Review: Wanderstop’s Strongest Feature Is Its Story

Cozy gets tossed around a lot in the gaming sphere recently as both a genre and a vibe. However, I often find it is better to hear a group of players or community refer to a title a such, rather than the developer itself. This is especially true when it comes to Wanderstop, which Ivy Road and Annapurna make sure to describe as “cozy” whenever possible. It’s a fascinating exploration of an individual who is going through a lot and I think its message is an important one to put out there, but many story beats and gameplay elements kept it from feeling “cozy” and “comfortable” for me. Worse, I experienced many bugs, one of which proved gamebreaking, on the PS5.

Alta is a warrior who’s just experienced some major setbacks. She’s tasted defeat. However, she’s not giving up. She wants to be the best. She wants to be unbeatable. She heard the legendary Master Winters headed into a certain forest to retire, and so she dashes in to hopefully find her and train under her. Except… once she gets inside… she hits a wall. It’s like a crushing weight hits her. She can’t lift her sword, so she’s forced to drop it. She collapses. She wakes at Wanderstop, a tea house where a man named Boro works. He found her and her sword, and tells her that she’s just exhausted. She can keep trying to run into the forest, or she can take some time to just be and slowly recover while working at Wanderstop. Since she collapses the second she runs back into the forest, it seems like the only thing to do is try this alternative.

I have a lot of feelings about Wanderstop’s story. When it comes to the the forest, shop, and some supporting cast members, I absolutely loved it. The mysterious nature of things and these folks could be fascinating and funny. I absolutely was curious about what was going on with Alta. However, there are a lot of times when I don’t think certain concepts were handled as well. Like there could be some moments in the script when I felt Boro, who would normally be super kind and sweet, almost came across a bit out of character and condescending. It also felt like Ivy Road really wanted to hammer some points and concepts home about the nature of accepting things, forcibly taking a break, and dealing with certain situations. While some of these moments are handled pretty well, there are others that fall flat because it just… constantly keeps coming up in early parts. I wished I had a little more time to breathe. I get what Ivy Road is trying to do, but this is a game I am playing for escapism and entertainment, not a therapy session, and I almost felt a bit uncomfortable at how often I was being told to “take it easy,” “perhaps do nothing,” “relax,” “recover,” and “savor the moment.” By the time I finished the second season of time, it felt more like preaching than a more natural, relaxed narrative designed to allow me to enjoy myself. This does pull back a bit after certain events happen, but then new issues arrive to interrupt the “coziness.”

Once Alta actually starts working at the tea shop, things fall into a certain pattern. You get tools off of the wall for each season and the tea gathering basket. You plant seeds in certain patterns to generate more seeds or larger plants that bear fruits that will flavor the drink. Tea bushes will automatically grow at the outskirts of the clearing. Typically, a few customers will show up per season, and you’ll talk to them multiple times and take them tea to meet their needs. After they tell you the kind of drink that they want, you go to the machine in the center of the shop to pour water, pump bellows to heat it, empty that into another pot, add ingredients, then dispense it into cups for visitors (or Alta herself) upon request. 

I honestly found it clunky, especially when compared to other farming and shop management. Alta only has so much room in her pockets. The mechanics for pulling out specific equipment and putting it away feels more tedious than necessary. The watering can empties incredibly quickly. The tea brewing process started out novel, but turned tedious. Particularly, two elements started to annoy me. One was the part involving hitting the bellows repeatedly while keeping an icon in a certain region as water boils, because button-mashing like that repeatedly felt unnecessary. The other involved the adding of ingredients, as the most efficient process involves basically staying on the ladder to reach certain checkpoints, then hopping off briefly to sort through Alta’s pockets to check the right ingredients and throw them into the pot. I found if I didn’t position her correctly, she’d sometimes just hop on the ladder again. In some cases, the ingredients didn’t register properly or even toss into the infuser, though the latter issue did seem to be fixed in a pre-launch patch.

It’s because of things like this that, while I like the concept behind Wanderstop, I don’t always feel like it is “cozy” or “convenient” in the way that many other games in this style are. Alta is a fascinating and troubled protagonist. However, when it comes to the way she interacts with and responds to the world, I feel stressed. She’s a damaged individual who is experiencing burnout and a breakdown. I feel like the portrayal of her suggests severe PSTD as well. As a result, it can often feel like even her most kind responses are sharp, curt, or even undeservedly mean at points. It set me on edge a bit when I was forced to choose replies I didn’t want to, even though I completely get and understand why the character would choose one of those options. But the fact that these can be apathetic, sarcastic, or mean at certain points of the story would get to me, even more so than discovering that my responses didn’t really matter. 

Yup, from what I can tell, your choices in dialogue don’t affect the story aside from perhaps one critical moment near the end. This sometimes comes up with the actual drinks served too, at least in the earliest parts. If what you gave the person isn’t 100% right, you can offer to rebrew it or often force them to accept what you made. The story continues regardless. There are exceptions later in the latter half of the story, but typically there’s no issue giving them what they didn’t ask for. And if there is a request from a customer you find frustrating to make, it might be possible to even skip it and push forward in the story if it didn’t come from certain people.

There are other elements that keep Wanderstop from being relaxing or soothing in the way I like my “cozy” games to be. It’s very easy for Alta’s pockets to fill up. I found myself stressing out because I had picked something, but then the game kept telling me that designated inventory section was full. I would have to go to a table or inside the shop to place it somewhere. The concept of hybrids when gardening and planting in specific patterns is fascinating, but I stressed out about finding the right seeds and making sure I wasn’t over-harvesting since said plants only are good for getting seeds or fruits for a limited number of times. It felt like even though Boro was telling me to take my time, relax, and live in the moment, there were these inconveniences that kept me from doing exactly that. Especially since minor design changes like no inventory limitations or plant lifespans not being limited would have helped eliminate those issues. 

I also got a bit frustrated when it came to certain ingredients and elements. When it comes to Alta drinking the tea, only the base flavor seems to count and adding extras, such as Timothy’s Jam, doesn’t result in a new memory due to the extra ingredient. There’s another element of it tied to the trinkets Alta might collect from tidying up the clearing and those disappearing that disappointed me, as I was hoping they’d remain decorative milestones to make the shop more homey. I honestly despise the pluffin birds too! Sometimes, I would leave an item somewhere on purpose, only to look down when I’m somewhere else and see one of the birds following me, carrying it. That wasn’t what I needed! My pockets were full and I wanted that item left where it was! Worse, at one point I made a complicated cup of coffee for a customer. Part of that involved multi-step brewing. I took the cup out from under the dispenser and put it on a table next to me for a few minutes to drain the machine so I could start the second spot. I turned back around and… the drink was gone and cup dirty. I actually checked with the developer to report this as a bug, like I had many other issues that arose during my playtime. It turns out that is intended. If you put down a drink for a second, something you might need to do since you can’t pocket it like other items, a pluffin might just appear out of nowhere, drink it, and potentially force you to rebrew a cup depending on how much you have left or its complexity.

Of course, what made me most uncomfortable is that Wanderstop is one of those games that made me inexplicably motion sick. Which is weird, since that usually doesn’t happen when I play third-person perspective games. It’s something about the camera direction and angle, especially when you go inside the tea shop to brew tea or do various tidying up options. It made me uncomfortable and dread heading inside to accomplish some tasks, and like I’d need to make Alta move slower to better deal with it.

There are some minor and major technical problems to consider with Wanderstop at launch, at least on the PS5. Starting in what I can best describe as the second season, whenever I’d give tea or an item to someone, Alta would turn around so she wasn’t facing them. It was really quite strange, especially since the story segment might start with her facing them, then she’d immediately turn around. If she was talking to someone who was able to just wander about, this also would lead to glitches that had character models getting too close. Whenever I’d try to play flowers in the hanging pots, even if transplanted from a mini pot, Alta would just end up hitting it instead. The weirdest issue is sometimes the ladder would “get away from me” if Alta was on the second floor, finished tossing stuff in the pot, and was going to hop on to rotate and head to open the valve to let the tea flow into the final pot. If you shake a bird to get the item it is holding, sometimes that item will just… be floating in midair once the bird drops it. One time, I had to go down to the first floor and climb up from there. But another, the ladder actually rotated back to where it was supposed to be after it happened? It was a weird bug.

Wanderstop tells a fascinating story and very much captures the stress, anxiety, and pressures that come from being trying to meet all these expectations and not fail. Especially when you try to stop doing that. However, I often found myself wishing this was a short animated series or movie, rather than a game. Alta’s journey and many of the characters around her are fascinating, and I love watching them. But this ended up being an unexpectedly stressful, inconvenient, and broken sim at some times, and that got in the way of my enjoying everything. I believe there are many people who will love and identify with Wanderstop! I just found it clunky, broken on the PS5 at launch, and far from cozy.

Wanderstop will come to the PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on March 11, 2025. A demo is available on Steam.