Are you a failure? Wanderstop can be a “cozy” game for you

Before you can even control your character in Wanderstop, you have been fucked. Alta lost in the arena, her failure was a fast and difficult to read for three years as an unbeaten champion. In her way of saying, she is a “failure”. To retrain and return more aggressively than ever, she went to the forest to find a legendary coach, just to find herself waking up exhausted in front of a picturesque tea shop. The following steam demo will see you harvest plants, make tea and argue a lot with the store owner, a gentle giant thinks that perhaps what Alta really needs is just a time to rest. In the end, you cannot fail when drinking a cup.

The Demo (released as part of Steam Next Fest) is basically the beginning of the game, heavy about the story and introducing our Hamstrung hero and her new friend Boro, an optimistic Hulking who owns a tea shop but is basically a huge therapist. I want to talk about how to tell stories based on the characters more than the games you will do every day around the tea shop. But I think it is helpful to know what you are in, so quickly summarize the basic things.

You are making tea, but that includes all the farms related to the first time. The small field outside the store is arranged in the Hex model and you can sow seeds in certain samples to immediately expand immediately. Sow in a line to get a small hybrid with green seeds. Raising those seeds according to the three -point star model to create a large hybrid will provide fruits that can be harvested for teas.

You will dry the tea leaves in a box with a time counter, collect the fruit tea balls, and on a giant central tea transmission, slide on the ladder, pull the rope and exaggerate and lever to get hot water. Tea poured into a spiral hopper at the bottom with a pleasant flow of a set of chemistry that you have for Christmas. There is something very cunning Van Dyke about the internal decoration of the house. Little Toy Trains Wheel came in and out of the waterfall and a heater – a washing machine for a cup of tea. Saloon door automatically paved the way from one room to another with a satisfied cry. You can adjust some knobs to change music played in the store. The radio has three stations: “horse”, “dog” and “cow”.

This is all very cozy and pink, but what does it have to fail, and how we deal with the idea of ​​it? Well, most of what is displayed is not to sell the game but the main character and her problems. Alta pushed himself through terrible exhaustion. She ran back to the forest several times to escape from the tea shop, using anger and fear as a source of fuel, not understanding that such fuel was hot and fast and pumped into toxins like any petrol -burning engine. Eventually she collapsed every time you leave the quiet Glade of the tea shop.

The author of the game, Davey Wreden (of The Stanley’s parable and the instructions of the beginning) and Karla Zimonja (Tacoma and Gone Home) talked about how the game is a personal story about the exhaustion and recovery power of “daily rituals that anchor us in our lives”. And playing this opening, I can see their meaning. The core struggles that Alta faces are difficulties that many of us may have. At a time, she talked about a previous dream – to Smithy her own sword. But she gave up the idea because to become a “great” in training would take a lifetime, and nothing but the best sword created to do. In the mind of Alta, she only has enough life for a goal: Becoming the greatest arena.

This is a kind of thought or nothing that any perfectionist will recognize, and a person can lead to despair as easily as it leads to success. Pour all the efforts of your life into a train with the cost of all others naturally coming to those who want expert and excellent. Many of us (I include myself here) have brought a life and identity into the spiritual coffee cup with us to work every day. But when an incident occurred and that career cup was broken, for any reason, the cold coffee traces of “failure” seeped into everything around you. Suddenly, after many years, you are a damn person. There are two reactions: double and try harder, or give up completely. All or nothing.

As you can see, there are many emotional luggage to extract in Wanderstop, even in this short demo. When it ended after an hour or longer, I was more thirsty. I want to see Alta better because I know the recovery value of taking a horse -to -cooling drug is about horses and learns to sit down and do nothing but breathe air once an hour. I learned that there was something – a lot of things – between “all” and “nothing”. And I feel warm and faint if this extremely angry man also comes to see this.

I also want the game to interrogate the “cozy” agriculture genre, according to the tradition, it is completed by the gear manufactured and the seasonal time is easy to turn relaxing games into more automatic games. If the goal here is to show Alta that she does not need to always motivate herself, no need to “work”, then I want to see the game design that strengthens that idea. Its Stardew and ILK valley are great troubles, a way out means daily concerns. But for a long time there has been room for a game to appear and think more deeply about why those games are very popular. Exactly what we are trying to escape when we grow another Parsnips? I hope Wanderstop has an interesting answer. Expected to launch on March 11.