Unlock Editor’s Digest Lock for Free
FT editor Roula Khalaf will select your favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Boiling water hits a cool ceramic mug. Mildly rising steam. The first deep chunk. The simple ritual of making tea and the act of drinking it are one of the great joys in life. But is it enough to heal Alta, once a great fighter, from a series of career-winning defeats? Is the only thing she needs to do to return to her long-awaited arena for many years?
The Wanderstop setup is an equal part of stuffing the whimsical and dark YA novel. The game begins when our hero falls to her lap in the Shadow Forest. Alta is exhausted. Her legs are lead. A snippet of her backstory is heard: “I’m weak, I’m a failure,” she talks about her professional collapse. Unable to move, she faints before awakening to the mysterious scene on the surface. The quaint forests with winding roads and rainbow-colored plantings are beautiful. Even in Disney movies, a tea shop called Wonderstop sits in the center. Boro, a friendly bald chap who runs it, encourages Alta to stop for a while. The fighter agrees despite his dissatisfaction.
Start her rehabilitation. Boro shows Alta, where the baskets gather tea. There is a series of shears that she can cut through nasty weeds, and a watering can that tends to produce fruit (used for the flavor of injection). The actual tea making is a small wonder of design and choreography. The camera elegantly sweeps along with Alta from the huge brewing gimmicks at the bottom where the injection arrives in a satisfying fuss.
The problem is that unlike guests who visit this tea shop, such as fairies, mischievous children, and sparkles known as Zenith, you can’t leave this little perfect world. Certainly until she recovers. And the question presents itself: is this a playground or purgatory?
Wanderstop will intentionally ask these questions. Writer and director Davy Reden made his name with the acclaimed metafiction title, the 2013 Stanley Performer and the 2015 Beginners Guide. The latter is particularly wonderful, evoking the emotional life and intellectual flashes of the great Charlie Kaufman film. Reden is skeptical of the potential for recovery and self-care when making tea. The game isn’t so padded that it suggests that all things will be fixed when you put on the kettle.
Another more fundamental question looms as the game wears. Is Alta really suffering? Reden said Wonderstop was inspired by his own burnout feelings, but the game couldn’t make this clear. In fact, beyond her surface level over Achiever’s suffering, Alta is drawn thinly. We only gave fleeting insight into her career insecurities, including the memory of her father becoming unemployed when she was 14 years old.
There is nothing in Wonderstop’s idyllic fiction that burnout is like this commonly debated issue in the real world (particularly among millennials). It lacks precarious employment, oversaturated social media and rising rents. This fantasy setting is depicted too widely for the personal struggle story to be influenced or effective.
In the brightest sequence, this slight game skillfully combines the hard-working cartoons of adult swimming and soothing photography of Studio Ghibli. But then we have to endure an ambiguous therapeutic purity of another 10 minutes. It’s good to make tea, but that’s not enough – for players and Alta.
★★☆☆☆
PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/s
