Wanderstop
Wanderstop is a 2025 cozy game developed by Ivy Road and published by Annapurna Interactive. Written and directed by Davey Wreden, composed by C418, and edited by Karla Zimonja, it follows a former warrior named Alta, whose painful losses in combat have led her to help tend a tea shop with its owner, Boro, with an aim to heal herself. The gameplay includes a system of tea brewing and farming by planting seeds in a hex grid, creating more seeds and fruit for use in the tea, as the shop and its customers are attended to throughout the narrative.
After C418 and Wreden each had ideas for a video game by 2015, conceptualization began in 2016, and bona fide development on the game began around 2018. With work on the project lasting over nine years, it was completed in Unreal Engine and utilized the Blueprints visual scripting software for no-code development. Though Wreden's vision was originally only to make a cozy game, Wanderstops focus shifted to the subject of trauma when Zimonja joined development, and Wreden chose to integrate his feeling of burnout from developing The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide into the narrative. The art design, taking inspiration from other cozy games, draws elements of Impressionist art and Art Nouveau. C418's original score plays dynamically according to the player's actions.
Wanderstop was released on March 11, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S. The game was praised for its characters, art and world design, narrative, and music, while the gameplay received a more divisive response. It appeared on several year-end best lists for 2025, and received nominations for accolades at the Golden Joystick Awards and The Game Awards 2025. Wreden was unsure about his future in game development after the release of Wanderstop, while C418 was open to further work with Ivy Road on a new game.
Gameplay and premise
The game's protagonist, Alta, was once an undefeated fighter who spent her entire life training in her craft. Unable to recover from two recent defeats, she seeks the legendary fighter Master Winters to train her, but collapses in a forest. Getting nowhere by continuing to try and push on, Alta is invited to stay and work around the Wanderstop tea shop by its jovial owner Boro, as she attempts to "fix" what is wrong with her.Wanderstops cast of characters have stories which play out in multi-step quests. Boro speaks idiosyncratically and is easygoing. The customers include a man named Gerald, who is under a witch's curse that controls his limbs and pretends to be a knight in order to impress his son, who is aware of his silliness; a demon hunter who is left without demons to hunt and instead tries to aid communities through social work; and Nana, an old lady who sets up shop in Wanderstop's clearing, considering everyone a business competitor.
A central gameplay mechanic in Wanderstop is tea making. Alta collects tea leaves in a basket from bushes outside the shop, leaving them in a bowl to dry and turn into a tea ball. The tea balls are an ingredient used in a complex tea brewing contraption, which is of a size that requires the use of a ladder to access all of its components. Pulling a rope fills the flask with water, hitting the bellows causes the water to boil, and after kicking a valve, Alta throws in the tea ball and any other ingredients into the infuser. After this process is completed, the tea is transferred to the "pouramid", which fills cups with the finished tea. Customers may ask for a drink providing a desired effect, which different fruits will produce; a field guide can be consulted to attain knowledge of the proper one. Wanderstops farming system is based on patterns on a hex grid. Seeds planted in rows of three become seed-producing "small hybrids", while planting seeds in a triangular pattern grows a fruit-producing "large hybrid". Different seed combinations produce different types of fruits.
Alta can roam the grounds to trim weeds, water plants, and sweep leaves to find decorative items or dirty teacups. She can return lost items via mail or frame photos on walls. Alta can brew tea for herself and drink it while sitting on a bench; using different fruits in the brew causes Alta to elicit and ponder different memories. Penguin-like "pluffins" roam the clearing, and they may steal items left around unattended. The mechanics of Wanderstop are designed to not cause stress; customers will wait for as long as it takes you to prepare the tea, botching a drink does not result in punishment but rather the opportunity to try again, and the activities have guides to help the player figure them out. The story progresses in chapters, which each have different moods and change the clearing to different colors.
Background
The game designer Davey Wreden released the full edition of his game, The Stanley Parable, in October 2013. Wreden struggled with the game's wide success; six months after release, Wreden began therapy, and took several months of drawing lessons, where he sketched woodland scenes. As early as 2015, composer and sound designer Daniel Rosenfeld, known by his pseudonym C418, had considered creating a video game. He described several experimental concepts, anticipating development would take time. C418 said he was open to collaborating with others on the ideas. At the same time, Wreden had just released his video game The Beginner's Guide, but had been working for so long he found himself unable to write. In January 2016, he had begun to daydream of going to a tea shop in the woods and lying on a bench by the water, and after sketching variations of the scene, decided that image would become the basis of his next game. Conceptualization for the project began that year.In a 2018 interview with Bandcamp, C418 disclosed that he was working on a game with Wreden. He called it a "crazy experiment on making a game where you don't 'earn' anything and there are no numbers that go up", while the player could still "obsess" over it if they wished. He remarked that there was much room to experiment with audio in the game and that he wished to spend "a while" working on it. C418 explained that of all possible choices, composing for a smaller video game drew his attention most because of the "moxie" of developers in the scene, who often take on many roles during development—he said he always enjoyed the "spitballing environment". In July 2019, Wreden began hiring for a gameplay programmer working on tea-related implements and a systems engineer for his next game. In 2020, C418 said that he would serve as the "lead audio person" for a video game development studio based in Austin, Texas helmed by Wreden. The musician said he was very involved in the game's development. Wreden said that the project had been worked on for nine years "in some capacity".
