Wanderstop review: Tea and wisdom in the woods

Wanderstop is a rarity among video games. The team at Ivy Road knows not just how to say the right things, but how to make them meaningful and keep them from being little more than pretty platitudes. It's one of the best examples of thoughtful messaging married to even more thoughtful design, where literally everything you do, even if it's just washing a teacup, underlines Wanderstop's most important ideas. Wanderstop is more than just a cozy, colorful tea shop simulator. It quietly and humbly raises the standard for video game storytelling.

It happened on the way from the forum

Wanderstop starts at the end, or what protagonist Alta thinks is the end, anyway. Alta is a fighter, the world's best fighter, in fact. She's spent most of her life training, pushing herself as hard as she could, no matter the cost, until she became unbeatable – for a time. She lost a match one day. Then, she lost another and one more after that. Atla becomes convinced that the only way to regain her old sense of self is to train even harder, so she flees the arena and sets off to find her old mentor in the woods. 

Wanderstop does, admittedly, stray into platitudes briefly during this segment. Atla runs through a list of phrases and ideas that almost seems designed to make sure it hits every talking point about overworking – about needing to try harder, push herself further, be perfect, not give up, and so on. The frequency of these comments, and coming as they do when you have no knowledge of who Alta is, makes the opening section seem shallow, but it doesn't last long. Alta finds she can no longer carry her sword and drops it. It's as much a layered piece of symbolism about Alta being unable to bear the burden of her former life as it is a nod to burnout's serious physical effects, but before Alta has time to make any of these connections, she passes out.

Alta wakes up on a bench in an idyllic, slightly psychedelic woodland grove with purple treetops outlining a sherbert skyline in the distance. Next to her is Boro, a large, bald man with an easygoing attitude who recommends Alta rest for a while at his tea shop, Wanderstop, before she sets out again. You can agree or venture back into the woods, but the latter only results in the same outcome as before. Eventually, whether Alta wants to or not (and she very much doesn't want to), you have to agree to help Boro. Not that running Wanderstop is an intense endeavor. The whole reason Boro created the place is for customers and his helpers to find rest and healing.

The best comparison for Boro is the wise, old mage archetype from folk stories. He's Wanderstop's Gandalf. Despite being just an ordinary guy who's probably not much older than Alta, Boro knows things – about life, people, and, you suspect, about what it's like to have your life and body crumble while you can only watch it happen. He's a solid calmness in the midst of Alta's chaos, the one whose presence makes it possible for Alta to consider the impossible and make a heroic decision to leave her old life behind.

Boro – and, by extension, Wanderstop itself – doesn't have all the answers, though, nor does he try to offer exact advice for how Alta can fix her life. Boro's plan isn't some LinkedIn-pilled outline for how to power through your burnout in five easy steps. He even says he can't promise that working at the shop will fix Alta. He just knows she needs rest, and staying for a while might let her heal.

The rules governing Wanderstop are that there are no rules. You're free to pursue what you want, when you want to, without pressure. Quests have no timers. Resources are plentiful. Money doesn't exist in Boro's grove – not until an outsider sets up shop, anyway – and whether business is booming or not matters little. This isn't a hardcore shop management simulator. It's a quiet analogy meant to encourage you to find ways you can make a small haven for yourself in real life, whatever form it might take.

Why? Why not!

One of Wanderstop's most impressive features is how its unspoken elements complement Ivy Road's vision as much as the story does. Boro's tea shop is whimsical for the sake of it, with its dishwasher train that carts dirty mugs up a waterfall and into a sudsy pond before hauling them off to dry. There's an impractically large tea station, complete with huge beakers and swirly straw-style tubes that carry water and tea to and fro, and its waste control system uses tea that overflows when you fill a cup to somehow make the flowers growing around the tea machine bloom more brightly than ever. None of this is essential, and it certainly isn't efficient. That's the point, though. Wanderstop encourages Alta, and the player, to appreciate peace, fun, and creativity for what they are and not what they can add to your productivity. Like Boro says: These things won't fix you, but they can, in small ways, help you heal.

The actual tea-making process, like Wanderstop's other tasks, consists of a few straightforward steps that keep you engaged without feeling too routine or too complex – exactly the kind of tasks burnout sufferers are encouraged to pursue in real life. You climb a large ladder to reach a pull-rope, tug it, and get as much water as you want. Then you heat it until it boils and slide around on the ladder to kick a valve that lets the water race and swirl into a giant carafe, where you add your ingredients. Then you pour and serve.

What ingredients you add depends on your customer's requests. The idea is to match what they want – a nostalgic flavor, for example – with an ingredient's description in the field book Boro gives you, but it's fine if you get it wrong. The customer just mentions it's not what they were looking for and reminds you what they wanted. If it's too confusing, Wanderstop has a guide book in the shop's loft that includes the correct ingredients for every request.

Sourcing those ingredients is what you'll spend most of your time doing outside the shop, and it's a clever blend of garden-sim and experimentation. Almost all of Wanderstop's ingredients are fruits, and they come from rare plants that don't grow naturally. You grow them by placing a certain number of plants in a specific pattern to create a plant egg, which hatches after you water it and turns into a plant that bears fruits a few times before losing the ability to produce. That's no reason to forget about them after they stop bearing fruit, though. Boro's grove is full of planters, and he occasionally even asks you to help him pretty up the garden by filling the pots and empty places – only if you want to, of course.

You can also make tea for Alta with or without additional ingredients and have her sit somewhere quiet to drink it. The process unlocks memories she's repressed through the years, and while these moments seem to have little influence over how the rest of the game plays out, they give some much-needed insight into her personality and help make Wanderstop's message more universal in nature as a result. Alta isn't just some world-renowned fighter. She's not a special person above it all. She's just a normal human who lost her way and has to figure out what to do next, and the same thing could happen to anyone.

How can I help you?

In Wanderstop's world, the same thing has happened to everyone, in some form or another. Customers come and go, lingering for a while before continuing their personal journeys and inevitably coming back. They all represent some facet of burnout or other – a father striving to live up to an unreasonable ideal; a civil servant whose job is their only identity; even a former admirer of Alta's whose presence reminds her of everything she's not doing and is a temptation to revert to her old habits.

They're all equally messed up in their own ways, but Wanderstop defies video game convention in this area as well, while offering some surprisingly apt commentary on setting boundaries. You're the hero, and they're the NPCs with quests to finish. But you can't fix them, even when you give them exactly what they want, and it's not really your job to anyway. All you can do is try your best to help how you can, be there if they find their way back to the shop eventually, and take care of yourself meanwhile.  It sounds heavy, and Wanderstop doesn't shy away from tackling serious ideas. It's balanced with plenty of humor, though, both from the wildly over-the-top personalities of Boro's customers and Alta's own sassy, disinterested dialogue options.

Wanderstop is like Spiritfarer for burnout sufferers and overachievers. The central focus is meaningful and expertly executed in its own right. However, it's the attention to detail in every other area that makes Wanderstop feel special, to the point where anything, even just planting flowers, enriches everything else. Ivy Road just gets it.

This review is based on a PC copy of Wanderstop the publisher provided. Wanderstop launches on March 11, 2025, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.

Josh Broadwell

Contributing Editor

Josh is a freelance writer and reporter who specializes in guides, reviews, and whatever else he can convince someone to commission. You may have seen him on NPR, IGN, Polygon, or VG 24/7 or on Twitter, shouting about Trails. When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him outside with his Belgian Malinois and Australian Shepherd or curled up with an RPG of some description.