There’s this Zen koan I’ve always liked: a monk, new to a monastery, asks Joshu what he should do, and Joshu asks if he’s eaten breakfast. When he says he has, Joshu replies, “Then wash your bowl.” Wanderstop, the latest game by The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide creator Davey Wreden and Gone Home‘s Karla Zimonja, sees the healing potential in these instructions.
Wreden has said the game is about his own struggles with burnout, and this is apparent from the jump: Wanderstop follows Alta, an up-til-now undefeated warrior who suddenly finds herself losing matches and unable to lift her sword. When she collapses in the woods, she’s rescued by Boro, a jovial man who runs the Wanderstop tea shop. Boro invites Alta to stay and make tea while she figures out what’s going on with her.
Working at the tea shop has all the trappings of the management sims and “cozy” games Wanderstop clearly draws from. You harvest tea from bushes around the shop and grow fruits for flavor by planting different colored seeds in different configurations, or planting adjacent plants to change their properties. You make tea using a huge contraption that requires climbing ladders, pumping bellows, and flipping switches. There are also plenty of chores to do around the tea shop, from cutting weeds and sweeping debris to decorating the place with trinkets and photographs.
Wanderstop wants to subvert the way these tasks usually play out in games, and in the day-to-day it does. Alta reflects at one point that “Even relaxing feels like a job,” which is the very idea the game is grappling with. So rather than the busy flood of demanding customers management games usually feature, people drift in and out of the tea shop, and sometimes they don’t want anything at all. Nothing bad happens if you make them the wrong order, and there’s even a “Book of Answers” that straight up tells you how to fulfill their requests. You don’t have to do any of your chores. You can’t level up the tea shop; the cup-washing machine takes forever to wash cups, and there’s nothing you can do to speed it up, nor do you need to, because there’s plenty of cups and never a rush. You can reject tea orders or tasks Boro gives you without consequences. (I did one camera quest just to see what would happen, and then gratefully rejected every subsequent one.) There are stretches of downtime when nothing needs doing, when you’re free to do whatever you like until the plot moves forward. I filled that time reading the game’s very funny books, or trying new plant configurations and then drinking the teas I made from them to trigger Alta reflecting on her past. As a game concerned with ideas about overwork and what labor is for, Wanderstop removes the pressure of work from the management sim genre; this drew my attention to my drive for tasks and progress in these kinds of games, and the plot itself asked me to think about how that same drive applies to my life.
Given the nature of Wreden’s games, I expected this subversion to deepen over time, but–a bit unfortunately–we’re still talking about a video game here, and a 10+ hour game of waiting around for things to happen would probably grow more frustrating than restful. Eventually, things get busier, customer requests get more elaborate, and certain characters become key to moving the story forward, even though this never rises too far from the game’s baseline slow pace. Instead, Wanderstop shifts its questions to its narrative, as Alta examines her past and what motivates her and who she’s hurt in her drive for success as a warrior. The game never gives a definitive answer; it just gives Alta and the player a lot of questions, and ultimately it’s up to your experience playing the game and your own interpretation of its ending to imagine what progress Alta’s made at the end. I appreciated this decision, as any answers the game gives might ultimately feel too neat to be resonant.
I got code for Wanderstop all the way back at the end of January, which is practically unheard-of leeway for a comparatively short video game, but I still found myself pushing through it for its review embargo. This is not the way it wants to be played, and I wondered if the long lead time was meant to highlight that. And I wondered what it said about me that I turned the whole thing into, well, what I always turn work into: a source of stress and an excuse to turn down other invitations, a reason to run through all my favorite stories and resentments (I must be doing something important if my day is so busy; I sure am working harder than other people!) the way Alta ran combat training drills before she burned out.
If you’ve hung around Aftermath for a while you know I have a, let’s call it, distinct relationship to work. Running my own business has brought that into stark relief; one morning after having the kind of “rock bottom” revelation we usually reserve for drinking, I even found myself on a website for the AA-modelled “Workaholics Anonymous,” a model I’m not sure I mesh with but whose literature I found chillingly resonant. I bought a bunch of workbooks that, in the nature of a lot of recovery literature, felt hard to work with without subscribing to the model itself, but which gave me a lot to think about. I’ve yet to be able to find a way to talk about work that works for me; people around me talk about not dreaming about labor, but I don’t think I agree with that. I do, to an extent, dream of labor; I joke that I have a bit of a Shaker streak in me, where the times I felt most myself were when I had a useful role to fulfill, whether that was restaurant work or managing a website or living in places that required literal wood to be chopped and water to be carried every day. Years of doing things outside of traditional work channels has taught me to decouple my idea of labor from concepts of capitalism, and I sometimes get frustrated with the ways they can get framed as if they are inseparable, feeling like something I appreciate about myself can only be conceived of as a character flaw or a downstream effect of The Man. But I also know that all this has a compulsive side, that there’s something I’m running from with this approach (at one point Alta expresses the fear that something bad will happen if she isn’t constantly working, and whoo boy), and that, especially these days, it’s doing me a lot more harm than good.
I appreciated that Alta rebelled against this too, criticizing Boro’s approach, and I appreciated that there’s never a moment when the game tells her she’s wrong or how she should think instead. But it also glides over some of the complexities; visitors to the shop include lost businessmen and an old woman ruthlessly obsessed with sales, and the game paints these characters in caricature in a way that sort of elides thornier questions. The Wanderstop cafe does not appear to need or run on money; when money is present in the game, it’s in the form of joke currency you can’t obtain. It’s a self-contained fantasy tea shop in a magical forest–not dissimilar, maybe, to a video game–but that lets it decouple work from survival in a way that lets the game explore its ideas but also makes it a little hard to pull those lessons over to the real world. Anyone who’s worked in kitchens knows it’s not terribly relaxing; anyone who’s run a business knows you have to make some kind of peace with the idea of sales and money and marketing. “A bunch of people who hate money own a business now” is a joke I sometimes hear told around worker-owned outlets, but it’s often a real stumbling block, and personally I’ve found it hard (but not impossible) to find spaces to meaningfully wrangle with that relationship.
For me and my relationship to work, Wanderstop sometimes felt a little simplistic in the way it stripped things down to focus on its core questions–not having to trim the weeds serves the idea of restfulness the game explores, but what do you do with these lessons when there are so many real and consequential weeds you’re responsible for trimming? But I can also see how my instinct to critique the game in this way is an effect of the very thing the game is wrestling with, that it echoes Alta’s tendency to shrug off all the twee advice Boro gives her because she–and I–want an excuse to keep doing what we’re doing, even when we can both see it’s not working. And here, again, is where it’s good that Wanderstop asks some questions and floats some ideas without being dogmatic. I’m thinking about it all, doing what the game wants you to; I can bring my rebellion against it to it and not feel like I didn’t “get” it, which feels like a testament to a core nuance that runs under some of its simplicity.
Maybe Wanderstop’s biggest Wreden-esque subversion is in not providing answers, in not giving you a self-care checklist or a post-credits scene where Alta deletes Slack from her phone and doesn’t answer emails after 5pm. How to actually work in a healthy way–what “work” is, what “healthy” is–is a hugely individual question, too big and varied to be answered by a video game. Wanderstop just wants you to notice your feelings and ponder your conceptions, and to give you something to do with your hands while you do.
