Hello, dear reader! Today is gonna be partly the usual flair of me ranting obsessively about a game that I like, but ALSO a bit more of a personal post. So, here’s a trigger warning for deep mental health talk if you think that might be too much for you. Okay, here goes!
Burnout is a very difficult feeling to deal with, especially when you’re on the autism spectrum. For me at least as an autistic adult, it always feels like my brain is moving a million times faster than my own body. There are so many things I want to do with my life, so many things I want to achieve and earn and yet my body has such a small limit. And that can be SO frustrating. Add that over-achieving nature on top of all the regular difficulties that being a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world brings; the sensory issues, communication differences, the lack of accomodations, underemployment and other potential conditions such as ADHD, Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Anxiety and Depression, it’s no wonder that our bodies at a certain point just refuse to function. We NEED that time to rest. And admittedly, I’ve never been very good at that.
This is probably why the “Cosy Game” or “Farm/Life Sim” genre (I.e The Sims, Stardew Valley etc.) has never really appealed to me. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Animal Crossing (especially you Sprinkle <3) and can absolutely see the appeal of relaxing and doing small tasks that don’t require as much generic game-ular skill as other games, but if a game doesn’t have a proper end-goal or big tasks to work towards, I’m a bit apprehensive towards giving it a shot. Wanderstop, on the other hand, is a cosy game that takes that anxiety about there not being an end goal and smashes you over the head with it like a warm and vivid wine bottle. I’ve been deeply affected by this game, and it’s given me the opportunity to think about so many aspects of my own life, my mentality when it comes to achieving things, as well as coming to terms with my autism.
Wanderstop is a game about Alta. She’s an arena fighter, who’s trained herself to the point she’s one of the most well known and renowned fighters in the world, undefeated for three and a half years. Everything’s going great for her… and then she loses a match. And then she loses another one. And another. And another. Frustrated and confused by this, Alta runs into the woods in search of an ancient master that could help train her and fix whatever’s happening. But as she runs she finds her sword is too heavy and she passes out. She wakes up outside the Wanderstop Tea Shop run by Boro, a kind, simple and stout bald man that carried her there. Boro sees that something is deeply troubling Alta and offers her to stay and run the tea shop with him, planting seeds, gathering tea leaves, brewing cups and giving them to customers. A nice, simple break. Alta is appalled by this. How can she just STAY here? She’s supposed to be fighting in the arena, not milling about at some tea shop! She has to find the person that can help her! She has to leave! She has to… and yet everytime she tries to run out of the forest, everytime… she always passes out and ends up right back where she started. Reluctantly, Alta agrees to run the shop until whatever is happening to her goes away, with her sword leaning defeatedly on an outside rock. She will get better. She will. She has to.
As you can probably already tell, Wanderstop deals with a lot more heavy topics than your average cosy game, but just because the game deals with these kinds of subject matters, doesn’t mean that the game is overly edgy or dark for the sake of it. This game’s vibes are still off the charts! The environments and colours are mcfriggin’ jaw droppingly gorgeous, the physics and sound design of the tea is so asmr-core that it’ll make you constantly need a wee, and the soundtrack by famous Minecraft composer C418 gives the game a melancholic atmosphere that’s like nothing else! Even the title screen theme gets you in the mood to self-reflect and relax with a cup of tea!
On top of all this sweetness, as you would expect from the creator of The Stanley Parable, this game is absolutely hilarious. Every customer that visits the shop has some sort of funny or unique quirk that makes them super entertaining to interact with, including the bumbling knight Gerald who wants to prove he’s the best dad ever (by taking photos of his son while he sleeps), an army of tired generic business-men who all have absurd and abstruse presentations to give and an irish magical girl obsessed with having “Aoen Brew”. This isn’t even counting the lost packages you can find and send back to their owners in the post, who’ll then send you silly and heartfelt thank-you letters, as well as the humorous books you can read, my personal favourites being the Adventures of Dirk Warhard, a stupidly funny parody of Tom Clancy novels that left me giggling like an idiot every time I finished reading one.
