Are you a failure? Wanderstop might be the “cosy” game for you

Before you even get to control your character in Wanderstop, you’ve already messed up. Alta has lost in the arena, her defeat a swift and ignoble end to three years as unbeaten champion. She is, in her own words, a ruinous “failure”. To retrain and come back fiercer than ever, she pops into the forest looking for a legendary trainer, only to find herself waking up exhausted in front of a picturesque tea shop. The Steam demo that follows will see you harvesting plants, making tea, and arguing a lot with the shop’s owner, a gentle giant who thinks that maybe what Alta really needs is just some time to rest. After all, you can’t fail at drinking a cuppa.

The demo (released as part of Steam Next Fest) is basically the opening of the game, heavy on the story and introducing our hamstrung hero and her new friend Boro, the hulking optimist who owns a tea shop but is basically a giant therapist. I want to talk about the character-driven storytelling more than the gamey stuff you’ll be doing day to day around the tea shop. But I think it’s helpful to know what kind of cosiness you’re in for, so let’s quickly summarise the basics.

You’re making tea, but that includes all the farming involved before the first flush. The small field outside the shop is arranged in a hex pattern, and you can sow seeds in certain patterns to instantly bloom different types of plant. Sow in a line to get a small hybrid plant with blue seeds. Sow those same seeds in a three-point star pattern to create a large hybrid that’ll offer harvestable fruit for the teas.

You’ll dry tea-leaves in a box with a timer, collect the resulting tea balls, and clamber up a giant central tea infusion machine, sliding about on ladders, pulling ropes and puffing bellows and kicking levers to get the hot water flowing. The tea spills out a spiral funnel in the bottom with the pleasing flow of a chemistry set you got for Christmas. There is something very Dick Van Dyke about the internal decor of the house. Little toy trains wheel in and out of waterfalls and heaters – a washing machine for tea cups. Automatic saloon doors open the way from room to room with a satisfying creak. You can tune some knobs to change the music playing in the shop. The radio has three stations: “horse”, “dog”, and “cow”.

This is all very cosy and rosy, but what does it have to do with failure, and how we cope with the idea of it? Well, most of what’s on show is not selling the game itself but the protagonist and her problems. Alta has been pushing herself past the point of terrible burnout. She runs back into the forest again and again to escape the tea shop, using anger and fear as a fuel source, not yet understanding that such fuel burns hot and fast and pumps out poison like any petrol-hungry combustion engine. She eventually collapses every time you leave the tea shop’s restful glade.

The game’s co-writers, Davey Wreden (of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide) and Karla Zimonja (of Tacoma and Gone Home) have spoken about how the game is a personal story of burnout, and the restorative power of “daily rituals that anchor us in our lives”. And playing this opening I can see what they mean. The core struggles Alta faces are difficulties a lot of us can relate to. At one point she talks about a previous dream – to smithy her own sword. But she gave up on the idea because to be “great” at blacksmithing would take a lifetime in itself, and nothing but the best-made sword would do. In Alta’s mind, she only had enough life for one goal: to be the greatest arena fighter.

This is a kind of all-or-nothing thinking any perfectionist will recognize, and one that can lead to despair as easily as it leads to success. Pouring the entirety of your life’s efforts into one vessel at the expense of all others comes naturally to those who want to specialize and excel. A lot of us (I include myself here) have funneled a life and identity into the mental coffee cup that accompanies us to work every day. But when something goes wrong and that career cup shatters, for whatever reason, the cold caffeine stains of “failure” seep into everything around you. Suddenly, after years of over-achieving, you’re a mess-up. There are two reactions: double down and try harder, or give up entirely. All or nothing.

As you can see, there’s a lot of emotional baggage to unpack in Wanderstop, even in this short demo. When it ended after an hour or so, I was left thirsty for more. I am eager to witness Alta’s improvement because I understand the therapeutic value of taking a horse-sized chill pill and simply sitting down to breathe for an hour. I have come to realize that there is a middle ground between doing everything and doing nothing. It would be heartening to see this extremely angry man stabber also recognize this.

Furthermore, I am intrigued by how the game will challenge the traditional “cosy” farming genre, which often focuses on crafting and meeting seasonal deadlines that can make relaxing games feel like more tasks to complete. If the objective is to show Alta that she doesn’t always have to push herself or be constantly “productive,” I am curious to see how the game’s design reinforces this concept. While games like Stardew Valley offer a pleasant escape from reality, there is a need for a game that delves deeper into why these games are so popular. What are we truly seeking to escape when we plant another row of parsnips? I am hopeful that Wanderstop will provide an intriguing answer. The game is set to be released on March 11th.