Latest news with #Wanderstop
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
3 Video Games You May Have Missed in March
At least one end-of-year awards contender was released in March, when a studio that focuses on cooperative video games brought Split Fiction to the masses. Our critic called it 'a manic mash-up of science fiction and fantasy' with 'many spectacles that make you pick your eyes up off the floor.' Those looking for single-player experiences could turn to Assassin's Creed Shadows, which follows two stories of vengeance in a vibrant feudal Japan; the cozy game Wanderstop, where a former warrior manages a tea cafe in a meditation on burnout; and Atomfall, which spins an alternative history around the worst nuclear event in British annals. Here are three other games you may have missed this month: Karma: The Dark World The brilliant Karma: The Dark World is one of the most aggressively disturbing horror games released in some time. When the investigator Daniel McGovern wakes to an empty hospital room, his left arm is grossly black and bionic. After removing three tubes, he sees ebony ooze burbling out and screams, a little too emotional to be a government sleuth. This weirdly unpopulated hospital is only the beginning. Through extremely dim, maddening office mazes, it's discovered that McGovern's mission is to find and interrogate Sean Mehndez, a family man addled by constant work for the autocratic Leviathan corporation. He's also accused of robbery. Throughout 12 hours of gameplay, Karma's creators have taken many inspirations — including BioShock and 'Severance' — to the next level with creepily surreal and bizarrely utopian set pieces. Here, the looping terror of Guillermo del Toro's and Hideo Kojima's P.T., a playable teaser for an unreleased horror game, is made far more frightening. On one of McGovern's trips through the loop of rooms, mannequins of the Mehndez family sit around a TV that shows stock footage of unsettling threshers on farmland. On the following trip, answered phones spew puzzling words. And during the next, corpses are hanging on hooks, heads rolling off their bodies if you dare approach. Witnessing these things from a first-person point of view, I felt somewhat insane myself. I had to stop to clear my head several times, especially after visiting an office with a foreboding Christmas tree made of old computer monitors, a metaphor for Leviathan's religious zealotry. Signs that were hung as brutal reminders read 'OBEY.' Static Dobermans held obscure clues on paper. The company's workers, who sometimes have computer monitors as heads, are woeful, depressed and mentally drained from the steely autocracy for which they toil. They work themselves to the bone. When McGovern runs from a skeletal monster into a narrow, claustrophobic hallway with locked doors, the bony hands emitting from the goon's chest aren't as oppressive as the overall atmosphere. The beast is almost overkill. The real horrors here are the effects of the company's edicts, and the blue pills it purveys that play games with the mind but keep workers plodding through. It's even more affecting than the excellent Mouthwashing. Midway through, I stopped again because one of these dizzying rooms induced nausea. But I kept returning to investigate this potent mix of speculative and realist fiction, learning how democracy died, somehow feeling brainwashed as well. Expelled! Woe to the pupil who fakes an illness to get out of class at Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls. Should she be sent to the infirmary, she just might have to swallow a generous dose of cod liver oil to appease the suspicious spirit of the school nurse. And just how does that taste? 'Like a group of sardines died together in a tin, a hundred years ago, and this was all that they left behind.' Over the course of her very bad day, Verity Amersham, the heroine of Expelled!, will have to brave all manner of indignities beyond cod liver oil to avoid being kicked out of school. Her fate hangs in the balance because an injured classmate has claimed Verity pushed her out of an upper-story window. To clear her name and uncover the facts and the whys of the incident, Verity will have to use what little time she has before the end of the day to chat with the school's students, teachers and staff members to gain the leverage she needs to vanquish her rivals and burnish her social standing. Expelled! feels like a visual novel crossed with a roguelite game. Players are incentivized to relive Verity's school day several times because information gleaned in one playthrough carries over to the next, opening up new lines for investigation. The writing — a model of economy — is deliciously funny, and the graphic novel visuals are fetching. Expelled! mounts a magnificent charm offensive. Centum Creativity may often be perceived as something light and freeing, but creativity can also be a prison. It's a dilemma that the adventure game Centum works to explore. Taking place within the warped and disintegrating world of an abandoned video game, Centum opens in a stone prison cell. You can poke and prod at various objects, even sketch a grim companion