In terms of gameplay, the game has a pretty simple formula! Plant seeds in specific patterns to grow fruit, harvest tea leaves from bushes, boil water in the gigantic wonka-like tea contraption, put the tea-ball and required fruit into the water, and pour a cup! While this process can oftentimes become very tedious, especially if you accidentally run out of a specific seed or if you have to wait for the leaves to sit, the tediousness seems part of the point. Not every part of every video game or life in general is going to be an ultra exciting or thrilling experience, sometimes they’ll just… be. Adding to this, while the recipes you’re given by customers start out simple, they eventually get more and more complicated, making you properly think about what kind of tea this customer needs and how in the world to even make it, like tea that tastes like cereal for instance. The increasing obtuseness of these requests seems to be sending the player the message that it’s okay to not have a simple true answer or solution to every problem, you just have to give the solution you think is the best. You’re not even pressured to fulfill the requests if you don’t want to! There’s no ranking system in Wanderstop, no true ending, no true check marks of progression other than your customer’s requests. The game at every turn refuses to give the player any kind of productivity satisfaction, a hilarious example being the game’s trophies. Wanderstop’s trophies pop up randomly throughout the game, never giving you a reason for why you unlocked them. They just happen. You get the platinum trophy before you even finish the game. This comes off as frustrating at first, you wonder what it is you even did that deserves a trophy and how you could replicate it in the future… and that’s when you realise what the point of the game is. Just existing deserves a trophy all on its own.
As a late diagnosed autistic person, I’ve always felt like I’ve had a particularly unhealthy relationship with productivity. Even during moments in my life where I’ve had a lot to focus on, it was never enough for me. There had to be something else I could do, anything! Anything to make me feel like I wasn’t useless and lazy. And this resulted in burnout after burnout after burnout. And after my diagnosis, while I was happy to finally understand why I found certain things harder than others, it also terrified me for a reason I didn’t understand at the time. I think now I know why. Because of my ASD, there will always be things in life that I find more difficult than neurotypical people. I will never be able to fit myself into the productivity mold of a neurotypical person, and certain neurotypical-focused workplaces and environments, while accomodations can be made, will never feel fully comfortable for me. The harsh truth is that most of society just isn’t made with people like me in mind. But I worked so hard all this time! I worked so hard to fit myself into an acceptable mold, to be palatable to society! To not be weird, to be normal! But realising that there was never a problem to fix in the first place can be just as hard as realising there is a problem, if you needed any more paradoxical ourouborus like thinking patterns for today. But ultimately, I think the only way to move past these emotions is to do one of the hardest things you can do, and that’s to embrace change.
Change is another big theme of Wanderstop, particularly the fear of changing; How the environment changes, how YOU change, even when you know these changes are for the better. When you’ve spent so long working yourself to the bone based on a subjective as shite concept like “productivity” it can be so, SO hard to get your brain out of that mindset. And part of you, possibly all of you, won’t want that mindset to change. I know I sometimes fall back into the deadly trap of idolising the past, my pre-diagnosis life, when I USED to be productive and could push through whatever came my way, failing to realise that what I was doing was slowly killing me and misremembering just how miserable I felt at the time. The game emphasises this theme through a number of elements, one big one being that at the start of every chapter, the entire forest resets itself. All the items you collected, flowers you’ve planted and customer’s you’ve interacted with are all gone and replaced with new ones. This is anti-thetical to a lot of other cosy games that emphasise collecting and hoarding as many items as possible, Animal Crossing being a HUGE example, but this is another example of Wanderstop taking a typical life sim trope and flipping it completely on its head, like a tortoise stuck on its back having an existential crisis. Through this subversion, the game is essentially conditioning players into being okay with change, to be okay with letting go of the past and accepting that you can’t cling to it forever.
One other big element that showcases this theme, as well as my personal favourite part of the whole game, are the arcs of certain customers you meet, and to explain why I’ll have to discuss spoilers so SPOILER WARNING FOR THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS.
