Earlier this year, a game called Wander was released, which allowed players to play as a cat exploring a post-apocalyptic Earth. Admittedly, the game’s trailers never quite grabbed me before it was released, so I passed on the title.
Wander was originally released in July 2022, which was a pretty dry time for game releases. Therefore, I assumed that the reason for the online game’s immense praise was due to the lack of other major titles released around the same time. Fast forward to the end of 2022 and Wander is nominated for Game of the Year so I thought it was time to check this thing out.
Wander is out now and is available on Steam and PlayStation.
After playing through Wander in one sitting, the main takeaway I had left was this; the fact that you play as a cat for the duration of Wander is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Initially, however, it is undoubtedly a strength.
During the first hour of Wander, players will revel in the cuteness of the game and its protagonist. There is an indisputable novelty in the originality of the choice to build a whole game around the idea of embodying a feline without opposable thumbs. The problem is that once that initial novelty wears off, all that’s left is a pretty lackluster four-hour walking simulator.
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The problem is that the game commits so heavily to the idea of playing as a cat that it suffers in other areas. An example of this is when the player has to communicate with the androids wandering the cities in place of the missing humans. Obviously, the cat can’t respond to robots, so a little droid companion is brought into the fold who serves as a translator.
Wander then attempts to build some sort of emotional rapport between the cat and the droid, as the robot “remembers” its past. The problem with that is that he’s a cat, so he can’t exactly reciprocate or even understand the complexity of the existential emotions the droid is feeling. Thus, a disconnection is felt by the player when witnessing this game.
Another example is when the player comes across a walking robot asking the cat to find sheet music to play. Collecting these scattered pieces of music is ultimately a benign task given that the player’s only reward is to hear the traveling musician play the distorted tunes.
There’s no leveling system, so no new abilities are unlocked to do this kind of busy work and so they ultimately feel like pointless drills. There are many tasks requested from the player throughout the game that give similar hollow wins and they merge to give Wander a feeling of banality.
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I feel like I’m being too hard on Wander, but I just can’t fathom the fact that this mundane, glorified walking simulator received a Game of the Year nomination. This begs the question of whether giving that kind of honor to a game like Wander says more about the game industry as a whole in 2022 than the game itself.
In the end, if the cat’s gimmick is torn from Wander, what remains is quite banal. It’s not a bad game, but it’s a game with poor graphics, uninviting gameplay, poor animations, and a forgettable generic plot. Again, my gaming experience Wander wasn’t overwhelmingly negative, but it’s definitely not one of the greatest games I’ve played this year.
4/10
Wander was reviewed on PS5 with code provided by fortyseven communications.
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