onto the wall, but you cannot escape. Not until you step back a level, to the game's metatextual computer interface, and launch a hacked version of that same scenario. This lets you break free of the prison and into all sorts of new, strange, gorgeously illustrated environs. Centum uses its layers of abstract visuals and narrative to wrestle with the challenges and responsibilities of creating art. What if the thing you built in an attempt to reach others winds up hurting them instead? What if you inadvertently pack your trauma and your wounds into your work, leaving them as traps for an unsuspecting audience? These questions manifest in a fractured and mystifying world of puzzles and one-off retro computer games that recall the early decades of indie game development. An OutRun-like game lets you race to flee a suffocating city; a top-down pixel art maze reflects the dead ends of the creator's depressed mind. Little makes sense at first glance, but the discordant pieces of Centum's narrative leave a successful impression of the pain and frustration inherent to all acts of creation.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kotaku Weekend Guide: 3 Great Games Keeping Us Grounded
Next week is a big one. Assassin's Creed Shadows launches on the heels of new reporting that Ubisoft is looking to spin off the franchise into a standalone company backed by Chinese conglomerate NetEase. The 2025 Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco with talks from people behind some of the biggest hits and blockbusters. And the first day of spring officially arrives less than two weeks ahead of the Nintendo Direct for the Switch 2, which some analysts think will cost over $400 and ship in June. Before all that arrives, we'll be taking a breath this weekend and spending time with these great games, which range from new indies to older gems. Play it on: Xbox Series X/S, PC Goal: Take down Boss_Wallducker. I like boomer shooters just fine, but Mullet Madjack has me hooked in a way other games in the subgenre rarely have. Originally released last year on PC, the arcade FPS roguelite just hit Xbox Game Pass this week and is scratching my 3D Hotline Miami itch (happy 10-year anniversary to that game's sequel, by the way). While the shooting is snappy and the weapon upgrades are neat, it's the hyper-stylized art and fun level design that's kept me entranced. The premise is simple enough—save a minor internet celebrity from robber baron robots in a futuristic world that feels like The Matrix huffing neon glitter glue—but it's a perfectly alienated fit for the sicko event horizon our online culture currently finds itself sucked into. Never has a game met the moment with a vibe so pure (and engagingly deranged). — Ethan Gach Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC Goal: Brew a decent cup of tea. I'm excited to try Wanderstop, the new game about, as its Steam page puts it, 'change and tea,' for a few reasons. One is that it's the first game from Ivy Road, a studio founded by Davey Wreden. Wreden previously created The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide, both highly original games that were fully committed to their own distinctive visions. On the surface, in the trailers that I've seen, Wanderstop looks like it could be a fairly conventional 'cozy game,' another chill, low-key release in which you soak up the pleasant vibes while running a business of some kind—in this case, a tea shop. However, given Wreden's involvement, I suspect there's more to Wanderstop than that, and that sooner or later the game's gonna throw me a curveball. Which is what I want! I want to be surprised, caught off guard, to have my expectations undermined. The other reason I'm excited is that I've seen the game receive a pretty wide range of critical reactions, from lukewarm praise to enthusiastic raves. (I haven't read these reviews yet because I want to go into the game knowing as little as possible, but it's clear to me that there's a good assortment of opinions on it out there.) I believe that most games should receive a much wider range of critical reactions than they do, but given that mainstream game criticism sadly still tends overwhelmingly toward consensus, when a game does receive a decent spread of critical responses I tend to sit up and take notice, because it inevitably means that the game is doing something interesting. It doesn't mean that I'll love it; it just means that even if I don't like it, I'll probably at least think it failed in an interesting way, and I'd typically much rather play a game that tries something distinctive and doesn't quite come together than a game that plays it safe and succeeds. Of course, it's also possible that I will end up loving Wanderstop. I intend to find out one way or the other this weekend. But right now, this moment before I've even started it, is sometimes one of the best parts: to be on the cusp of beginning a new game, and not having any clue of just what to expect. — Carolyn Petit Play it on: 3DS Goal: Remember where everything is in Kalos Pokémon's sixth generation has always been a weird one for me. I love the lore of the Kalos region and the