Review InnuendoStudios 5/5 · May 9, 2026
my first job was a video store that was also a liquor store. (in my home town, nothing could stay in business unless it was at least two businesses. that saying, "stop going to the hardware store for milk"? the hardware store around the corner from my job was also a deli, I'm pretty sure you could buy milk there.) …
my first job was a video store that was also a liquor store. (in my home town, nothing could stay in business unless it was at least two businesses. that saying, "stop going to the hardware store for milk"? the hardware store around the corner from my job was also a deli, I'm pretty sure you could buy milk there.) I was 18. I worked 12-hour shifts, saturday and sunday, alone, for $8/hr under the table, no breaks, no air conditioning.
my first day on the job after training, I went into a manic state. it wasn't the busiest day I ever worked, but there were busy stretches. with only one employee, not a lot of floorspace, and nowhere else but the gas station to get booze or arizona iced tea, there were several stretches with lines out the door. we had no computer system, so every rental slip had to be written on paper, every return filed and shelved by hand, change counted out manually and there was always change because we only took cash. I had to learn my coworkers' handwriting if I wanted to fill out the log. in every lull, there was always something I could be doing, and, by mid-afternoon, running on adrenaline instead of blood sugar, I felt, if I sat for a moment, I would never stand again. so I kept busy. every tape got alphabetized, every slip put in the correct spot of the card catalogue, the ledger got updated and the till counted and the bills faced. I was everything my boss (a future tea partier) could want in a teenage employee working illegally with no benefits.
it was clear that being a model employee will kill you. I learned, very quickly, to slack off as an act of self-preservation. it was the same $8 either way. and, yeah, I'm weak: there are day laborers working without papers at the border, or in foxconn sweatshops, who maintain at that level for years, 80-hour weeks, for a fraction of what I was making. I was a middle-class white kid burnt out after my first day. but, you know? those laborers, they die young. and they shouldn't have to work that hard. and learning that my miserable first day was the norm for hundreds of thousands of people was a radicalizing event.
wanderstop is ostensibly a cozy game about learning to slow the fuck down, about working in a tea shop with no deadlines and no consequences, but that's not how I played it. I played it like that first day in the video store: every minute I was keeping busy. while the tea leaves were drying, I was gardening. when there were no customers, I was sweeping. I brought pruning shears with me while foraging for mushrooms so I could trim weeds. packages to mail, decorations to place, birds to feed. there was, a good 90% of the time, something I could be doing. that busy-ness was an old-but-familiar mania, an echo from more than half a life ago.
it hit different. because nothing here mattered. the genius of wanderstop is that all this stuff is, explicitly, optional. not just optional: extrinsically meaningless. having to wait a few real-time minutes for tea leaves to dry superficially resembles farmville, as does the regularly respawning weeds and dust-piles that can be cut back and swept up, but there's no pay-mechanic to speed the tea up, and no penalty for letting the weeds run wild, letting the dust pile up. and there will always be fresh weeds, fresh dirt. clean it, or don't. get a customer's drink order wrong, and you can retry as many times as you want, or you can say "my bad" and forget about it. it doesn't matter. none of it matters. except, it does, but not mechanically. keeping busy with no finish line, no future moment where the boss is gonna walk in and see the un-updated ledger and the stack of returns sitting on the counter instead of on the shelves.
there is no penalty for weeds growing all over your forest. or, I dunno, maybe there is? you have to plant seeds in order to grow the fruits that will become ingredients in specialty teas, and, now that I think about it, I assume you can't plant a seed in a spot already full of weeds, so, presumably, if weeds overgrow your garden you will have to prune them. except you don't have to grow in the garden, you can grow anywhere there's room, and I don't think the game's days are long enough that weeds could conceivably cover everything to the point you'd have to pull them to continue. and this is all presumption because I never left a weed untrimmed once I'd seen it. I did it because I prefer the clearing to be weedless, and to pass the time.
