Tea for One
Wanderstop and the Cozy Game
By Esther Rosenfeld
Cozy games run counter to the stereotypical video game: they are nonviolent, unstressful, and deliberately unchallenging. They allow players to engage at their own pace, and take on tasks that require creativity and diligence more than skill. The term includes simple life simulation games like The Sims, or digital evocations of serenely menial tasks like PowerWashing Simulator.A common motif is farming, which clearly evokes the idea of comfortingly repetitive work. Village life simulator Animal Crossing is a keystone cozy game, as is the farming roleplaying game Stardew Valley. At their best, cozy games provide a comforting placidity, featuring soft pastel worlds full of kindly NPCs where the only tension revolves around the player’s personal desire to maximize the game’s rewards. At their worst, they are more boring than relaxing, with childishly dull and repetitive mechanics (the disappointing Lake comes to mind, as well as the cash-grabbing Infinity Nikki). While works that could be considered cozy date as far back as the late ’90s, with games like Harvest Moon and Boku no Natsuyasumi, the idea of the cozy game as a specific genre emerged in the late 2010s. A 2017 report by game design think tank Project Horseshoe laid out one of the earliest attempts to define coziness as a feature of play. A “cozy game” as originally defined made an individual player feel relaxed and safe. In 2025, it has become more of a marketing term that connotes a formulaic product.
Given the previous work of director Davey Wreden, with its razor-sharp metafictional critiques of game design clichés, it was only natural to assume that his new game Wanderstop, about a former fighter working in a cozy tea shop, would be a kind of takedown of the genre, poking holes in its conventions with a satirical edge. As if anticipating this expectation, Wreden shared a surprisingly sincere video a month before its release. In it, he explained that Wanderstop was his way of processing the burnout he felt after making The Stanley Parable (2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (2015), massive undertakings for a director working with tiny production teams. It was unusual to see Wreden speak so openly. And yet, in the game’s first trailer, protagonist Alta repeatedly insists to herself that tea-making is relaxing and healing, as darkness closes in on her, a seeming indictment of the cozy game as a sedative. Even the game’s name seemed like an ironic way of describing the genre: a place where activity comes to a halt.
It opens with Alta racing through a forest to find one of her idols, a Master Winters, whom she hopes can train her back into fighting shape after the ignominious end of a years-long undefeated streak. But Alta grows exhausted, eventually incapable of even lifting her sword. She passes out and awakens in a colorful clearing in the company of a large, genial man named Boro, the proprietor of Wanderstop, a tea shop catering to the quirky characters traveling through the forest. Alta takes up Boro’s insistently gentle offer to work with him while she deals with her exhaustion. In opposition to her gritty past as a fighter, the environment here is almost oppressively whimsical. The colors of the plants and trees and grasses are numerous but never too bright, all soft pastels that are easy on the eyes. Wanderstop itself is a fantastically mismatched construction that seems taken right out of Howl’s Moving Castle. The cartoonish aesthetic clashes with Alta’s gruff demeanor and personal problems. At times, it almost feels like the game’s visual unseriousness is mocking her.
At Wanderstop, there are no immediate objectives or goals, no quests, only suggestions from Boro on activities you might try. The entire experience is smooth and seamless. Boro gives Alta an instruction manual on growing plants for tea brewing, but the book stops partway through and suggests taking a break. Boro himself is infuriatingly unflappable. Despite your best efforts, you simply can’t say anything that would upset him. Boro explains to Alta that Wanderstop isn’t a business, but something he does for people simply because he enjoys it. The player can’t really do many things at Wanderstop. You can make different combinations of seeds to grow fruits with various properties. You can trim weeds and put pictures on the walls. You can pet the pluffins, penguin-like creatures that wander the clearing. Alta protests, “None of those sound like measurable objectives.” But what Boro tenderly tries to impart to Alta (as does Wanderstop to the player) is that the dopamine rush of completing prescribed missions, of checking items off a list, is no more valuable than the experience of taking things at one’s own pace and performing actions simply out of a desire to do so.
When the first forest wanderers appear, Boro encourages Alta to chat with them, learn about their personalities, and collect their requests for specific flavors of tea. The only real challenge in the game is figuring out which ingredients to use, and correctly operating the Seussian tea-making machine at the center of the shop. But there’s no punishment for getting a request wrong; you’ll have unlimited opportunities to try again, and you can always consult the “Book of Answers” in the shop’s library for explicit directions. Most other cozy games feature an action-reward structure. Animal Crossing, somewhat infamously, has an economy with mortgages and a stock market. Alta can make tea for herself, and each flavor sparks a different inner monologue about her backstory, suggesting something like a conventional reward dynamic. Yet these anecdotes, related in voiceover, don’t offer much insight. Alta looks back on these memories with frustration, having apparently learned nothing from them.
