First of all, Caravan SandWitch is a beautiful game.
And it's use of a vehicle as a base for how the metroidvanian aspects function is really interesting and fun. There's not much more satisfying in a game than firing your van-mounted grapple hook at a specialized door then driving away to yank the door off of its hinges.
Using that same grapple hook to attach to designated mounting points on top of buildings to give yourself a zipline shortcut, or using the radar attachment to scan the environment for objectives, it all feels pretty good. It's basic at its heart, but because you're doing it all from a vehicle, which becomes more of the main character than Sausage the red headed protagonist, it does feel rewarding as you unlock the next accessory, the next ability upgrade, knowing that you've seen all of these locked area that are only accessible by using the next piece of your equipment puzzle.
It is in the spaces in between those things where there are cracks. Cracks that by the end of the game have grown and eroded into valleys.
To begin, there is the story. It starts off relatively interesting. After years missing and presumed dead, your sister's ship is now sending a distress signal. You arrive on the planet where you grew up after years away in the big Space City in the stars to find it a ghost of its former self. A giant storm now torments a large section of the planet and this scared away the mega-corp that had built the infastructure that your family once survived by. With the corporation gone, things have dried up, and only a few people you grew up with now remain in the small town that will be the hub of your adventures.
An interesting premise that manages to remain interesting for the first half of the game. What you'll realize is that the story largely disappears for large portions of the experience as you meander around the wastelands exploring ruins and hunting down materials that allwo you to get your next upgrade. There are moments and tidbits, where you can hack terminals to get small 3-5 sentence snipits of the past, but they are few and far between and I could certain see a lot of players missing these opportunities all together. But I can't hold this against Caravan because this is a common issue with metroidvanias, where you spend a lot of time in a sort of narrative stasis as you try to figure out how to unlock the next area of the game, and so on.
Which is to say, I could forgive the way the story sags, if the delivery of the story was strong and the ending brought things home. Unfortunately, the writing is too indulgent and the ending is too rushed.
The story is delivered through character dialog, which comes in the form of text bubbles, either above character's heads or via 'text messages' you receive in your UI. There's nothing wrong with this method, in fact, I think if done well, a concisely written story can really benefit from the limitations that the method imposes. But, if you overwrite your story then suddenly having to "press X for next" to get through loads and loads of dialog turns the player against your story. This is the case in a lot of Caravan. I would start out a conversation intrigued and then by the end of it I had skipped through most of the dialog and probably missed the climax of the conversation by tapping X to move on. There is just too much drivel. The balance is not met, and because of that what good writing there might be is largely lost in the mix of gruel that the game constantly spits at you.
Near the end, when you can really feel the climax coming, the story and gameplay switch from casual and meandering to full throttle, the story then becomes compelling again, but fails to stick its landing. Without spoilers, the story seeks to answer all of the questions posed, and it does so in a way that would have been satisfying except that it happens so quickly that it ends up feeling abrupt. Characters change the perspectives they have had for the entire game in milisecond. They are swayed by single sentences of dialog. Their entire reason for existing within the confines of this narrative, flip-flopped within moments.
At the end of Caravan SandWitch I mostly felt nothing. But there is some charm in the game that with more design time could really be spotlighted and an even better game could have been chiseled out. To me, this is a perfect definition of a 3 out of 5.
If you are looking for a decent exploration game that doesn't ask you to do any combat, with a strong and consistent art direction, at a reasonable price, then I would say certainly give Caravan SandWitch a shot. Otherwise, perhaps looking forward to the studio's next game might be a better option.
