“Wanderstop” or tea therapy

Sits on a bench or a sofa, bring a burning cup to your lips and immerse yourself in your thoughts. These moments of serenity are at the heart of Wanderstop (Available on March 11 on PC, PlayStation and Xbox), a game in which tea comes to hunt black ideas.

After a humiliating defeat, the Alta warrior is found unconscious by the Colossus Boro, owner of a tea room located in a mysterious clearing. Consumed by a burnout and unable to leave, she puts on an apron to serve hot drinks while waiting to recover.

In therapy

A string of customers, all more wacky than the others, then present themselves to her: an idiotic father who improvises knight, men in costume-tie in search of a meeting room, an aggressive merchant … A complicated clientele that must be spared to obtain orders. Each new head is thus the occasion for a sketch and the dialog responses are to be wisely choosing to push the interlocutor to open up to us.

With these tocassed consumers, a saving humor is invited in the clearing where Alta leads an existence weighed down by remorse and exhaustion. Its introspection capacity thus increases as it learns to listen to, even if it means taking the insults of a filthy kid or share the delusions of an incompetent demon hunter.

Twelve years after his masterpiece The Stanley Parablethe talent of the Game Designer Davey Wreden to destabilize us and make us (Sou) laugh is always intact. Witness the writing of the dialogues (in English, subtitled in French)- “Coffee? This is not my cup of tea ”loose for example the elegant Boro – and the way in which the scenario skillfully zigzues, between deliciously absurd sketches and heavier moments.

In counterpoint, overlap of the game phases which consist in preparing hot drinks. The basic principle is inspired by that of a life simulator: it is up to us to seize a wicker basket to harvest tea, sweep the dead leaves, cut brambles, grow fruit by planting seeds and, finally, develop infusions in a gigantic teapot.

To make you lose your ball (tea)

The blind research of yielding being deeply associated with the evil from which heroin suffers, the Ivy Road studio, however, subverts the genre by voluntarily stopping the player’s productivity: tea bushes appear randomly in the clearing, plants are exhausted quickly and resources are reduced to zero in each chapter. Wanderstop wants to encourage us to get off and thus illustrates the slowness of Alta’s convalescence, who learns to let go as soon as she discovers a new drink and tastes her while sitting.

These brakes imposed on the player nevertheless have the effect of making very classic missions for boutique management and preparing for more laborious potions. To the point that these simple, often banal tasks in other video games, end up generating a feeling of discomfort. If our frustrations justly reflect the regular disillusions of the heroine, which falls many times before succeeding in moving forward, they also put our patience to the test. Go to the end of this game, despite its colorful sets and its rhythm driven by the soft music of C418 (which composed the music of Minecraft), asks to arm a little perseverance.

During the thirteen hours we took us to come at the end of this adventure, the annoyance made us leave the game a few times, which ended up dragging. But the complexity of its flavors was only cleared after the fact, once installed on a sofa with, of course, a cup of hot drinking in hand to meditate on this fascinating therapy by tea.

Pixels’ opinion:

We liked:

• Sits on a bench with your drink and wait to see what’s going on;
• the grain of permanent madness;
• Go from a weighing subject to light discussions in the blink of an eye.

We liked it less:

• The cultivation of fruits and the preparation of tea are repetitive and sometimes frustrating;
• It is not easy to extricate from the game (as from a depression).

It is rather for you if:

• You are looking for originality;
• You are very interested in psychology and burnout.

It is rather not for you if:

• You are looking for a relaxing life simulator;
• You don’t like you to be constantly destabilized.

The pixel note:

7 teas served/10 customers.