Are you a failure? Wanderstop might be the "cosy" game for you

rockpapershotgun.com:

Before you even get to control your character in Wanderstop, you've already fucked up. Alta has lost in the arena, her defeat a swift and ignoble end to three years as unbeaten champion. She is, in her own words, a ruinous "failure". To retrain and come back fiercer than ever, she pops into the forest looking for a legendary trainer, only to find herself waking up exhausted in front of a picturesque tea shop. The Steam demo that follows will see you harvesting plants, making tea, and arguing a lot with the shop's owner, a gentle giant who thinks that maybe what Alta really needs is just some time to rest. After all, you can't fail at drinking a cuppa.

The demo (released as part of Steam Next Fest) is basically the opening of the game, heavy on the story and introducing our hamstrung hero and her new friend Boro, the hulking optimist who owns a tea shop but is basically a giant therapist. I want to talk about the character-driven storytelling more than the gamey stuff you'll be doing day to day around the tea shop. But I think it's helpful to know what kind of cosiness you're in for, so let's quickly summarise the basics.

You're making tea, but that includes all the farming involved before the first flush. The small field outside the shop is arranged in a hex pattern, and you can sow seeds in certain patterns to instantly bloom different types of plant. Sow in a line to get a small hybrid plant with blue seeds. Sow those same seeds in a three-point star pattern to create a large hybrid that'll offer harvestable fruit for the teas.

You'll dry tea-leaves in a box with a timer, collect the resulting tea balls, and clamber up a giant central tea infusion machine, sliding about on ladders, pulling ropes and puffing bellows and kicking levers to get the hot water flowing. The tea spills out a spiral funnel in the bottom with the pleasing flow of a chemistry set you got for Christmas. There is something very Dick Van Dyke about the internal decor of the house. Little