Mega Evolutions battle gimmick, but despite that, I've never gone back to the 3DS games after all these years. With Pokémon Legends: Z-A coming out this year, however, it feels like the right time to return to my old copy of Pokémon Y and refresh myself on what came before. Game Freak was definitely still getting used to making games in 3D with X and Y, and as a result, a lot of the visual character the Pokémon had exuded in earlier games was drained from them in favor of mostly pretty lifeless 3D models. Back when the games came out, it still felt like a huge deal to finally see Pokémon in 3D on a handheld, but despite this visual shift, X and Y were a breaking point for me as I finally grew tired of the original Pokémon formula. Today, Pokémon Y is a relic of a bygone era in a series that has started to think outside the box in recent years, which makes it kinda quaint to go back to after games like Legends: Arceus and Scarlet/Violet have taken some pretty big leaps. That said, the simplicity of old Pokémon still has its charms. If I'm going back to reacquaint myself with Kalos, I'd rather not have something dense and cumbersome. It's fine! It's pleasant! I can't complain too much about hanging out with my Raichu in a place we haven't visited in a decade. — Kenneth Shepard For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
New York Times
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Burned-Out Designer Tried to Heal by Making a Cozy Game
Nothing moves quickly in Wanderstop. To make a single cup of tea in the new video game is a meditative ritual of deliberate steps. The recovering hero, Alta, has to forage for tea leaves, dry out those leaves, plant seeds for fruit to flavor the tea, water those seeds, watch the plant grow, harvest the fruit individually, and then, with a fantastical apparatus the player traverses using rolling ladders, heat up the water, drain it into a brewing pot, throw the ingredients in one by one, go to a shelf of bespoke mugs, select one, place it under a tap and — finally — pour. There is recognition for doing so without spilling a single drop but no punishment if it is not perfect. It is not that kind of game. Davey Wreden, the 36-year-old writer and director of Wanderstop, has not released a stand-alone game in a decade. He burned out after commercial success with The Stanley Parable (2013), an absurd meditation on cubicle life and choice that has been cited as an inspiration for the TV show 'Severance,' and artistic acclaim with the game's follow-up. Wanderstop was supposed to be different from those mind-bending works, a calming experience set at a woodland tea shop. It did not end up that way. 'I started out trying to make this game in a way that it wasn't going to be a complex story about me and my life, and I failed to do that,' Wreden said. 'The more that I began having Alta speak the words in my own head, the more compelling it got.' The Stanley Parable was intended as a job application but became a career. In the 2000s, the dream gig for cerebral gamers was at Valve, a studio known for games like Portal and the Half-Life series that paired innovative gameplay with witty but affecting writing. Landing a job at Valve was the only goal for Wreden, who grew up in Sacramento and always wanted to make video games. When he started working on The Stanley Parable in his junior year at the University of Southern California, it was not a full game but rather a mod formed out of the building blocks of Valve's game engine. It was set in an office because he used some assets from Half-Life's research facility. Stanley's job is to follow instructions and push buttons. But one day, as a genteel British narrator notes, something peculiar happens. The orders disappear, as do his co-workers. The player explores the empty office to find answers, but encounters choices to abide by the path announced by the narrator or to divert from it instead. The alternatives lead to branching endings: Stanley can find freedom, be blown up or lose his mind. After working over Skype with a teenage level designer, William Pugh, to create an aesthetic, Wreden released the full version of The Stanley Parable in October 2013. Its offbeat writing made it a hit with critics and players. But Wreden now describes those days, which should have been a triumph, as an indistinguishable brown mush. The Stanley Parable existed, Wreden later said at a public talk, because he felt like Stanley: completely alone. He said it came from a 'Look at me!' desperation. But being looked at did not help. In a comic he drew after receiving industry accolades, Wreden compared winning awards for his art to being given the sun: 'No matter how you dress it up, the gift is ultimately intangible, distant, trying to hold onto it will kill you.' Six months after the game was released, Wreden started therapy. To relax, he took months of drawing lessons, repeatedly sketching woodland scenes that he later channeled into Wanderstop. Cozy games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, with their cute environments and achievable tasks like delivering gifts and farming, became escapist havens during stressful times like the coronavirus pandemic. But the pull of productivity still trickles in. Crops, fruits and fish are sold for gold. Daily cycles keep players running around to complete tasks before nightfall. Wanderstop subverts many of those mechanics. Although the game is set in a shop, no money changes hands. Even the tutorial urges players to slow down: When they grab a watering can before the tool is introduced, they are gently scolded for rushing ahead. Alta can give each cup of tea to another character or drink it herself; each flavor prompts a different reflection. There are no sudden fourth-wall turns or meta depths, as some fans speculated because of Wreden's earlier work — only sincere emotion. 