In yesterday’s post, I was talking about my backlog and indie games in general. I mentioned one that I was instantly drawn to when I saw the trailer, and now I want to talk about it. It’s called Wanderstop (Ivy Road), and it’s by the developer of The Stanley Parable. Everyone raved about the latter, but I could not stand it. I found the narrator insufferable, and if I remember correctly, the game made me mildly nauseous (first-person). When I realized that the former was made by the latter’s dev, well, my interest dampened considerably. But I wanted to give it a fair shot, especially because I loved the premise of it.
You play as Alta, someone who’s only purpose in life is to fight with her sword in hand. No wonder I was drawn to the story! She’s won every fight for several years in a row, then loses one. Then another. And another. A series of events make it so she ends up at a wery charming and odd tea shop run by a man named Boro. By the way, I instantly felt a kinship with Boro and will protect him to the death. He is the best.
He rescues Alta and suggests that she saty at his tea shop (Wanderstop) while she rests up. It’s clear to him that Alta can’t keep doing what she’s doing, but she’s stubborn (I also relate to her as well). This is what she’s meant to do. She can’t fathom having a different life, and she is angry that he would even dare suggest it.
But. She can’t live her old life any longer. At least not right now. And there’s nothing else for her to do, so….I have to say that I like the tone of the game. I like Boro, and I can empathize with Alta. The environments are colorful and charming. The music is whimsical and matches the vibes.
You can sense a but, can’t you? Well, I’m not there yet.
The game has some accessibility options, such as a dot to mitigate motion-sickness. It’s a third-person perspective, but it does invoke nausea in me. I fiddled with the camera controls, and I have made the nausea minimal. But I can’t make it disappear completely.
I feel like a broken record, but my limitations make the gameplay unpleasant and unnecessarily laborious. The gameplay is not hard in general, but the grid-like hexagons are hard for me to stay on. What I mean is that you have to plant seeds in specific patterns. My dexterity makes it difficult for me to land on the precise hexagon I need. Plus, I think the controls are just way too fiddly and overcomplicated.
After an hour-and-a-half of play, I found that while I was mildly positive as to the characters and the story, the gameplay was really dragging it down. This is not a farming sim, but it’s not a story-driven game, either. It’s somewhere in between, and I’m not sure they managhed to bridge the gap successfully.
Again, it could just be me, but I found trying to navigate the ladders is the game (as a way to reach places I couldn’t reach on the ground alone) very frustrating. They move too fast, and then if I try to do an action while on them, it’s even odds that I’ll actually end up hopping off the ladder. There’s a review I watched who mentioned several of the issues I had with the game. I’ll link it here, but the video above is of the launch trailer. She has motion sickness and said even with the fiddling, she still experience mild nausea. Hard same. The camera is awful as it clips through the environment and suddenly zooms in during dialogues. It feels like I’m walking on unsteady ground, and I do not like it. You can turn the camera sensitivity down and you there’s a dot in the middle of the screen (presumably to keep your vision grounded).
She (Miss Bubbles) also talked about some of the little irritating things. Like the ‘pouring the tea’ prompt is so finicky. And the items in your inventory is grouped in four different ‘pockets’, and in a very weird way. It’s not intuitive at all. One of them is tools, I guess, which includes the watering can, the tea basket (for gathering tea leaves), and…the tea cups? Weird.
I have long since maintained that small indie devs who are focused on the story/plots/themes really do not need to put gameplay into their games. In this case, it feels very underbaked and not well done. I would rather just throw the ingredients in a tea pot, maybe stir a few times, and have it be done. It’s needlessly complicated and frustrating for someone with my brain. Again, maybe it’s me, but I am not enjoying that aspect of the game at all.
Nor do I like that the resources are so limited. You have a very small amount of seeds, and you have to manage them quite rigorously if you don’t want to run out. On the day I got a certain colored seed, I ran out of them and could not find more for at least half an hour. That was so frustrating, and I nearly stopped playing the game completely.
After the first hour-and-a-half, I was ready to call it a day. It just didn’t grab me the way it seemed to have grabbed so many other people.All the reviews I read/watched gushed about how it was so moving and how it would change you. It’s not a long game (people say it can be done in a dozen hours or so), and there’s a dark twist that is supposedly shattering.
I want to reiterate that I like all the characters so far (to a varying degree), and I do feel for them when bad things happen to them. I want the best for them, and as I said earlier, Boro is to be protected at all cost.
And yet. I felt slightly hollow as I kept playing. I could not even tell you exactly why. This should be exactly my jam, theme-wise and plot-wise, but it was just missing something. I have thought about it, and I must conclude that it’s the gameplay. I can’t really get into the story because the gameplay frustrates me at every step. I feel like the gameplay is actively trying to annoy me and get in my way.
Some other things I don’t like: no map. The environments are gorgeous, but they are a bit samesy (it’s the tea shop and the immediate surroundings), and I have no sense of direction. I have gone in circles trying to find what I was looking for. I have passed by what I wanted/needed because I didn’t see it or realized it was what I was looking for.
Another irritation is the limitation of each pocket in the inventory. It’s really small, something like ten items. So I have to leave things wherever I am, and because of the aforementioned spatial issues, I can’t guarantee that I will ever find them again. Just let me carry everything with me. I really hate load limits, and I think they have no place in a game.
I am done for now. Will write more about it tomorrow.