Development
Bona fide development, which began in 2018, was led by a small team. Developed in Unreal Engine, the game made use of the engine's Blueprints software, a visual scripting programming language which allowed no-code development. Wreden joked that development "took so fucking long that 'cozy game' is now like a swear word"; at the beginning of development, Wreden says cozy games had not been as popular by the time of Wanderstops release, and said that his goal with the game was to explore humanity and have a purposeful narrative, which he felt other games in the genre had not yet covered. Developers for the game include lead producer Patrick McDermott, lead designer Steven Margolin, lead programmer Andrew Nguyen, and 2D and 3D art designers Nat F and Temitope Olujobi, respectively.Animation and art
Aura Triolo, who served as lead animator on the game, prioritized finding shortcuts to animate the characters with. When she began working on the game in 2019, she was the only animator employed by Ivy Road, though the animation team would grow to as many as four simultaneous people later on. She spent much of her early development on Wanderstop setting up animation technology to automatically handle many different situations, including character idle and active stances. She utilized procedural generation and inverse kinematics to apply universal animation sets across all characters, which would work for each despite them having different models. She called the earlier implementations "one of the simpler examples" of procedural generation present in the game.Artist Temitope Olujobi said that the Blueprints software aided them in development—they are not knowledgeable in computer science—as they were able to create development tools which expedited the process of creating art. Olujobi researched other cozy games, My Time at Portia, Stardew Valley, and namely Alba: A Wildlife Adventure for inspiration on the art of cozy games. They cite Alba as influential on both the level design and the aesthetic, considering that since it takes place on a single world, the environment functions as a "main character". Olujobi used Impressionist art in the vegetation, which they felt was evocative of "feeling", and remarked that "you can almost feel" the environmental colors and the textural aspect. Olujobi said that utilizing the "decadent and indulgent" aspects of Art Nouveau—based on "natural forms" and nature—worked well in achieving intricacy in the environmental design of Wanderstop. Olujobi studied the sights of botanical gardens to inform how the game would look when Alta contemplates things with her tea.
Creative and gameplay design
After his struggle with burnout following the developments of his games The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide, Wreden wanted to create a cozy game, describing a wish to create "something simple and peaceful that could heal me and restore balance to my life", though this did not work for him, proving to still be stressful. Wreden did not find that the ideas of simply completing a list of tasks or just making a "cozy game" were satisfactory; it was only when Karla Zimonja joined development, a year and a half in, that Wreden realized they would make a game about trauma. Zimonja became Wreden's story editor, helping to provide direction to the narrative. Wreden watched two television series during the course of development, Better Call Saul and BoJack Horseman, which influenced his writing because both are "deeply empathetic stories about troubled people in a difficult world just trying to do their best".Wreden and Zimonja would take hours-long walks, figuring out characterization and personal details for Alta; Zimonja felt that Wreden's high personal standards for writing presented a welcome challenge—for example, the pair wrote Boro's dialogue carefully such that his motivational nature did not seem depthless. Zimonja spoke with women practitioners of jiu-jitsu to inform Alta's place as a fighter. Throughout development, Wreden decided slowly that he would integrate his feelings of being burnt out and hopeless into the game's narrative; Alta was originally a silent protagonist, meant to intentionally keep Wreden from writing large amounts of dialogue; before Wreden began having her reflectively voice his own fears and "belief that he could power through anything". Wreden said that he really "fucking hate" guru tropes that see the wise characters chastise the subject character for being "wrong" and "dumb", and self-aggrandize about their wisdom and insight—Wreden was pleased that Boro was written to set an example for Alta to follow by just existing, without being the guru trope he hated. This dynamic was not enough to create the character of Boro, and Wreden had to build "a full person" around that main characteristic, one who would believably hold full conversations without being vague or abstract.
Wreden noted he had underestimated the complexity of a management game when he began the project. With the gameplay, Wreden originally had the tea making machine constitute one orb, but mandated expansion upon the number of orbs since it was the core gameplay element; following testing and feedback from the team, he ended at three—one to heat water, another for mixing ingredients, and a third for pouring the tea. Originally, Wreden wanted to utilise a system of procedural generation that made the game's garden grow alongside, and reflectively of the player, but Ivy Road could not make this work, and they replaced the procedural content with a structured experience.
Wanderstop contains comedic fictional books written by "D.B. Steele". From the inception of the idea to have in-universe literature, Wreden knew the books had to be comedic, feeling that "totally optional and extremely lighthearted" material would contrast with player expectations for fictional books serving an expository purpose. A team meeting left Wreden with the idea to write these books in the style of Tom Clancy, disregarding other styles to focus on the "Dirk Warhard" content. Dirk Warhard was the name chosen for its "cool", and because Wreden shares initials with the name. Wreden felt that the comedy of these books contrasted with the "either dark or achingly sincere" tone of the other writing, a foil he felt necessary for himself and the player experience. A book studying the Dirk Warhard series exists in-game, titled Chasing Bullets: A History and Critical Theory of the Dirk Warhard Novels.