Wayward Strand Review (PS5)

Interactive adventures focusing on exploration, also known as walking simulators, often have a bad reputation. Although in some cases that can be justified, most of them still offer a memorable interactive story experience. Wayward Strand takes this concept, twists it and runs with it in a totally unexpected direction. The result is both highly engaging and relatable, focusing on a subject usually avoided by videogames. 

As you would expect from a game of this genre, the story is the most important element of Wayward Strand. Right from the very first scenes you will meet Casey Beaumaris, the young hero of our adventure. After a few initial dialogue choices that position her either as a strong-willed child or as an obedient daughter, gamers will realize that the story is mundane, but not quite ordinary.

The events unfold at the board of an airship turned into an elderly home, the workplace of our hero’s mother, a nurse taking care of the patients. Having no choice but to help out her mother, our 14-year-old curious teenage hero will have three days at her disposal to discover as many secrets as possible about the airship and its inhabitants.

Being a game focused heavily on dialogue this will mainly mean doing a lot of chit chat, but also paying attention to the different details and successfully following the threads of the story bouncing among various characters. The gameplay remains very relaxed through the entire game, and while you will uncover that there lies a lot of tension beneath the apparently peaceful surface, the game narrative remains kind of anticlimactic without any major revelations.

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You will not be able to discover everything in just one playthrough. As the developers promised this tale is told in a curious way, thanks to two basic principles: the inhabitants are going on with their lives with or without the player’s interference, and time passes for everyone equally. That means that things are happening whether you are there or not, and you have a limited time to explore the three main floors of the airship.

In order to untangle each and every individual plot, you will have to play through Wayward Strand several times and by the end realize how these individual strands are weaved together into a coherent tapestry. Moreover, the developers chose not to hold the player’s hand by not giving specific instructions beyond go and do whatever you want. Although there is a guideline to spend time with the patients, there are no repercussions if you chose to dillydally or read all day long.

The entire ship is like a well-defined sandbox in which all NPCs are going about their lives without waiting on the player to cut in. Just like in real life, you have the freedom to pursue any particular story or person and discover it at your own pace. Depending on your choices you will see different parts of these personal histories and you will understand the motivations of the various characters.

You will meet or miss the relatives coming to visit the patients, you can stumble upon interesting interactions, or just study the elderly, their surroundings and habits. Step by step you will see through the initial fog, learn about their true personalities and uncover their life stories. You will also run into a bunch of gossip about grudges, romantic interests and the truth about the staff, both current and past.

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You can pursue any avenue but be prepared that not all the patients will be opening up to you or will be willing to spill what they know. Based on how focused you are on a particular plotline, the three days you can spend aboard the airship will prove to be actually very short. The worst that can happen is that you collect a lot of information bits, but you fail to reach a conclusion and see through a particular storyline. 

Still, this is the one of the most amazing attributes of Wayward Strand, you cannot really lose in the game. You can start over and try to do things differently, uncover new details and find out more about the topic that piqued your interest. It is fantastically refreshing that the game does not wait for you: it plays out no matter your choices or answers. Just like a good journalist, you are doomed to uncover the story, but have no chance to change it.

The dialogues may seem mundane from time to time, but they are very life-like, and remind us of small talks between strangers. The personalities of the different inhabitants are very well drawn and the time you will spend with them will help form almost real bonds with them. There is nothing extraordinary here, nothing that we have not seen already, but the beauty of the mundane is that it is so relatable.

The airship itself is a wonderful metaphor for the undeniable fact that the time is not reversible, nor does it stop for anyone. You are forced to deal with the idea that everyone grows old and fades away in the end. The visual style perfectly displays this concept with an approach that is a bit naïve, a bit comic books like, but very heartwarming. It lacks unnecessary eye candy and any kind of sparkle that would distract from the story.

On the other hand, the game technically tends to be a bit messy. Many of the animations are clunky at best, the background music is desperately repetitive in case you manage to notice it, and there are also bugs that need to be fixed – the collision detection is otherworldly, with the characters just walking through the different objects. The voice actors though did a tremendous job in bringing their characters to life and making them relatable, being one of the most remarkable aspects of the game.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion