Wanderstop review: cozy tea shop game embraces its flaws

Wanderstop doesn’t just embrace slowing down; it sees it as a necessity to survive. Alta’s growth over the story comes as she learns to sit down and smell the tea leaves. Slow tasks like filling up a watering can or planting seeds become a much-needed reprieve from her fast-paced life of violence. It’s only through rest that she can regain the energy needed to fight another day. Ivy Road isn’t just making a cozy game to capitalize on a trend: The studio is in actual conversation with the genre. It turns the stress-free joys of games like Stardew Valley into a statement on mental recovery. Sometimes it’s all a little corny, with platitudes that sound like they were pulled from self-help books, but it’s always earnest in its approach.

Wreden doesn’t entirely throw out what he’s done so well throughout his career. Wanderstop still delivers some delightfully funny moments between bouts of existential eccentricity. That doesn’t just come out in Alta, whose brash nature and dry wit make her the perfect annoyed barista, but in her customers too. The story is split into specific chunks where two or three people wander around the small clearing surrounding the shop at once. Each one has their own multi-step story that’s progressed by filling their orders and talking to them. That allows Ivy Road to create a fully fleshed out cast of characters rather than a rotating door of nameless people to be served.

Those individual stories are often hilarious. In one section, a rival merchant sets up shop on my clearing and aggressively challenges Alta to an economic war. Later, a gaggle of businessmen start robotically milling around in search for a place where they can present meaningless graphs about financial growth. Wreden even pumps his signature humor into a series of readable noir novels that mount in absurdity with each new volume. There’s a sense of a wider world outside of Alta’s bubble, a bizarre one filled with all sorts of weirdos who are, somehow, making it work.

But Wanderstop never lets go of its heart, even in its silliest moments. In fact, its most ridiculous characters often fuel the story’s most emotionally impactful scenes. Alta’s relationship with a hyperactive child sets off a key moment of self-reflection that brings the entire tale home. Even now, their final moments together still linger with me. There’s a real sense that Alta has grown by the end of her story and much of that comes from seeing different facets of her reflected in others.

Wanderstop is a call for empathy, something that’s become unfortunately radical in the years since my mental break. It asks players to let down their defenses — even if just for a brief moment — and observe the world with a warm cup of tea in hand. It’s often through understanding others, their problems and all, that we can meet the strangers that live in our own heads.

While its writing is strong, Wanderstop struggles to crack the cozy genre. That comes as no surprise. When I chatted with Wreden about the project in December, he noted that he underestimated just how complex a management game like this really is when he conceptualized the project. While its comforting pastel aesthetic and calming music hits the mark, I can see that struggle play out in a wealth of half-realized ideas that don’t fully pay off by the end.

On its surface, the hook should be simple. Players need to run a tea shop and manage the land around it. Necessary tasks include harvesting tea leaves and mushrooms from the clearing surrounding the shop, growing fruits that can be infused in teas, serving customers, washing dirty mugs, and more. Alta gets a few tools to help her with her daily tasks, like weed clippers and a broom to sweep up dirt clumps. The hook is easy to grasp early on as I make my tea balls, create a system of ingredient-rich hybrid plants by planting colorful seeds in specific patterns, and working a giant tea infuser in the shop, which is operated via a sequence of short steps.

What I quickly realize is that Wanderstop is more of a puzzle game than a management sim, and those two ideas often clash. There’s no actual need for me to create a functional farm full of plants. During the story, I only get a series of specific drink requests tied to the few characters who come to rest. There’s no reason to experiment; I just have to plant specific fruit trees needed to fulfill those orders. I need to use my trusty field guide to figure out the flavor of each fruit and the correct seed pattern needed to grow the plant, but that’s largely where the puzzle depth ends. I’m usually just shuffling four colors of seed into two different patterns, completing the same tea machine mini game sequence, and dropping the specified fruits in.

Later orders are a bit more complex, requiring me to use mushrooms to color swap fruits or only add a certain amount of heat to the mix, but Wanderstop ends just as it’s getting creative with the loop. I’m left with a repetitive set of puzzles and not much to do outside of their restrictive demands. The only other benefit to making tea is that I can drink it to unlock a memory tied to each flavor, giving me more insight into Alta’s past.

There isn’t actual room to create a farming ecosystem either. The story is split into two hour chunks where Alta deals with a few customers at a time. When that ends, the entire clearing is wiped clean and Alta starts again from scratch. The only progress that remains is any photos Alta has taken and placed around the shop. While there are systems in place that allow players to manage a field of ingredients, doing so is a waste of time. There’s never a scenario where a player will ever need to do it. It feels like a misunderstanding of the genre and why its automation loops are built the way they are.

While my instinct is to paint these design quirks as flaws, Wanderstop often has an answer for its decisions. Boro isn’t just a mentor for Alta, but a voice of reason for frustrated players. He encourages me to embrace the repetition of its tea making system, finding value in a routine I can master. When I first learned that my field would wipe every few hours, he was there to remind me that I shouldn’t be afraid of impermanence. It’s all just part of life.

While Wanderstop isn’t meta in the way The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is, there’s a key moment of self-reflection in it for Ivy Road. Boro’s greatest bit of wisdom is that sometimes it’s okay to just be okay at something. Alta doesn’t need to be the best warrior in the world. She can be a fine one and still have value. All that really matters is that she’s earnestly trying her best. That’s a fitting theme for a cozy game that doesn’t fully nail down the management sim genre. Even when it feels lacking, its heart is always in the right place and it’s more than willing to put the effort in.

In its own way, Wanderstop is the perfect mission statement for a bright-eyed studio starting its path to self-discovery. It is a sincere celebration of our struggles and imperfections. They are not problems to run away from, but stones to sharpen our blades upon so we may win the next fight.