TOAt first, Wanderstop seems to appeal to the same restless need as many other cozy games: the desire to leave our stressful lives behind and escape into an anonymous wilderness. The game starts with you working as an assistant at a tea shop in the woods, where you spend your days cleaning, tending to the garden, and researching the perfect tea blend to suit the needs of the customers who visit. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find a game that shatters the hollow rewards of escapist fantasy.
The bucolic setting is born from an image that game designer Davey Wreden became obsessed with in the months following the release of Beginner’s Guide 2015His mind kept wandering to a fantasy of going to a teahouse in the woods and lying on a bench by the water. For months he sketched variations of the scene before deciding to make it his next game.
“I was totally exhausted,” he says. “It was like I was trying to summon the energy of rest and relaxation. I thought relaxing games might heal a part of me. It didn’t take long for me to realize that was totally wrong.”
It’s not just that making a cozy game is like making any game — a marathon of demanding work, made no easier by its cutesy sensibilities — but Wreden also fell into the same fantasy that’s at the core of the genre: that the satisfaction of completing a to-do list is the same as healing.
Wreden only realized she was making a game about trauma that felt like a cozy game when she was joined by Karla Zimonja, one of the creators of Gone Home. “We realized that the characters in Wanderstop were really conflicted and not okay,” she says. “They wouldn’t magically be cured by drinking tea in the middle of the woods.”
Protagonist Alta is the splinter at the heart of Wanderstop’s cozy fantasy: the character who seeks healing through escapism and routine. She was formerly a champion fighter, a human weapon, honed and violent. “Her entire life and mindset is focused on progress and achieving future outcomes,” Wreden says. Her time in the arena has left her traumatized, and she believes completing the job at the tea shop will heal her.
If Alta were a player, she’d be a classic min/maxer, figuring out the most efficient way to complete tea shop jobs in the shortest amount of time. She even sweeps with her broom like she’s swinging a sword. Without giving away the story, though, Wreden makes it clear that completing a list of healthy tasks in a hurry won’t get Alta the healing she or her customers are looking for. “The last thing we can do is have characters who, when you give them their tea, say, ‘Great, you did it. Thanks so much for giving me back myself. Here’s a token of my appreciation!’ and then go off and live their lives,” Wreden says. “If this shop is going to[challenge her]activities can’t have the predictable outcomes that players are used to.”
Wanderstop isn’t meant to frustrate comfortable game players and their escapist fantasies; it’s meant to shift our understanding of where healing comes from. “In Studio Ghibli films, there’s often a long sequence where[we see]someone doing chores,” Zimonja says. “They’re cleaning the floor, washing dishes, or putting things away. You can tell the creators feel that these ritualistic elements, these behaviors of ongoing maintenance, are important and meaningful to living in the world.”
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Through Alta’s story, we see that tasks can only be reclaimed through the intrinsic joy of doing them, and not, as Wreden says, “through promises of future rewards.” As Zimonja adds, “it is the daily rituals that anchor us in our lives.”