s narrative but not the narrative itself. To be sure the story told is a good one, all the major characters given ample time to develop and grow over the course of the game, but I just didn’t find myself connective with them. I have my favourite characters (the businessmen are by far the funniest and are a great satire of corporate life) but apart from that I didn’t feel myself empathising with them directly. Instead the core theme came through strongly enough for me to be able to engage with the game more as a whole.
Which, on the sum of it all, isn’t a bad thing. Wanderstop forced me to undergo some introspection which was probably long overdue. Has anything good come out of that introspection yet? Hard to say and, honestly, it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been ok with that. Fundamental change takes time and I shouldn’t be trying to rush change in order to avoid burnout. That’s a recipe for ending up in the same place again in a hurry, and that’s a mistake I don’t want to repeat.
Wanderstop took me on a journey I wasn’t expecting to go on. Being frustrated at a game that didn’t ask me to do much, instead offering me a sandpit to do as I willed and wouldn’t be judged on, seems like such a clear sign of something being wrong now that I’m kicking myself for missing it before. Finally settling into it and understanding what it was, whilst reflecting on my previous writings about the same subjects, has made me appreciate the experience even more. Wanderstop is a treatise on burnout, the desire for something else and the process of unburdening yourself; something that everyone can take some value from.
Rating: 9.0/10
Wanderstop is available on PC and PlayStation 5 right now for $36.50. Total playtime awas 7.8 hours with a total of 100% of the achievements unlocked.
