Sometimes the only thing you need is a hot cup of tea. Any tea. Something sincere and, at that moment, necessary, especially when doubt creeps in, when you even begin to doubt yourself.

For me (middle-aged, living with chronic depression, and often struggling to engage with even the most appealing games) Wanderstop feels like a song for things I have never quite managed to say out loud. It expresses them in the gentlest possible language: comfort, routine, and care. For that alone, the game feels perfect as it is.

So what do you actually do? Tea?

The mechanics are simple in the best way: not simplistic, but intentionally unburdensome (does this word exist?). There is not a million chores competing for your attention, although yes, you do have a brush and some scissors to so dome chores. Finding tea leaves is as easy as taking a stroll. Growing plants and flowers, combining seeds, producing fruit: it is all approachable, almost semi-automatic, the kind of light engagement that gives your mind something to do while the story unfolds around you.

You wait for customers (usually two or three at a time), you brew the tea they ask for, and you serve it. That is the loop. And if you want, you can drink the tea yourself,sometimes to trigger a moment of insight that feels uncomfortably close to your own problems. You can play for five minutes, half an hour, or lose a whole evening to it. The tempo is yours. Patience is the key. Tranquility is the key. Rest, the deliberate kind, the kind you choose, is the key.

Just tea, then.

Yes. But also no. Tea is only the means. The end is meeting people where they are: learning what your customers need, and (quietly) what you need too. This is a game about “enforced gentleness”.

It begins with a simple act, or rather the absence of one. You carry a sword, but you cannot lift it anymore. Not today. Not now. Not for reasons you can easily explain. You just… can’t. So you make tea instead.

Alta, the protagonist, moves and stays still in the same breath, trying to work out what is wrong with her, the way we all do when our body refuses the life we thought we were supposed to live. In the meantime, customers arrive and depart, each one a different facet of being alive. You help them with tea, and in return they help you rest, because the task is so small, so bounded, that it becomes a kind of permission. Sometimes the answer they give is profound, and sometimes it is simply kind. Both matter.

And it is funny. Not “quirky” funny, actually funny. Terry Pratchett funny. It is not always loud about it, it often sits just under the surface, waiting for you to notice. Depression even becomes something you can laugh at, briefly, when you are asked to carry the problems of others instead of your own. But your sadness is still there in the background: the sense of inferiority, the stuckness, the paradoxical loop where all you want is to move forward, to run, to progress, and you cannot. That is the point. The cast feels like it walked out of a fantasy novel that Pratchett might have written, and you rarely tire of them because their small remarks land with surprising accuracy.

Boro, your anfitrión, your host (and friend), is considerate, compassionate, and so genuinely huggable you almost want to squeeze him into orbit. He reads like a Tom Bombadil figure: not merely calm, but calmly other, as if tranquility is not a mood for him but a natural law. In a game about learning to stop, he is the embodiment of stopping without apology.

To its credit, the game does not abandon its central loop, but it does keep it from going stale. It integrates new mechanics gradually, without ever turning the experience into a checklist. You work with a small set of seeds (only four at max), mushrooms, and configurations that produce the plants you need. Then you gather fruit, feed everything into the magical tea machine (just a giant boiler), serve the cup, and wait for the customer’s response. Sometimes it is ordinary tea. Sometimes it tastes like ice cream and pulls you back toward childhood. Who knows?

Well… the guides know. You have two at your disposal: one that explains the core mechanics, and another that can outright walk you step-by-step to the exact tea a customer wants. There is essentially no difficulty curve here, and that is deliberate. More often than you might expect, the “correct” answer is simply: do whatever. Not because it does not matter, but because multiple choices are valid, each one producing a different emotional note, a different conversation, a different kind of closure.

This is, definitely, not a game to stress over. Even players chasing the platinum (me included) will realize the path forward is simply to play. Just tea, please.

It is a game of simple repetition, like a zen garden, like a small meditation, built around a manageable load of chores that keeps your mind gently occupied while your emotions catch up. If there is a flaw, for me, it is almost comically small: there is a limit to how much fruit you can carry. It is rarely a real problem because you never need much, but it also feels thematically appropriate, as if the game is reminding you to do what is necessary and nothing more.