Wanderstop

Wanderstop
Official logo
Developer(s)	Ivy Road
Publisher(s)	Annapurna Interactive
Director(s)	Davey Wreden
Producer(s)	Patrick McDermott
Designer(s)	Steven Margolin
Programmer(s)	Andrew Nguyen
Artist(s)	Nat F Temitope Olujobi
Writer(s)	Davey Wreden
Composer(s)	C418
Platform(s)	PlayStation 5 Microsoft Windows
Release	2024
Genre(s)	Simulation[1]

Wanderstop is an upcoming simulation game developed by Ivy Road and published by Annapurna Interactive. It is written and directed by Davey Wreden, composed by C418, and created with Karla Zimonja.

Development on the game began in 2017 after C418 previously desired to develop one. Wreden and Zimonja co-founded the studio Ivy Road with the musician and formed a partnership with the publisher Annapurna. They officially announced the studio in July 2021 and their debut game as Wanderstop in June 2024.

The game is scheduled to release in 2024 for PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Windows on Steam.

In the game, Alta, a girl who wants to return to fighting in an arena, has to tend to a tea shop in the meantime. She adjusts to her life in a magical forest, performing tasks to maintain the tea shop, such as growing and harvesting ingredients and mixing them together in a large flask machine, cleaning and decorating the shop, chatting with customers, or just sitting on a bench.^[1][2]

The game's protagonist Alta is a former warrior who now must tend to a tea shop. The shop demands patience and rejects those who have come only in the "pursuit of growth unchecked". Alta finds trouble convincing herself that this low-stress life is working for her. She cannot keep her time as a warrior from haunting her, and she battles with her unresolved trauma throughout. Being left alone with any spare time is "torture" to her, yet she still fights to enjoy her quiet life.^[1][2]

Writer and director Davey Wreden

Composer Daniel "C418" Rosenfeld

As early as 2015, composer and sound engineer Daniel Rosenfeld, known by his pseudonym C418, had considered creating a video game. In an interview that year, he described a desire to create something that was "not really a game, but an experience based on it". He mused that "you’d buy it on Steam and you’d get the album and you’d also get the game frame", but admitted he was only experimenting with the idea, and that the game would take a while.^[3]

In a 2018 interview with Bandcamp, he disclosed that he was working on a game with friend and game developer Davey Wreden. He called it a "crazy experiment on making a game where you don't 'earn' anything and there's no numbers that go up, but it's something you can maybe still obsess over if you want to." 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.^[4] In 2020, Rosenfeld said that he would serve as the "lead audio person" for a video game development studio based in Austin, Texas helmed by Wreden. Rosenfeld said of the studio's game, "I can tell you that there’s going to be a lot of me."^[5]

Development, which started around 2017,^[7] was led by a small team.^[8] 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.^[9] Aura Triolo, who served as Animation Lead 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 early development on Wanderstop setting up animation technology to automatically handle many different situations, including 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 of the implementations "one of the simpler examples" of procedural generation present in the game.^[8] Rosenfeld said that the "talking" from the game's "Pluffins" caused trouble for the sound engine.^[10]

The game's original soundtrack was composed by Ivy Road studio co-founder C418.^[11][2]

On July 29, 2021, Rosenfeld, Wreden, and Gone Home artist Karla Zimonja revealed their game development studio Ivy Road, and announced a partnership with Annapurna Interactive. There, the company stated their intent to create a new video game with the company.^[12] Their publishing agreement was one of four announced at Annapurna's showcase that day; the others were with Outer Loop, No Code, and Canadian developer Jessica Mak.^[13] Studio co-founders Wreden, Zimonja, and Rosenfeld would release an official announcement video with Annapurna Interactive in which the earlier two co-founders were drinking tea and "joking around" about video games whilst Rosenfeld played an original piano piece in the background.^[11]

During the Summer Game Fest 2024 showcase in June, the game was officially announced as Wanderstop, to be released that year on PlayStation 5 and Steam. A trailer was revealed at the event, and the game was announced to release later that year.^[2] In response to the trailer, PC Gamer's Lauren Morton remarked that the game "[has] exactly the kind of commentary we'd expect from Wreden as Wanderstop's director and writer",^[1] and GamesRadar+'s Hirun Cryer opined that Wanderstop "is The Stanley Parable creator's take on Stardew Valley".^[14] Inverse's Robin Bea felt that the game had the potential to explore the "real-world stresses that players are seeking to escape by playing them", and mused that the game could be seen as "a parody of cozy games themselves".^[15] Game Informer's Kyle Hilliard anticipated a deeper meaning to the game given Wreden and Zimonja's previous work.^[16]

• Official website