The first of these customers is Ren, who is a fellow fighter alongside Alta. At first, he’s delighted to meet her as he’s a lifelong fanboy of her fighting escapades, and desperately wants to help her get back into fighting, which is something Alta is all for! But once Ren starts explaining his self-improvement plan to Alta, how rigorous the training will be, where in the forest they’ll need to go, how convoluted the steps will be… Alta’s head starts physically hurting and she realises that she can’t. But Ren doesn’t understand this. Alta was just fine before, she was amazing! How is this any more difficult than what she was doing previously? Would she really rather just stay here in this shop, stagnating and doing nothing when she could be doing so much more? Ren bluntly gives these thoughts to Alta, as well as his immense disappointment that she did not possess the unwavering conviction he thought she had. And if you’re a neurodivergent person who’s ever had to justify not engaging with a neurotypical activity to a neurotypical, this sequence hits HARD. Alta isn’t a lazy person like Ren thinks, the fact that Alta even became a world renowned fighter is proof of this, but because Alta can’t handle certain things that Ren can at this point in her life, he still views her this way. Ren is being incredibly insensitive here, something that ends up coming around to him when he comes back from outside the forest… missing an arm and not saying a word. Now that he himself has a disability, it’s certain that he’s thinking either one of two things. Either he’s regretting his mentality towards Alta or, and unfortunately the more likely option, he’s hating himself for not being able to work to his old standards of productivity. Ren’s storyline really friggin’ impacted me, not just because of how thoroughly and brutally it showed the reality of neurotypicals not accepting accommodations for the neurodivergent brain because they can’t “see” any problem, but also how that behaviour and refusing to accept that it needs to change in turn leads to internalised ableism.
The second customer is Zenith. Zenith is an all knowing, omnipotent and extremely fashionable being that Alta believes holds all the answers for what’s happening to her and how to fix it. They state that Alta’s “change structure” is broken, but they don’t elaborate on what this means. Alta and Zenith try multiple times to exit the forest and discover more about Alta’s condition, but again it always ends with Alta passing out and waking up right where she started. They try this over and over with no results. And eventually, Zenith starts to change. They become fascinated with the silly army of business-men customers, and slowly they start morphing into one. They start wearing a suit, a tie, asking for coffee, until eventually they fully become just another business man called Garry, with no memory of their time with Alta. Alta is beyond distraught with this and doesn’t understand why Zenith changed or why that change was so important to them. The emotions of this arc clearly come from a lot of real life experiences one can have during autistic burnout; the feeling of being behind in life as you see someone who you were close to change, become successful and therefore unrecognisable to you, the feeling of losing someone important to you who you thought would “fix” you like a therapist or a teacher, the sadness of seeing friends who have the potential of the universe resigned to what you see as a limited job role, not understanding their urge to conform. Wanderstop is ultimately a game you can make multiple interpretations for, but Zenith’s character arc, at least to me, showcases how alien and frustrating change can feel, but at the same time how not embracing it can lead to a feeling of emptiness. Something I am very much not a stranger to, if the rest of this post has been any indication.
I’ve been grappling a lot with my purpose and where my life is going recently and in that way, I feel like I am a lot like Alta, despite not really wanting to be. The same existentially terrifying life questions she has always seem to poke through the floppy membranes of my own head like a brain-ular whack-a-mole. When does the burnout end? Do you choose when it ends or will it just come naturally? Do you need to instigate the change or will the change eventually find you? And if it’s the latter, will you be okay just… waiting? With no guarantee that it’ll ever end? If you try to change out of that, will you just end up hurting yourself even more? Wanderstop doesn’t give the player the satisfaction of finding the answer to these questions, as they don’t really have simple solutions. The best thing you can do is to just give yourself time to process them.
If there’s any message to take from this game, and indeed this post, it’s that there is nothing wrong with doing nothing. In our modern internet-run capitalist hellscape of a society, it feels like there’s always this pressure to DO something. To make something of ourselves. To get the most likes. To be famous. To go viral. To be important. To be useful. To not be lazy.
But you don’t have to listen to it. Being happy isn’t something you have to earn.
So if you’re struggling with any of these feelings both me and Alta have faced, don’t worry! You CAN take a break! Drink some tea! Stroke your cat! Read a book! Go on a walk in your local nature reserve and accidentally step in doggy doo! Go to the cinemas! Watch that TV show your friend won’t stop recommending! Finally go on holiday to that place you’ve always wanted to go! Or if you have the autie bortie like me, spend the whole day in the dark playing your favourite video game! It may not fix any of those feelings, but it might help just a little bit. Remember, your life isn’t measured by your productivity, your job title, by accolades, trophies, degrees, promotions, likes, or anything like that.
Your life has inherent value, no matter what you achieve.
Your life is measured by you. And you are ALLOWED to love yourself.
You are.
Trust me.
Please.
Thanks for reading. 💙
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