'That stuff was nothing,' Wreden said of the twists in his previous games. 'Trusting in small moments of humanity to be actually compelling narratively? That's hard,' he said, using an expletive. Balancing the charm of the tea shop with Alta's struggle was a challenge for Wreden, who said writing the character felt at times like mining his own diary entries. His follow-up to The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide (2015), centers on a game designer named Davey, voiced by Wreden, whose friendship with another game designer, Coda, deteriorates after Davey oversteps boundaries with his work. Players speculated how autobiographical the game was, leading Wreden to clarify it was fiction. But it does have roots in the dissolution of relationships after The Stanley Parable. One of Coda's games is about cleaning a house ad infinitum, being asked to straighten up pillows and make up a bed over and over. Instead of monotony, it is a calming domestic scene. 'My place is just to see a bit of peace brought here,' says a figure seated at a table. Coda envisions it as a loop, but Davey edits the game to have an ending. (It was inspired, Wreden said, by a romantic relationship he regrets he could not let himself be happy in.) When Coda confronts Davey in the form of a video game, he directly quotes a former real-life friend of Wreden's: 'When I am around you I feel physically ill.' Davey responds through shaken narration: 'I'm starting to feel like I have a lot of work to do.' Wanderstop feels like a fulfillment of that work. Alta is an undefeated warrior who, one day, finally loses. Her sense of self is shaken and her sword becomes too heavy to lift. She runs through a forest to consult a master but passes out and awakens at a tea shop in a clearing. The man who tends to the shop, Boro, invites her to stay awhile as she recovers; Alta has to quiet every impulse to go faster. Alta was a silent protagonist in a mechanics-driven game until Wreden started having her voice his own fears and his belief that he could power through anything. Wreden and Karla Zimonja, Wanderstop's narrative lead, would dissect Alta's character on hourslong walks, trying to better understand her personality and motivations. She said it was a challenge meeting Wreden's standards for personal writing that did not feel forced; they fretted to make sure Boro's lines did not sound like rote motivational quotes. 'Part of my job, in the editorial capacity, was being like, 'That's it, you got it,'' she said. 'Everybody gets that feeling when you're making something and you're like, 'Is this actually garbage?'' Wanderstop is Wreden's most collaborative work yet and the first game from his studio, Ivy Road. Zimonja interviewed women who practice jiu-jitsu to inform Alta's arena career. Temitope Olujobi, the game's 3-D art director and environment lead, studied the sightlines in botanical gardens for the vistas that Alta contemplates with her tea. Daniel Rosenfeld, who created the ambient score in Minecraft, crafted shifts in music between the serene clearing and livelier tea shop. Yet Wreden's influence on Alta is still clear. In Wanderstop, absurd action novels about a detective named Dirk Warhard are delivered to the tea shop. The scholarly 'Chasing Bullets: A History and Critical Theory of the Dirk Warhard Novels' that arrives seems strange, until it mentions that the author went from crowd pleasers to stories of 'justice cannibalism.' When asked if he felt like a 'justice cannibal,' eating at himself to set something right through his protagonists, Wreden demurred and said Dirk Warhard was just a cool name. (One that shares his initials.) Healing, like tea making, is slow. After 10 years and a lot of therapy, Wreden said he felt more at peace. He spends time outside, riding his bike to the waterfront in Vancouver, British Columbia. Despite Wanderstop's peaceful theme, game development is a punishing job. Wreden, who has the luxury of not really needing to worry about money because of The Stanley Parable's success, plans to take some time off. He does not know how he will be involved in Ivy Road's next game, if at all. He is OK with that. 'It would be really freeing in a lot of ways to begin to release myself from the obligation and the expectation of churning out hit after hit,' Wreden said. 'Even if the obituary comes down for the greatness of my work, I'd like to be able to go to its funeral and grieve it, and then go home and have a cup of tea.'
