Davey Wreden does not tend to make conventional games. He exploded onto the indie scene in 2013 with The Stanley Parable, a choose-your-own adventure story set in a workplace hall of mirrors. Its follow-up, 2015’s The Beginner’s Guide was a tour through a series of games created by an untraceable hobbyist developer. Both are undeniably trippy, metafictional titles. Now, after a decade of experimentation and subsequent burnout, comes Wanderstop, a game that dials back the impish impulses that defined the earlier works for something more emotionally upfront.
Wanderstop takes place in an almost impossibly quaint forest clearing. A tea shop sits at the center of this small, ostensibly perfect world where guests arrive in search of a soothing brew. Playing as Alta, a professional fighter on a career-decimating losing streak, it’s your job to make tea while tending to her recovery. Alta is handed a basket to collect tea leaves, shears to cut unruly weeds, and a watering can to tend to plants. The game is part cozy farming simulator, part narrative adventure. Crucially, it never smashes through the fourth wall of its fantasy premise like its predecessors.
With Wreden’s track record, there’s a worry that players may find Wanderstop straight-laced in comparison. “I want to be liked. I make things in part because it’s fun to be liked and have people enjoy your work,” Wreden says. “But I didn’t have anything left to say. If I had more genre-bending, mind-blowing games in me, that’s what I would have made. But I went to the well and none of that came back.”
Wreden found inspiration in the sense that, as you get a little older, small things like a cup of coffee or tea “begin to glow with meaning.” He set out to make a game about purely “existing in the moment,” which was partly a reaction to the intense burnout he suffered after the release of his first two games. “I struggle so much with this unrelenting feeling of needing to go forward and make progress,” Wreden says. “What does it look like to just exist in a place? Is that a thing that a person who has historically lived in such an almost vicious way, in constant pursuit of one thing or another, [is] capable of doing?”
Wanderstop confirms Wreden’s trajectory from postmodern trickster to something more sincere. He refers to The Stanley Parable’s heady provocations as an exercise in “attention seeking” — “what if we blew the players socks out of their asshole?,” he deadpans. The minute Wreden got that attention, which arrived in a flood of effusive reviews, fawning interviews, and millions of sales, the “twists and crazy, mind-blowing things” ceased to interest him. He finished The Beginner’s Guide a few years later with a newfound sense of himself. “No longer giving two fucks about getting more attention,” he says.
Around the same time, a friend gave Wreden a copy of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. “I absorbed it into my soul,” he says. “Bechdel tells a story that’s so mundane in subject matter, yet is brimming with violence. You can’t pinpoint that violence on the page anywhere. But you can feel it.”
In The Beginner’s Guide, a similar kind of unwritten violence plays out between the fictional developer “Coda” and Wreden. Wreden, a version of whom narrates the game, is revealed to have an obsession with the anonymous developer. He doctors their games and becomes something of an online stalker. Such is the primary interpretation of The Beginner’s Guide — that “Coda” is a stand-in for Wreden himself, that the two are essentially one and the same — the game functions almost as an act of self-inflicted violence.
Wreden resists Freudian interpretation. The 36-year-old grew up in Sacramento, the easygoing capital of California that’s famous for its uneventfulness. He is the son of two family doctors and enjoyed a “calm, stable, and loving” childhood. Wreden speaks warmly of his parents, who instilled in him the belief that “I can go out in the world and do whatever I want to do.”
Despite a supportive family life, Wreden’s career has been built on making restless video games about deep interior unease. This openness is what sets them apart, says Bennett Foddy, the designer of similarly beloved experimental titles like 2008’s QWOP and 2017’s Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. He describes playing The Beginner’s Guide as being unambiguously in “conversation” with Wreden. The game arrived at a time when indie developers were inclined to “write themselves out of their work,” Foddy says. “I felt in communion with the designer in a way that felt very radical.”
Alongside Wreden, Nina Freeman, maker of 2015’s Cibele, was at the forefront of this wave of newly confessional, autobiographical games, a sub-scene within a broader movement of experimental games. Wreden looks back on the era as an exciting but conflicted time. “It’s a little hard for me because it’s like, ‘Oh, shit, is that the most impactful I’ll ever be?’” With Wanderstop, the goal was to not worry about that kind of genre-shaking impact at all.
Ever since The Stanley Parable, 3D spaces in Wreden games have functioned less like playgrounds than prisons. Stanley, the solitary office worker, runs into obstacles of existential dread, like infinite holes. In The Beginner’s Guide, the player explores abstract interpretations of actual incarceration cells. Through their surreal, dream-logic quality, these worlds evoke the movies of Charlie Kaufman (one of Wreden’s favorite directors). Both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York feature protagonists trapped in highly sophisticated constructs of their own mental making. Only sometimes in Wreden’s games is the player emancipated from their immediate surroundings, like the transcendent moment in The Beginner’s Guide when the player floats above a virtual cosmos.
The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide were developed with Source, the engine used to create the seminal 2004 shooter Half-Life 2. These games all share something in common, says Gareth Damian Martin, creator of the acclaimed Citizen Sleeper series and an essayist on the spaces and architecture of virtual worlds. “So much of Half-Life 2 is about spatializing struggle, like the Citadel, the huge pillar in the distance,” they say. “A big part of games is that spatial poetry, and that’s where I think The Stanley Parable begins.”
“I felt in communion with the designer in a way that felt very radical.”
Wanderstop’s bucolic glade can feel like both a haven and a prison. It is calm and pleasant, yet try as Alta might, she is unable to leave: any escape through the woods simply spits her back out into the clearing.
Early versions were based on Wreden’s idea of existing in the moment through the use of procedural generation, with a garden that would slowly grow and thus become a reflection of players themselves. But making it work “evaded us at every turn.” Eventually, Wreden and the team at Ivy Road — which includes Minecraft composer C418 and Gone Home designer Karla Zimonja — began replacing these modules of procedural material with bespoke content and centered the experience on a specific structure.
This is how Wanderstop functions: story followed by ritual; tumultuous event followed by decompression; turmoil followed by, one hopes, rehabilitation. Some of the early procedural sandbox elements of Wanderstop persist, as you’re able to take photos and decorate the tea shop. The tea-making itself is a small wonder of choreography — the camera sweeping elegantly alongside Alta from the top of the gigantic brewing contraption to the bottom, where the infusion arrives neatly. On a sensory level, Wanderstop is deeply pleasurable, from every perfectly calibrated clink of china to the markedly tactile interactions.
But the game is performing a high-wire act emotionally. There is the disorder and unrest of Alta’s story, the extent to which she must reckon with her own problematic behavior and high-achieving hang-ups. Then there is the calmness of making tea. Wanderstop is neither a celebration nor critique of cozy games. It takes their ability to soothe at face value while reckoning with their limitations (and really that of therapeutic self-care more generally). Wreden first had ideas for the game in 2016, before even cozy game trailblazer Stardew Valley was released. “This game took so fucking long that cozy game is now like a swear word,” he jokes.
Making Wanderstop has been a demanding marathon, made no easier because of its wholesome sensibilities. Ironically, Wreden may be even more burned out now than when he started working on it. His journey is a lot like Alta’s: no amount of soothing rituals is a replacement for dealing with your personal demons.
“I had this belief that if I put enough of myself in my work, then I would feel free of this ugliness inside of me,” Wreden says. “What I found is that the game just ended up being a mirror. It never trapped anything. It just showed me that the ugliness has been there all along.”
Wanderstop launches on March 11th on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.
