Burned Out, Davey Wreden Tried to Heal by Making the Cozy Wanderstop

Nothing moves quickly in Wanderstop. To make a single cup of tea in the new video game is a meditative ritual of deliberate steps.

The recovering hero, Alta, has to forage for tea leaves, dry out those leaves, plant seeds for fruit to flavor the tea, water those seeds, watch the plant grow, harvest the fruit individually, and then, with a fantastical apparatus the player traverses using rolling ladders, heat up the water, drain it into a brewing pot, throw the ingredients in one by one, go to a shelf of bespoke mugs, select one, place it under a tap and — finally — pour.

There is recognition for doing so without spilling a single drop but no punishment if it is not perfect. It is not that kind of game.

Davey Wreden, the 36-year-old writer and director of Wanderstop, has not released a stand-alone game in a decade. He burned out after commercial success with The Stanley Parable (2013), an absurd meditation on cubicle life and choice that has been cited as an inspiration for the TV show “Severance,” and artistic acclaim with the game’s follow-up.

Wanderstop was supposed to be different from those mind-bending works, a calming experience set at a woodland tea shop.

It did not end up that way.

“I started out trying to make this game in a way that it wasn’t going to be a complex story about me and my life, and I failed to do that,” Wreden said. “The more that I began having Alta speak the words in my own head, the more compelling it got.”