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wanderstop review: why I found Ivy Road's de-stressing tea-making game surprisingly intricate
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Wanderstop details Publisher Annapurna Interactive Developer Ivy Road Release date 11 March 2025 Format PC (reviewed), PS5 Platform Unreal Engine What do you do when you've met with personal failure? Do you mope in despair, try to talk about it with someone, dust yourself off and put all your energy into getting back on the saddle? Or maybe before any of that, you just put the kettle on first. That is to some extent what Wanderstop is built around. Centred on celebrated arena fighter Alta who one day loses her undefeated streak, her quest to find a mysterious master who can train her back to her best leads her to waking up in a forest clearing, the site of a tea shop run by a gentle giant named Boro. Unable to leave this clearing without quickly collapsing from exhaustion again, and lacking the strength to even pick up her own sword, her goal instead is to rest. But knowing that to do nothing would have you feeling excruciatingly restless, she decides to grudgingly help run the titular tea shop, trying to make the most of it. Wanderstop is a cosy game where the protagonist doesn't want to be there, the kind of narrative twist you would expect from the creator of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide. But in between its story beats, it's also arguably quite conventional as it commits to the bit of being a cosy game. (For more background, read my interview with the Wanderstop dev.) Wanderstop will feel familiar to other cosy management sim games that have grown in popularity in recent years. Running the tea shop involves taking requests from the quirky customers who randomly also find their way into this clearing. But the actual tea-making process is quite deliberate in its many intricate steps. You have to collect enough tea leaves with a basket then wait for them to dry, while you'll also learn to plant multicoloured seeds in different patterns that result in hybrid plants that grow different fruits that can be used to flavour the tea. Once you have the ingredients, you have to operate the large tea machine in the centre of the shop itself, which you can conveniently navigate with a ladder that swivels around it. That involves heating the water just right by manually stoking the fire with bellows, before tossing in your ingredients, and then pouring the results into a clean cup. A lot of busywork just to make a brew, and yet it's all the care that goes into these small interactions that makes the process feel rewarding in its own way, especially as you watch different ingredients change the colour of the tea. You'll even realise that there's a right timing to ensure you pour just the right amount without any of it spilling over. It's not all just about tea-making, as you also have tools to keep the clearing tidy, from trimming weeds to cleaning dirt piles with a broom. Over time, you may also notice other elements, such as the strange mushrooms you can pluck and use to modify your plants or pulpy action novellas that come through the mailbox you can happily leaf through. You might even want to decorate the shop by taking pictures with a camera and framing them, or fill the pots with plants. But they're all simply suggestions rather than objectives you have to tick off, though will undoubtedly play into the psychology of trophy hunters. Perhaps due its cosy trappings of taking your time, Wanderstop's story is also a slow brew that requires patience to develop, especially when compared with writer and director Davey Wreden's previous games, which had much shorter playtimes and therefore never outstayed their welcome. Without going into spoilers, as you fulfil your customers' requests, something strange happens that means all your hard work will routinely reset as a new cycle begins, also changing the clearing's colour palettes as well as the customers you encounter. In between these cycles, narration and illustrations also piece out the internal conflict Alta is experiencing. Wreden had already spoken explicitly about how the game has a personal story based on his own feelings of burnout that comes from obsession and perfectionism, and knowing that, those parallels with Alta's struggles are pretty direct. But I also found myself relating to her impatience, questioning why I'm making all these teas for people, some of whom you borderline have to force into making a request for tea, when it's also impermanent and inconsequential before the story moves onto its next beat. Perhaps I'm just in denial of my own sense of encroaching burnout, with the need to always be on, searching for the next game to cover, the next work assignment, the next pay cheque. In other words, Wanderstop is a game I needed to play to get myself to slow down, but it's also better to describe it as meditative medicine rather than a must-play you can't put down. While it may drip-feed its story for longer than necessary and doesn't really go out of its way to subvert the cosy game, those who are looking for a way to relax will find comfort in the intricate and charming processes of making tea to pass the time. What do you think of Wanderstop and it's art direction? Let us know in the comments below.