A review code for this game was provided by Ivy Road
Wanderstop at times feels like it is personally attacking me. In many ways, the game is completely antithetical to who I am as a person and as a gamer.
This is a game where you manage a tea shop. That tea shop has no time demands. There is no day/night cycle where you need to get everyone served before the sun goes down. When people want tea, you can get it for them as fast or as slow as you like.
At several points in the game, you can have all current requests completed, and there is actually no particular objective for at least a short period of time. The first time this happened, I was a bit confused for a second. Eventually, I went to the affable Boro, who serves as a bit of a mentor throughout the game, to find out if there was something I was missing.
When I asked Boro what I could do next, Boro gently chided me. He told me that sometimes there’s just nothing to do, and that’s OK. He told me that I should just relax or do whatever I want.
This didn’t quite compute with my gaming brain. Yes, I game to “relax,” but I’m never actually relaxing in a game. There’s an objective in front of me. There’s a checklist of tasks to complete. Even in a “chill” game like a Stardew Valley, I’m always thinking about what to do next. The idea of being in a game and actually trying to “relax” within the game itself feels almost incomprehensible to me.
And yet, this is the delicate balance that Wanderstop wishes to strike. It’s a game that tells you that it’s OK to be bored sometimes. It’s a game that wants you to truly take it in and enjoy it in every way possible. It’s a game that doesn’t want you to feel stressed in any particular way. Wanderstop wants you to actually RELAX in every sense.
Admittedly, I don’t think Wanderstop converted me in this way. I still can’t stand being bored. Luckily, Wanderstop actually has a surprising amount to do for a game about relaxing. It also has a meaningful story that kept me engaged until the very end. I had a great time with this game, despite perhaps being the worst possible person that Ivy Road could have given a review code to. That alone seems like a tremendous achievement.
This Isn’t Really My Cup Of Tea, But I’ll Drink It Anyway
You play Wanderstop as Alta. Alta is a fierce warrior who was undefeated in a professional fighting league for a long time until she suddenly went on a bad losing streak. She is the hardest worker imaginable, and she can’t comprehend why she is suddenly losing fights that she would have won in the past. In order to fix herself, she ventures into the forest to find an old master to train her back up.
As Alta enters the forest, she is so low on energy that she literally can not carry her sword anymore and collapses. She is quickly rescued by Boro, who runs “Wanderstop,” a tea shop in the middle of this odd forest. Boro suggests to Alta that perhaps she is collapsing and can’t carry her sword anymore because she has worked herself too hard for all these years. Maybe she just needs to finally rest. This doesn’t please Alta, but she accepts that Boro might be right. Alta then takes on the role of helping to run the tea shop. This leads us nicely into this cozy tea shop management game.
Running the tea shop ends up being an interesting mix of simple and complex. As mentioned earlier, there is no time pressure in Wanderstop. As requests come for different types of tea come in from people who stumble upon the shop, there is absolutely no need to get them done immediately. You can accomplish things as quickly or as slowly as you like. This obviously makes things significantly easier than most cozy games that have a shop of some sort to manage. You don’t need to maximize profits or get everything you can out of every minute of every day. The story just continues whenever you make all the tea that everyone requests, and that’s it. This takes all the stress out of the process, which would usually be a very bad thing for someone like me. I enjoy stress when it comes to video games!
But making tea actually has enough depth to it, where it ends up being kind of interesting even without the stress. First off, in order to make tea, you need the right ingredients. You have to collect tea leaves in the environment, and then put them in a certain spot in the shop that turns them into tea balls. You also need fruit to combine with the tea balls, and that fruit is made by planting seeds in a specific way. The process of mixing everything together in the elaborate tea making machine also takes a fair bit of time. Later on, the game also mixes in mushrooms, adjusting the heat of the tea and some other twists that keep things increasingly interesting. There is a surprising amount of different elements to just making the tea in Wanderstop.
But the most important thing for me is that if you end up low on tea balls or seeds in particular, the game really becomes a pain in the ass. I was frustrated with the game early on at times, because when I ran out of tea balls, it took several minutes to gather what I needed, and then there were multiple minutes of just waiting for the tea leaves to turn into tea balls. It’s the same thing with the seeds. If you get low on seeds, there is a minute or two process to get more seeds that can be annoying if you are feeling in a hurry. Washing dishes is also a minute or so process, so not having clean dishes ready to go could be a bit annoying as I waited for the dishwasher to work so I could continue the game. When I was behind on my tasks and had to wait for some of these automated processes to complete, I could get a bit *GASP* bored. This is devastating for me.
So even though the game doesn’t even want you to have any urgency, this process gave me that urgency. I realized that if I wasn’t on top of keeping myself well stocked, I would run into situations where I ended up having to screw around for several minutes while I waited for the processes that allowed my supplies to replenish to happen. I suddenly became a pro at always having tea balls ready. I also always had multiple clean cups nicely stocked on my shelves, and anytime I got low on seeds, I started the process of replenishing that supply immediately.
