Wanderstop: challenging the cosy escapist fantasies of burnt-out workers

At first, Wanderstop appears to tap into the same restless urge as many other cosy games: the wish to leave our stressful lives behind and escape to an anonymous wilderness. The game opens with you taking an assistant job in a woodland tea shop, where you spend your days cleaning, tending the garden, and researching the perfect tea blend to satisfy the needs of visiting customers. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you find a game tearing at the hollow rewards of the escapist fantasy.
The bucolic setting is born out of an image game designer Davey Wreden became fixated on in the months after the release of 2015’s The Beginner’s Guide. His mind would repeatedly wander to a daydream of going to a tea shop in the woods and lying on a bench by the water. He sketched variations of the scene for months before deciding to make it as his next game.
“I was supremely burnt out,” he says. “It was like I was trying to summon the energy of rest and relaxation into me. I thought cosy gaming could heal some part of me. It didn’t take long to learn that that was dead wrong.”
It’s not just that making a cosy game is like making any game – a demanding marathon of labour, made no easier because of its cutesy sensibilities – but Wreden also fell for the same fantasy at the genre’s core: that the satisfaction of completing a list of tasks is the same as healing.
It only became clear to Wreden that he was making a game about trauma that looked like a cosy game when he was joined by Karla Zimonja, one of the creators of Gone Home. “[We realised Wanderstop’s] characters were in real conflict and very much not OK,” he says. “They wouldn’t be magically healed by drinking tea in the middle of the woods.”
Protagonist Alta is the splinter at the heart of Wanderstop’s cosy fantasy – the character searching for healing through escapism and routine. Formerly a champion fighter, a human weapon, honed and violent. “Her entire life and mentality is centred around making progress and achieving future outcomes,” says Wreden. Her time in the arena has left her traumatised, and she believes that completing the work at the tea shop will heal her.
If Alta were a player, she would be a classic min/maxer, working out the most efficient way to complete the tea-shop’s jobs in the shortest time possible. She even sweeps her broom as though she is wielding a sword. However, without spoiling the story, Wreden is clear that racing through a checklist of wholesome tasks won’t lead Alta to 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 restoring me to myself. Here’s a token of my appreciation!’ and then go off and live their lives,” says Wreden. “If this shop is to [challenge] her, then activities cannot have the predictable outcomes players are accustomed to.”
Wanderstop isn’t built to frustrate cosy game players and their escapist fantasies; it’s built to shift our understanding of where healing comes from. “In Studio Ghibli movies, there’s often a long sequence where [we watch] someone doing household tasks,” says Zimonja. “They’re cleaning the floor, doing the dishes, or putting things away. You can tell the creators feel these ritualistic elements, these continual upkeep behaviours, are important and meaningful to living in the world.”
Through Alta’s story, we’ll see that tasks can only recuperate because of the intrinsic joy of doing them – and not, as Wreden says, “because of promises of future rewards.” As Zimonja adds, “it’s the daily rituals that anchor us in our lives.”