that is the vibe for everything. there was no reason to make sure I tried every fruit-and-tea combination before closing out the game's final day, I just did it to do it. my last day in the video store, I watched return of the king in the back room, thankful the day was slow enough that I could get through the whole thing. my last day in wanderstop, I invented tasks to perform.
it is odd to play a game - a, generally, recreative act - about the intrinsic value of labor. my first office job was temping for a tuition-management company. I did data entry, copying text from handwritten forms into databases, for $12/hr, no benefits, during the great recession. they'd hired me on during a crunch, so I was typically working 50-hour weeks, and had no car so there was 60-90 minutes of public transit on either end of my shift. I remember clearly the day I sat in my cubicle, bored in that fidgety way only a pre-diagnosis adhder can be, wanting to chew my fingers off so I couldn't type anymore, and thinking, over and over again, "I don't get paid enough for this." the gods of capitalism must've heard me, because I received an email that same day, informing me I was receiving a raise to $13.50/hr, and to please not tell the other temps about it. the boost this gave my ego sustained me for one entire afternoon before I discovered: an hour of data-entry is exactly as monotonous at $13.50 as it is at $12.
again, wah wah, middle-class-raised white boy doesn't like work. and, believe me, after spending the next decade of my life below the poverty line, collections agents telling me to sell plasma so I could make a payment, spending hours on the phone with the food stamp office trying to correct the error that kept my card from working, I missed the security of steady hours in an air-conditioned office. but, even at my lowest, I can't say I missed the work. I missed the extrinsics. no one is nostalgic for data entry.
wanderstop serves as a very gentle refutation to the economist's idea that no one labors without financial incentive, because most economists can't understand incentives that don't show on spreadsheets. you make tea in wanderstop because people want tea, and making tea is something to do. every day we do things just to do them. we make the bed and noodle on instruments and sketch in the margins of our dayplanners, we meet with friends and teach ourselves to crimp pierogi, and no one pays us for it. and, if we start making beds as housekeepers, drawing as illustrators, crimping as chefs, it changes the work. it hits different. it enters whatever the opposite of the magic circle is, gives it an objective, an extrinsic goal. something economists can understand, sure, but something distinct from how we did it before. we start playing video games about jobs just to experience labor that doesn't actually matter.
we review video games for free on websites instead of releasing our reviews on youtube for money because we miss the feeling of writing about games for the sake of writing about games.
a takeaway from ellen meiksins wood's the origin of capitalism is that, in pre-capitalist europe, the blacksmith put shoes on the farmer's oxen because, if the farmer's oxen couldn't plow the fields, the farmer couldn't grow food. and the farmer fed the blacksmith because, if the blacksmith didn't eat, they couldn't shoe the oxen. nobody got paid; money was for the market, a physical location where merchants sold wares from other towns. money was a convenience for working with people outside the community. locally? work was done because it needed doing, for direct and visible benefits, and, if it felt like one party was giving more than they were getting in return, it had to be resolved by hashing it out as humans.
when I say things like "labor does not need to be extrinsically incentivized," people respond with "who's gonna clean the sewers without capitalism?" to which I can only answer, "people who don't want to live in their own shit." given a choice between "clean a sewer" and "die of cholera," most people will choose the former once "economically coerce someone else to do it" is off the table.
wanderstop is the story of someone whose entire life has been working towards a goal - whose passion for fighting became inextricable from a separate-but-related need to be the best at something, to be impervious, to control her fate - having to relearn the value of work for the sake of work.
it didn't get me to "slow down," except in the moments when it pointedly gave me absolutely nothing to do and I had to just sit with a cup of tea for a while. (I often took these moments to brew myself a cup of actual tea with the game still running, an exquisite case of both getting and missing the point.) mostly, the game got me to busy myself with tasks that did not stress me out. to remember the feeling of being active and knowing it is 100% my choice to be active, that trying every tea combination, washing and putting away every dish, will accomplish nothing, will lead to zero reward. (smartly, even the achievements are unlocked solely by plot progression; reading every book or growing every plant will grant you nothing but satisfaction.)
I spent two days doing almost nothing but playing wanderstop. I recommend you do the same.
