in the Wayward beach, out today for PC, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox, puts you in the role of a stuck teenage girl visiting her mother’s workplace. This is a giant floating airship anchored off the coast of Australia that, after being decommissioned as a luxury ship, is now serving as a retirement home.
In a way, it’s a game about being a teenager taking his first tentative steps into an adult realm. Her character Casey writes an article about her time on the airship and, at the urging of her mother – a nurse – spends three days visiting the otherwise lonely inhabitants of the airship and chatting with them about their past and present.
Casey is nervous and unsure. We’ve all been through this; an internship maybe, or just the first day in our first job, that awkward point where the rubber of your childhood meets the street of the adult workforce. And so Wayward beach is in many ways a play on that melting pot, as over the course of three days Casey gains confidence, comes out of her shell and begins to let her talents and personality shine.
But it’s also a game about the other end of the age spectrum. The point of the game is to wander the corridors of the airship and stop by every room of the occupants to pay them a visit. At first it’s an almost unbearable routine; Hello, my name is Casey, what is yours, that is a beautiful picture, just the most mundane small talk. But that’s how most relationships start, and as the days go by, residents stop being targets and start becoming, if not friends, then at least people.
Perhaps the game’s greatest accomplishment is that it made me feel like a total idiot several times for not visiting my grandma more often. On your first day on the airship, the ancient residents are presented in the same way the ancients are often portrayed in our media; friendly, sweet, but also frail, weak, forgetful. Characters defined by their age and physical build, and little else. However, the more you interact with them and the more you explore their rooms – each helpfully over-decorated like an octogenarian teenager’s bedroom – the more their stories and lives are uncovered.
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$663 total value
Humble Bundle 2K Megahits Game Bundle for Covenant House
Providing shelter and supportive services to youth affected by homelessness
A number of games from 2K have been bundled together. You can pay whatever you want to support the cause, but if you want access to some of the big hits like Borderlands 3, The Bioshock Collection, XCOM: The Ultimate Collection, and Sid Meier’s Civilizatrion VI, you’ll need to pay at least $16. But hey, that’s hardly anything compared to the $663 value you get from all 18 games combined.
These aren’t old people. They are people who have grown old. They had exciting lives, loved and lost, dramatic exploits. What they are now isn’t what they ever were, and it’s an absolute delight to get to know each and every one of them over the three days of gameplay.
How you get to know them is another Wayward Strands Successes. This game doesn’t tell you a single story, it leaves a dozen (or more!) of them lying around, each unfolding in real-time, and leaves it up to the player to stop by each one and see how things are going.
If you know your way around the game sleep no more– which I was fortunate to witness along with the rest of the staff on a year long work trip to NYC –Wayward beach unfolds in a very similar way. If you’re not familiar, think Jordan Mechner classic non-linear adventure game The Last Express
your role in Wayward beach– Your only real gameplay task at all – is to intercept these stories and make sense of them, whether it’s solving a mystery or just getting to know a person’s life story. At first you don’t really notice what’s going on around you, but once you get to know everyone on board and get a feel for their relationships and habits, the whole place really comes alive.
I really enjoyed it Wayward beach. Aside from the beautiful intertwined storyline, I also appreciate how Australian This game is, from some of the wardrobe choices to the brilliant casting choices. We don’t often see each other in video games like this, so it was great to kick back with something so at home and at peace with its origins.
One last warning though: I had a lot of trouble beating this because the game has no manual saves and its autosaves are pretty sparse. If you plan on beating it, you’ll be fine, but unless like me you can’t always devote hours at a time to a single session, you might want to keep it running or you could lose a good chunk of progress.
