Delightful, esoteric adventuring in the new game from Dear Villagers
Caravan SandWitch is a lovely little game about coming home. The plot revolves around finding our sister, who’s been missing for a good amount of time until her ship sends out a distress signal. It’s a story about the community that we grew up with on this dying planet. With resources dwindling and the planet’s place in the system losing its value, the community has changed, grown, and shrunk. Most of the people that were there when we were younger have left, and so we’re both familiar with and also alone in this place. In fact, the game balances figuring out the community and refinding ourselves in the process, all while looking for our sister.
The game opens like a narrative platformer, where we’re doing a lot of parkour climbing and simplistic puzzle solving to get around the planet. There’s even some of the vehicle-based driving and puzzle solving, which is what drew me to the game originally too. The planet is huge and we need to get around. To discover its history we need to engage with the community in missions, a lot of missions, too many of which are design like fetch quests.
That quest-based system is the weakest aspect of the game, and it slows down the pace quite a bit. The map isn’t an open world, instead it’s a guided path that we can only advance through depending on which items we have. We’re basically gated by the components we have and the mechanics we have to upgrade, whether it’s for our vehicle or accessories. A lot of that is locked in through exploration and completing quests. Those quests give us set amounts of resources, but they don’t feel rewarding because we’re not getting a true estimate of what we’re building towards our next upgrade. The exploration aspect is thrown off because of this. We could spend an hour exploring an area before we’re even sent on the fetch quest to go there, so when we finally do have to go back there may not be a sufficient amount of the collectibles we might need to get the upgrades done, causing things to come to a grind.
So if the story isn’t clicking with us, I don’t think there’s really a lot driving us towards experiencing it all.
But the story and the community aspect did click with me. And the characters and stylized design kept me pushing forward. The puzzles are small an enjoyable, and the vehicle especially is a fun little physics mess. And it runs great on Steam Deck, too, which is perfect for a game like this. Caravan SandWitch fits a very specific, laid back mood in which we just want to do things but still interact with a community when doing it. It may have offbeat pacing, but it has enough charm to keep coming back.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest Live for September 19, 2024. Images and video courtesy the publisher.
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