Playing this way gave me the satisfaction that these shop management games usually give me, without the same levels of stress that they can have. I actually found it to be pretty addictive, even though I’m not sure at all if the developers would even think this is the proper way to play the game. Either way, I think it was legitimately cool that Ivy Road was able to add so many different steps to the process of making tea without it ever feeling overwhelming. I really enjoyed the gameplay of Wanderstop, even if I arguably completely ignored what the game was trying to tell me in order to do so.
Is A Game Boring If It Specifically Tells Me It’s Trying To Be Boring?
My own aversion to boredom isn’t the only reason that I played Wanderstop with so much urgency, though. The other part of that is that I was consistently very interested in what would happen next.
Wanderstop excels from a storytelling capacity on multiple fronts. First off, I was pretty into the main plot hook of the game. It’s interesting that Alta can no longer carry her sword when she is, by all accounts, an incredible warrior. It’s a great concept for a narrative based cozy game, and it had me hooked from the start. The main plot slowly continues to develop once you get through serving enough tea and delivers some big moments both in the middle of the game and near the end. It also hits you with a few other interesting plot points regarding the existence of the tea shop as a whole that had me engaged.
In between the main plot revelations, you will spend a fair bit of time talking with the various characters that arrive at the shop to order tea. While a few of the characters tie in with the main story, these mostly end up being fun little side stories. The writing in the game really shines here. A good chunk of the characters are pretty zany and are really hilarious. I was surprised at how consistently the game had me chuckling. As eager as I was to see what happened next for Alta, these were nice distractions that I (usually) enjoyed.
But the writing easily shines the most with the main characters, Alta and Boro. Watching Alta learn how to relax is extremely entertaining. She has lots of funny dialogue as she quite grumpily tries to figure out how to adapt to this different lifestyle. The game also has a surprising amount of dialogue choices when she talks to various customers, and there are a lot of really hilarious options where she loses patience with the people she is serving. Alta’s character arc is executed very well and is very satisfying to watch unfold.
But absolutely nothing tops the writing for Boro, the slightly mysterious proprietor of the tea shop. Boro is an interesting mix of incredibly wise and yet also remarkably simple. He is completely unassuming, but then will bust out some sage advice in the most basic way possible. He is also surprisingly funny, and he is occasionally snarky in a very polite way (as displayed a bit in my example at the start of the review). I’m not exaggerating when I say that Boro might be worth the price of admission for Wanderstop by himself. He is that good and will be a strong contender to be my favorite character from 2025.
Boro is the main driver of many of the biggest themes of Wanderstop as well. The game tackles things like the true meaning of relaxation and how it can correlate with healing in various ways. The game also ties this all to boredom. The latter theme is an especially interesting thing to think about in our current era of smartphones and constant entertainment. As I’ve alluded to, it’s also a very interesting theme to tackle while in the middle of a video game. Conversations around these topics constantly had me fascinated because this stuff just isn’t addressed in many video games. I loved how bold Wanderstop is by tackling some of these unique themes.
Not every element of the narrative lands perfectly, though. The game throws a fair bit of those side characters at you, and not all of them landed with me. Honestly, a few are outright annoying, and I was desperate to be done with their particular arcs. None of those characters stick around long enough for it to ever completely kill my enjoyment, but there’s a couple who got close.
My bigger issue with the plot is that not every plot thread closes quite as nicely as I’d like. The game throws some real interesting mysteries at you, and while the game gives you answers for most of them, I thought some of the answers were much more mundane than expected for how intrigued I was by what the answers would end up being. I do at least think that the game closed quite strongly, with a credits sequence in particular that is my favorite since at least Astro Bot last year. It all adds up to a plot that I found very well done, despite a few hiccups, with the unique themes and excellent characters being the biggest highlights.
OK, Maybe I’ll Try And Allow Myself To Be Bored… Once In A While… I Dunno… We’ll See
With those themes of relaxation, Wanderstop obviously wants you to truly chill out and enjoy the world that it takes you to. This wouldn’t be a particularly desirable direction if it was an ugly game. Luckily, Wanderstop is absolutely gorgeous. While the area you have to explore and hang out in is quite small, it is exceptionally lovely. The art direction is phenomenal, with striking colors everywhere you go. The game also mixes things up with its color palette as the game goes along, which keeps things fresh. The game, of course, has wonderfully relaxing music as well, which keeps the vibes right where they need to be.
The excellent art direction and music are the perfect cherry on top for what I found to be a very special experience. Wanderstop is a very touching video game with excellent characters, writing, and a surprisingly enjoyable gameplay loop.
Much like Alta needs to learn how to chill out once in a while, it’s a game that desperately wants you to learn how to really enjoy the video game you are playing. It wants you to not be in a rush and make the most of the experience and the beautiful world you are in.
It’s a message that can easily be taken into the real world as well. Weirdly, I am writing this review while I’m on vacation and on the beach (I’m not a beach or water guy!). As I reach the end of this review, I’m realizing that perhaps I should close my laptop and soak in the light breeze and gentle crashing of the waves that currently surround me. Perhaps it’s time to relax a little more on this vacation.
Wanderstop may not have converted me to its ideals, but maybe it made a little headway after all.
Score: 9.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
Leave a comment