Followed up the rest of Wanderstop.
The story develops a bit with some unreliable narrator stuff. The antagonist is revealed to be your inner voice which keeps trying to push you out of inaction even though you are burnt out. The spine of the story was very relatable for me as I go through my own struggles with stress and trying to step away from self-imposed reasons to keep working through pain. Overall, I don’t feel endeared to the game, more so I agree with its message and think that a lot of its dialogue, writing, and mechanics get quite tangential and seem to be interested in things other than the central message.
The game resets progress between chapters so you can never keep any of what you plant and create a factory to anticipate any tea orders. I think this was meant as a way to get you to stop and smell the roses but it just put me in full critpath optimisation mode - bare minimum to progress. There’s an item in the game called the ‘Book of Answers’ which I think was prepared to alleviate the adventure game-iness of the customer orders which can be frustrating to remember/puzzle out and the book just tells you what to do. I just followed the book the rest of the way.
Every chapter has the forest around the shop change to a new layout and colour and has new NPCs visit. One of the ‘chapters’ just has your character in full depression after remembering something traumatic and this chapter is essentially unplayable because it doesn’t give you any resources or wiggle room to work with. The only NPC that shows up you can’t even speak to properly because you are so depressed. This felt like the game experimenting a bit more with what its form is but never really does this again. During this section is the only time they do anything cool with the Book of Answers.
The game eventually strips out the farming and tea making optimisation to get you to try and focus on either customising the space to your liking or simply enjoying it as a space. It deviates from a true cosy game in my mind since it’s more of a toybox masquerading under the form of a traditional lock and key adventure game itself masquerading as a cosy game. Since no progress meaningfully persists and there are so few customers who request a handful of recipes, the ‘tend and befriend’ of cosy games more generally is absent or at least strictly limited by the linear narrative sequences you move through. It kinda needs an endless mode if it wants to be a proper cose.
Although the central story is quite good at getting across its stress theme it is probably too long a game for the message. I anticipated it ending two chapters earlier than it does and quite a lot of this is padded out with humour. Specifically Wreden’s humour which is obsessed with jokes about business and economics. At one point a bunch of businessmen who look like some Double Fine motherfuckers come in with business jokes straight from The Stanley Parable’s cutting room floor. To contrast them, a godlike being comes along to the shop and takes an interest in them and grants you access to coffee beans which don’t naturally grow in the forest. Eventually after drinking enough coffee it turns into a businessman called ‘Garry’ which I’m fairly sure is a Gmod joke. Anyway. Folks, there are enough tired jokes in videogames about how dumb and redundant and jargonistic businesses, companies, corporations, company men, presentations and corporate meetings are that this game really doesn’t bring much to the table. A big proportion of the NPC dialogue is reheated absurdist bites that I suspect Wreden personally finds funny but are, for me, the kind of safe humour I feel like indie games should be liberated from recycling.
Gripes aside, my big takeaway for my own personal life is I need to do nothing more. I need to not self-possess myself and constantly force myself to do more with the little time I have. The music is pretty great, particularly the little motifs and stems of such that make up NPC themes.
The game never really attempts a genre shift or formal reworking of ideas to dovetail with the theme. The most that happens with teacrafting is you might be asked to do things in a certain order, or not heat water, or wait 1 minute of real time. It could get a lot more crazy with it and still ram home the theme and I think it’s a shame it’s not more ambitious in that direction.
