REVIEW: Wanderstop's therapeutic and tactile tea-making brought me to tears
- Nate Hermanson
- Apr 29
- 8 min read
Wanderstop is an incredibly powerful game.
Once in a blue moon, something will come across my desk at exactly the right time to shake me up. To share lessons with me that I knew I needed but never took the steps to pursue. To show me ways one can heal amidst deep, deep darkness. And to remind me why video games as a medium can be so much more affecting than any other art form.
Wanderstop doesn't rely on flat platitudes or cutesy visuals to achieve its good vibes and comforting tea-making gameplay — instead it confronts harsh truths and embraces the frustrating unknowns of being a human to craft something truly special. And it's one of my favorite games of 2025 as a result.
Just the Facts |
Developer: Ivy Road |
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive |
Platform(s): PC and PS5* *denotes platform reviewed on |
Price: $24.99 |
Release Date: March 11, 2025 |
Review key provided by publisher via popagenda. |
My tea shop brings all the neurodivergents to the yaaard
Ivy Road, as I described in our preview earlier this year, is a superstar team of devs from around the indie scene who've come together to provide something unlike anything any of them have made in their past: a cozy game that looked to deeply examine what cozy truly meant. The end result, Wanderstop, is a simultaneously rigid and free-flowing experience that asks you to heal yourself and others through the process of making tea.
In Wanderstop, you inhabit the battle-worn boots of a fighter named Alta, an undefeated champion of the arena who surveys her surroundings from the peak she's built for herself... until she's knocked down by an unexpected defeat. She tries to get back up, but she loses again. And again. And again.
Jolted by this sudden shift and a desperate feeling that she's lost control of the thing she's good at, she runs determinedly off into the forest to seek out a legend, Master Winters, to help get her head back on straight and start the wins flowing once more. Not even a few steps into the forest, Alta feels something else unexpected: weariness. She stumbles, struggles to hold her sword up — and before long, she's passed out on the ground.
When she regains consciousness, she's in a dreamy clearing with a bald round man to her side and a charming pastel cottage of a teashop called Wanderstop in front of her. The man, Boro, has hardly just introduced himself and welcomed Alta with a cup of tea when her determination flares and she's ready to leave again. Out into the forest she goes again — and this time when she collapses and Boro carries her to safety, he advises her to slow down. He's gentle but truthful: Carry on this way if you must, but one day, eventually, you'll collapse and not get back up. Stop and consider making some tea, he says. To rest. To breathe.
She, of course, scoffs at this, but indulges him. And before she knows it, she's stuck in with this community.
Wanderstop's setup is familiar enough for cozy gamers, with a fish out of water ending up somewhere rural, simpler, and slower, in charge of something that leaves them out of their depth. But the biggest difference is... Alta couldn't give a shit about any of it. Her skepticism, her begrudging cooperation, her fighter's energy being shoved kicking and screaming into a different box, all makes for a far more engaging journey than farming sim-adjacent games often offer.
Alta's a cozy game protagonist who would rather be doing anything else, and as a player, being put into the position to match her energy and let yourself learn how to relax alongside her makes for a natural level of narrative immersion I wasn't expecting.
Alongside her, the cast fills out with a variety of strangers who also find themselves called to this clearing: a group of similarly fractured people whose problems mirror and reflect Alta's issues beautifully.
There's the knight (a dad wearing a suit of armor) who's willing to shrug off a literal curse to impress his son. The shopkeeper who will stop at nothing to crush her competition. The ethereal space being who is finding their identity. Each new person adds to the unique brew that Ivy Road concocts here to provide humor and tragedy in equal measure. My only real complaint comes in the fact that so often their stories remain unfinished throughout the game's five chapters, which feels like it's meant to be another lesson in being okay with not knowing where someone's story ends up, but still makes me sad that I'll never know where some of them end up.
VULNERABILITY WARNING! WEE-WOO!
As a person whose self-worth remains weighed by what I accomplish, whose ability to celebrate my wins lacks in comparison to focusing on my failures, and whose issues with being good enough (whatever that means) feel constantly spotlighted in my day-to-day, Wanderstop shattered me... just to tell me how I might start picking the pieces back up.
It addresses some painfully relevant issues of burnout, of not taking care of oneself, and of dependency in its many forms. But it manages to do it without making things overly heavy. It does it with humor and heart, and without heavy-handed speeches.
It's a special game. And while it's possible that it might not strike a chord as powerfully with everyone, Wanderstop is one I'll be praising for a long time.
Climbing the great big tea machine
In its deconstruction of what a cozy game means narratively, Ivy Road has managed to make Wanderstop a truly comforting game to play.
Fans of cozy classics, like farming sim and drink shop games, will recognize a lot of familiar pieces here. You plant and cultivate ingredients for your teas, maintain and decorate the plot of land around the shop, blend the unique flavor profiles of your ingredients to satisfy customer demands, and so on. But it's the way Ivy Road approaches these things that make it feel like something new.
