Game: Wanderstop
Genre: Adventure, Farming Sim, Life Sim
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Ivy Road | Annapurna Interactive
Controller Support: Yes
Price: US $22.49 | UK £17.54 | EU € 20,69
Release Date: March 11th, 2025
A review code was provided; many thanks to Popagenda PR.
Wanderstop is a 2025 adventure farming sim game developed by Ivy Road and released by Annapurna Interactive.
The Premise of Wanderstop
In Wanderstop, we play Alta, a young woman who has become a professional fighter. After a series of defeats, she is faced with uncertainty. While searching for a famed swordmaster in a magical forest, she happens upon a tea shop and its owner, Boro, and has no choice but to stay for a bit.
Gameplay
The developers of Wanderstop describe the game as a narrative-centric, cozy game about change and tea, and that’s absolutely spot on. As Alta, we manage the tea shop within the magical forest and tend to the customers who pass through. Alta starts as a grumpy young woman, in a hurry to leave and disheartened when she cannot. She can be standoffish, which can be seen easily from our dialogue choices when talking to customers. As time progresses, she starts to let go and let people in, so much so that Alta is quite different at the end of the game.
As a long-time fan of tea in abnormal quantities, I’ll freely admit that I wish-listed the game solely because there was tea to be made (and had). I was not disappointed—all the steps of the tea-making process are observed, from collecting tea leaves from the tea plants around the forest clearing where the shop is to letting the leaves ferment and then using them for tea blends and infusions.
Collect Seeds
We can collect seeds from different plants and then plant and cultivate them to create new species of plants, which bear fruits for infusions. We can also use the seeds for tea in one specific situation – the whole plant, roots, and all. Each plant has its specific color, taste and the feeling it invokes. When a customer arrives, they will tell us vaguely what they want in their tea. It is our job to come up with a combination of ingredients that recreate that wish – it could be something that reminds you of home, a tea that reminds you of the vastness of nature, or even just something sweet and refreshing like a mint tea with ice cream.
Teamaking is a central part of Wanderstop and is done with an enormous machine in the center of the tea shop – we have to keep the temperature at a certain level, put in the infusion ingredients, let it steep, and then pour it into cups. Each pot of tea yields about three cups of tea.
Boro, the shop owner and our heroine Alta, will never refuse tea, but you can also just empty the teapot into the roots of the tree growing around the machine. You can also pour a cup of tea for the puffins wandering about the store. They will change colors and be more affectionate with you.
I rarely like farming games – I find them too repetitive and lose interest quickly. The farming in Wanderstop was just the right amount for my taste. It was quick and simple enough for me- find seeds, plant them, water them, get more seeds or see them, plant them, combine different plants to cultivate another more complex fruit-bearing plant, water them, and bring fruits for infusions. If you have the seeds, you can get new ingredients for your teas in a matter of moments.
I like that the plants sprout immediately after watering without waiting around. The fields where you can plant are in a honeycomb grid, and cultivating is done by planting different combinations of seeds next to each other in a circle formation. There are a few season changes as the story progresses, and each season has its own specific seeds, but the customers who appear in every season need only tea made with the plants available.
At a later stage, Wanderstop also introduces mushrooms, which can be found around the clearing. There are several types of mushrooms, each with its specific properties. They are used the same way we cultivate plants—planting the mushrooms around a plant changes the plant—it can make it smaller and different in color, or the fruits can be changed into trinkets.
Take Care of the Forest
And speaking of trinkets, besides farming, harvesting, and making tea, we also take care of the forest by clearing piles of fallen leaves and pruning dead branches. Each task can earn us trinkets – random objects to put around the tea shop or teacups to use in the tea shop. We can also find lost packages, which we deposit in a post box in front of the shop. Sometimes we get a thank you note; other times, we even get a little present. We also got a camera from Boro, and we could put up the pictures and other mementos in the frames around the shop.
It’s worth checking the post box once in a while because we also have a book subscription. The books we receive are short, and after reading them, we can put them in the library. Some of the characters we meet will also give us books. And there’s, of course, the field guide—a book that we will constantly check—it contains everything we need about how to farm and make tea.
Boro will give us the field guide. He’s also the one to save Alta at the very beginning of the game. He is the tea shop owner – a mysterious but cheery fellow who is always willing to help should you get stuck and always open to trying our tea experiments.
While all the characters are charming and have surprisingly deep emotional stories, despite the short time we spend with them, Boro is by far my favorite. Even though we spend most of our time with him, Boro remains a mystery. He seems open and warm-hearted, but there are hardly any details about him. Because of that, he strongly reminded me of the character Tom Bombandil from Lord of the Rings.
Boro is the one to guide Alta on her journey of change and healing, but it’s more like an initial push, similar to how it is in real life- if you don’t want to heal, you won’t be able to do it, no matter how many people are trying to help you. As Alta interacts with the customers of the tea shop, those interactions help her look back at her life, her experiences, and her emotions, examine them, and grow. Each transformation makes her more willing to open up to people and herself, and that change is reflected back as a season change in the forest. We have green woods, purple-pink landscapes, a greyscale scene and a rainy but green Spring, while Alta realizes that not all changes are bad. Each time Alta drinks tea, she tells us more about her life, expectations, and hopes.
Visually, Wanderstop is gorgeous – the colors are vibrant, and the soundtrack is excellent. The characters and architecture models are somewhat rounded, reminding me heavily of the Torchlight game series. The woods are dark and mysterious, and the customers we meet are from all walks of life and fantasy genres. The game is filled with cozy things – gardening, endless tea making, a monthly book subscription, a library, armchairs in front of fireplaces, taking pictures, and walks in the woods.
Some Other Things
Wanderstop has an extensive options menu—various graphics and video settings, adjusting the speed of the dialogues, remappable controls, basic audio settings, and interface settings, including a dyslexia-friendly font, colorblind support, and enabling motion sickness dots, which are meant to alleviate motion sickness.
The game has Steam achievements, all of which are achievable simply by completing the game. There are no Trading cards yet.
Conclusion
Wanderstop easily became one of my favorite games ever, not only because it combined all of my favorite things but also because of its heart and humor. I completed the game in about 11 hours, and while I was satisfied with its length, I wouldn’t mind meeting the characters again. I will surely miss Boro and Alta.
If you like tea, magical farming, and gorgeous cozy fantasy, you will probably love Wanderstop as much as I did.
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up
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