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Brewing Tea in a Cozy Game Can Be Tiring
Wanderstop, a chill but cheeky experience with characters who exude dry humor, appears to be about harvesting and making tea. But it is also full of musings about fatigue and burnout. In other words, is the daily grind worth the harm it can do to the psyche? Cozy games like Animal Crossing, Nintendo's funny animal series, became extra popular during the stress of the coronavirus pandemic, and the new studio Ivy Road is trying to change the nature of the genre. In Wanderstop, you're not just tending your garden in a Voltaire sense. You're trying to understand, relate to and fix a character who is on the verge of a breakdown — or has already had one. It's a cautionary tale for those who toil too much and too hard. Alta, a female warrior, has lost her mojo by laboring too strenuously to make it to the top. Exhausted, she faints in the forest. She can no longer even lift her huge sword to fight. To clear her mind, Alta begins managing a far-flung tea cafe. Creating the steamy brews requires dutifully ascending a wooden ladder to release water into an extravagant tea machine. With a bellows, she stokes the fire 30 or so times until the water boils. Then, with a neatly animated kick, she opens a giant kettle to toss in tea and fanciful ingredients. Brilliantly rendered, the device recalls Willy Wonka's Great Gum Machine. Alta, with a mahogany-colored apron and little patience for customers, has long followed the strict, militarized rules of elite competition. But here, there are no timed objectives, just an anything-goes attitude. Nonetheless, the argumentative Alta remains drained. Boro, the portly, baldheaded tea master, proclaims, 'What a surprise that a person pushing themselves to the brink of exhaustion would collapse!' His Yoda-like philosophy comes off as overwhelmingly needling rather than meaningful, his concern mired by condescension. Alta is easily addled and stressed. Beyond her desire to return to the top fighter ranks, she carries a heavy guilt regarding her father. Powerless, she feels lazy, stupid, angry and a failure, to use her words. There's a meta aspect to these feelings. Davey Wreden, the game's director, felt similarly after working for too many hours on versions of The Stanley Parable (2013), which became so popular that it was an inspiration for 'Severance.' The art here is admirable. Lush garden acres of smudgy colors surround the cafe, inviting contemplation. Collectible tea grows on its outskirts, and there is a small temple featuring a being's somehow-soothing oval head. Hues change from variations of purple and green amid running brooks to pink and white. It's all suitable for sitting on a bench, watching the world go by while plump and playful pluffins waddle near their coop. Alta and her customers eventually offer moments of revelation. But they're too few and far between. A goofy knight (with a cursed foot that emanates purple mist) who yearns to be thought of as cool by his son, as someone to be respected, is a compelling enough story beat that comes too late. It was difficult to sympathize with the characters' tales of despair, however witty. The wry, eccentric humor that worked well in the sterile office setting of The Stanley Parable seemed at odds with this world of breezy bucolic environments and magical hybrid teas. Working in the farm-like setting and making tea wasn't always peaceful. Commanding exclamation points appeared over customer heads when they required tea or wanted to make a minor point. It made me believe I needed to jump to customer needs. I also wondered how, if Alta was physically and mentally beaten down, she could cut down a lawn's worth of thorny bramble snarls with the caffeinated speed of Sonic the Hedgehog. By the time those around me began to open up and become nicer, I didn't want to engage anymore. The point was to learn that working at one's own pace is rewarded with individual enlightenment, cup by cup. But I felt more like a therapist, trying to be patient with my patients as I urged them to spill the tea.