Wanderstop emphasizes the freedom and agency of its players. It acknowledges that many of its tasks can feel like chores, but also ensures that you are free to do as little or as much as you want. It gives you unique brewing puzzles with each new customer's orders — but it also offers a Book of Answers that flat out explains how each brew should be made. It removes any deadlines, offers you easy solutions to gathering new ingredients you need for your teas, and allows you to simply say no to requests that don't sound fun.
So often I hear people remark that cozier games like Stardew Valley and the like feel overwhelming, because there's so much to do, and the freedom those games offer can leave players baffled about which direction to choose. In contrast, Wanderstop makes each new goal clear. It focuses on the making of tea, and the clearing's relatively small size keeps the action right in front of you at all times.
Wanderstop is the game for the cozy game skeptic, because it confronts many of the issues people have with the genre head on and genuinely emphasizes comfort and ease of play above all else.
Wanderstop is a game I knew I'd like but didn't realize I'd love. Ivy Road's crafted an incredibly special game that I will carry with me for years to come.
Once you dive into the nitty-gritty of making tea, there's a hands-on tactility to brewing even just one cup that feels satisfying and comforting each time you do it. Wanderstop's tea brewing machine, a giant glass apparatus planted right at the center of the shop, requires Alta to climb all around it to pour water, heat it, blend flavors, and ultimately pour a cup. It's much more involved than many of us are used to at home and requires you to take your time for even just one mug of tea.
Where games like Coffee Talk certainly focus on the process of making drinks, there's something about the deliberate actions needed to produce your soothing brews in Wanderstop that makes it feel momentous each time.
From the way Alta slam dunks seeds in unique patterns to cultivate specific plants, to deciphering progressively more confusing tea orders, all the way to finally getting your ingredients aligned at the tea machine and completing the process, I felt a real embodiment in getting things done at Wanderstop. Rather than clicking on menus, you feel every step of the process and experience a sense of pride when the customer sighs in satisfaction upon finally taking a sip. And it never really fades from start to finish. All 10 hours of my tea brewing felt just as fulfilling.
The simple puzzles — your customer's orders — are never too complicated, as long as you consult Alta's trusty field guide. The only real complication comes in remembering where you stashed an ingredient you needed after your pockets got full. But, again, this game's emphasis is on taking it easy.
The clearing and the shop even scrub away the progress you've made in planting and decorating with each new chapter: wiping the slate clean, asking you to accept change and release control, the same as Alta. What could feel like a setback in certain other cozy games that steer you toward optimization is instead a prodding reminder that progress doesn’t always mean permanence. It challenges the idea of perfecting your process or optimally playing it, instead just asking you to stop and smell the roses. In this way, that narrative immersion aligns perfectly with its gameplay ideas.
VIDEO GAMES.
Powerhouse performances
If we're gonna keep talking about things perfectly aligning to make a piece of art special, we've got to talk about Alta and her performance on the whole. First, we call to attention her animation set. So many little details are hidden in Alta's every action in the world, each one showcasing her inability to fully leave her fighting self behind and embrace the calm of being a tea shop's manager. Sweeping up leaves becomes a 1-2-3 combo flourish that wouldn't feel out of place in an action-adventure game. Alta's use of the tea machine has her deftly batting at and kicking its various buttons and levers with the trained maneuvers of a warrior. You can almost feel her frustration when wielding a pair of garden shears as each cut gets faster and faster as she goes.
Then there's the performance from Kimberly Woods that perfectly showcases Alta's fragility and slow unraveling alongside her stubborn grit. As the primary voice you'll hear from end-to-end — most other characters are unvoiced — Woods sticks the landing again and again. Toward the end of the game, some of her line reads had me teetering on the edge of full-on sobbing.
Daniel "C418" Rosenfeld's soundtrack does the rest of the talking in ways I didn't see coming. Rosenfeld's eclectic soundtrack is one of my favorites in years, using acoustic piano tracks to perfectly score moments of emotional revelation and twangy strings to accompany the clearing's more whimsical visitors. Each character has their own signature sound, and the way Ivy Road has each track dynamically come in and out with a flourish gives it an almost stage-like live score feeling that keeps you in the moment. It's expertly done.
And finally, when silence is best, Wanderstop's art design takes front and center. The impossibly colorful fluffy trees, the whimsically natural plant design, the overgrown comfort of Wanderstop's interior: it all coalesces into an experience that is just pleasant to enjoy on all fronts. Though I think it all starts and ends with the roundness of Boro. He's a good lad.
Wanderstop is a game I knew I'd like but didn't realize I'd love. With its therapeutic gameplay, healing-focused narrative, masterclass performances, and genuinely cozy vibes, Ivy Road's crafted an incredibly special game that I will carry with me for years to come.
The last time a game made me feel this way was Chicory: A Colorful Tale, and that stands the test of time as one of my all-time favorites. So consider Wanderstop one of 2025's must-plays and get your healing on at the tea shop as soon as you can.
Video Games Are Good and Wanderstop is . . . TRANSCENDENT. (10/10)
+ narrative focused on healing that addresses some harsh truths, therapeutic and tactile gameplay mechanics, masterclass performances from all artists involved
- narrative's greatest emotional strengths may not resonate for all, cozy skeptics may still reject its concepts, some stories lack the payoff you might want
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