Understanding Wanderstop, and cozy games in general, necessitates understanding the concept of extrinsically motivated and intrinsically motivated players. An extrinsically motivated player will do things in a game because of the promise of a reward, while an intrinsically motivated player will do things because they offer a different kind of satisfaction. It’s the difference between a player who will rush through quests in a Spider-Man game in order to acquire upgrade materials and unlock more gadgets and skills, and one who will spend their time swinging around the city simply because it feels good. Alta is a stubbornly extrinsically motivated character, and Wanderstop is designed to challenge her.
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Davey Wreden, Wanderstop’s director, has only made a few full games (not counting some smaller collaborative projects), but they feature a distinct creative voice in a medium frequently lacking obvious authorship. (People think of the latest Assassin’s Creed entry as a “Ubisoft game” before crediting its director.) But Wreden’s The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide are the kinds of artistically distinct works that invite auteur status.
The Stanley Parable puts you in control of an office drone who notices one day that all of his coworkers have mysteriously vanished. Stanley sets out to investigate and his actions and exploits are all described by the voice of a narrator. Early on, the narrator matter-of-factly states that “when Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left.” But the player can also choose to go through the door on the right. Whichever direction they go, they will soon be faced with numerous other pivot points at which they can obey the narrator’s guidance or take alternative paths. This is the parable referred to in the title, a satirical metaphor for the designer/player relationship, and the contradictions inherent in an art form that allows those experiencing it to ignore the artist’s intentions.
Wreden’s follow-up was even knottier. The Beginner’s Guide casts Wreden himself in the role of narrator. He explains that the game you are about to experience is a collection of other games by a designer named Coda, with whom Wreden was once close but lost touch. Wreden hopes that by showcasing his work, Coda will emerge from obscurity and return to creative pursuits. As the game progresses, though, Wreden’s relationship to both Coda and his creations takes on deeper, more fraught implications. One early Coda game has the player ascending a “stairway to heaven,” which suddenly slows the player’s movement to a tedious crawl. That Coda may be illustrating a theme here eludes Wreden, who explains in voice-over that he has changed the game’s code to allow the player to ascend at normal speed, so they can see what’s at the top of the staircase. Wreden continues changing Coda’s games in ways that destroy their thematic aims so that he can further a critical interpretation that seems more like his projection than Coda’s intention.
Coda isn’t a real person, of course; the game is a fiction designed to make a point about authorship and interpretation. It’s a testament to the power of Wreden’s imagination (as well as his vocal performance) that some players, myself included, watched the credits of The Beginner’s Guide roll with pits in their stomachs, believing to the end that it was all real and that we had just purchased and played through a collection of stolen and bastardized work. Here Wreden cemented his reputation as a creator of probing, metafictional work that asked serious questions about game design trends, an artist-critic with no contemporaries in the game space.
Wreden’s previous works are preoccupied with the idea that a game can be played “wrong,” that the player doesn’t have to direct Stanley through the door they’re told to enter. Wanderstop deliberately disallows this kind of player expression. No matter how much Alta devotes herself to the repetitive work of tea making, her ultimate goal is still totally out of reach. Even when she relaxes “wrong,” the consequence is the same as if she had done it “right.” The only real counter-mechanical choice you can make is to not do anything, and Boro reminds you and Alta that that’s okay too. With Wanderstop, Wreden forces the player to really think about why they’re playing a game like this. Do you really want to be relaxed? Well, here’s all the relaxation you could possibly handle.
In its subtle critique of the cozy game subgenre, Wanderstop manages to be remarkably provocative. It’s a game about the healing power of rest which depicts rest as potentially unhealing. “Even relaxing feels like a job,” Alta grouses. And it does, if you’re extrinsically motivated and desperate for a sign that what you’re doing in Wanderstop is having a measurable effect. Wanderstop destroys the barrier between audience and character by erasing as much friction as possible for Alta. It ends by espousing the virtues of boredom, the value in doing nothing. You’ll reach the credits having earned no special rewards, completed no checklists, found no hidden objects. In this way, Wanderstop may be the first true cozy game, a game profoundly resistant to letting the player accomplish anything.
The game ends on a cryptic note; whether Alta got what she wanted is something you’ll have to decide for yourself. Some players may find the game as punishingly tedious as she seems to, and that frustration may be compounded by the withholding of closure and catharsis. When the credits roll, you will have been invited to think about how you spend your time, and what you really get out of it. Both the player and Alta may ultimately feel as though their time was wasted, but Wanderstop may leave you both convinced of the value of wasted time.