Wanderlust: Travel Stories

This is a collection of interactive travel stories. As such, you mostly read and click to progress, often picking from 2-3 narrative choices. On boat/train/etc rides, things may be partly time-driven, as lines appear at an unhurried pace and a few optional choices (e.g. to sleep or make small talk) come and go. Throughout, choices affect the protagonist's stress and fatigue, which can also influence the story (e.g. the character may be calm enough to be patient with a setback, so stressed that they snap at someone, or so tired they don't want to stay out at night). A couple stories incorporate other choices, like what to pack or wear, but these mostly felt minor in my play. Each story has a different set of writers with different styles/approaches. Some stories are tense and sad, others are relaxing. I enjoyed Harriet's most, though Tomek's seemed the most open to player choice. It feels like a lot of love has gone into this (and I really admire the trouble they've taken for little things like crediting contributors, estimating how long a story will be, accumulating passport stamps in the title screen, etc), but I have mixed feelings about the results. Most of the stories felt very plotted, rather than experiential, which honestly wasn't what I was hoping for in a "travel game." The photos felt distracting at times, too much like a photo from someone else's completely separate experience (which I guess, of course, they mostly are). The framing story also felt a bit contrived to me, though it was nice to see how characters had progressed after their main story. And while I can respect the decision to leave it out so far, I do wish there were a way to undo a step or replay a story after finishing it. On the whole, my experience has been uneven. I've enjoyed some of my time with Wanderlust quite a bit, but other times it was more like being stuck with a tedious book on a long flight. I prefer 80 Days as a mostly-text travel game, but your tastes may differ.

It doesn't try to imititate other games, but it's good at what it does I didn't really expect this one to be a rollercoaster, and it wasn't, but it still managed to pull some punches to the gut. It's achieved mostly with writing - because really, this game isn't that far from a book, if you could choose what the characters do next. There are photos, sounds and music, and some gameplay elements in the form of resource management, but you can forget about them - it's about the stories. For Wanderlust, it all depended on the stories. It's not a game that can make up for weak writing with anything else. Fortunately enough, the stories are finely crafted. Well, most of them, because I found myself connecting with some characters more than the other. But that was to be expected as they were written by different writers. So yes, as a narrative, this game works completely fine, and it is a relaxing and sometimes thought-provoking experience. But know this isn't a game you can just pick up like a random platformer. You need to know what you're doing.

Wanderlust is certainly a different flavor of visual novel as what I am used to. You basically steer various stories that a group of tourists tell each other as they explore and interact with each other on vacation. Through this you learn more about them as well as shape certain parts of the stories. With this many different mini stories some are bound to resonate more with you than others. I really enjoyed the “Sea Fever” story about a father and daughter taking separate trips through the Antarctic at the same time as well as a story about a woman travelling through Africa to get to her daughter in time for the birth of her grandchild. I was not a big fan of the story of that same woman taking her grandchild to Coney Island as I felt it tried to hard to shoehorn politics into the story in a way that felt unnatural. I also felt that Tomek’s story about meeting a woman one day in Barcelona had a very sudden end that left to much unexplored. One thing I will say is that regardless of whether I enjoyed the story or not all of the stories in the game had a crazy amount of detail to them about the locations and journeys. The art work featured in game was great but it was only of locations and wildlife. It would have been nice to get some pictures of the characters as well. There were plenty of choices to make in some stories but others had very few. I played Wanderlust on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any glitches. I did notice one grammar mistake where a sentence said “who was lived in Uganda” where it should have been “who has lived in Uganda”. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game saves every time you exit the game. There is only one save game allowed at a time. I finished the game in six hours and twenty one minutes. I paid $5.99 CAD for the game and felt that was a great value for what I got. The normal price of $17.49 CAD is a tougher sell for me. Overall if you enjoy visual novels I feel there is something here for you.

Rather a collection of interactive novelles than a "real" game. There is a *lot* of reading to be had, so you better be in the mood for it. A group of tourists meets on Easter Island and tell themselves stories about their lives. Each chapter you take take control of one of the characters, making decissions and directing their story; two stories each - one longer life defining one and a shorter follow-up. At least that's the idea behind it. In acutallity you click through the text and have limited agency. changing mostly smaller details or the sequence of events. In the long stories you sometimes get a branching path, but they do come together in the end making your choices not feeling consequencial overall. Which is in part, however, a sign of how good the writing is. While it *feels* like you are strong-armed it actually just prevents your choices from feeling erratic. Well, mostly. You still get your odd out-of-place paragraph or two. As a result of this approach the characters themselves are little more than a pair of pants with some light backstory to them, so character development only shows through your choices. Rather than their actions and thoughts. Which is a weird shift of focus to the surroundings and events rather than how it affected them on what can be largely described as a story of self-discovery. The stories themselves are mostly interesting if you have a knack for differenct cultures and travel to just plain boring if you are not into the setting. I found myself clicking through some of them rather uninspired, which feels like a drag as even that can take up a couple hours of forced uneventful wait during travel times. Some of them, as well as the overaching story on Easter Island come of as super pretentious whithout any real message or character development and feel like bluntly presenting you with social/political agenda (or "wokeness").