Capsule Review: Caravan SandWitch
A cozy exploration game that's a bit less than the sum of its parts.
Mechanically, Caravan SandWitch is an open-world game with no combat. Traversal is both on foot (you can run, jump short distances, and climb a bit) and in the van (which starts as just a normal van but accumulates several upgrades over the game that add new options). Missions take you back and forth across a small open world; along the way you can encounter points of interest that generally present simple puzzle platforming segments to reach collectibles and/or plot tokens (and that often have additional semi-hidden collectibles). There’s no combat, fall damage, or risk of death, though there are places where if you are careless you can fall and have to redo a decent bit of platforming (but you can teleport to the van at any time, so placing it strategically can help a lot).
There are some Metroidvania elements to the exploration: most places you go, you’ll run into areas you can’t access until you get more van upgrades, though this usually just blocks some more collectibles you can come back for later. I know some players like this for the sense of progression it creates, but for me it mostly just felt like the game was constantly giving me homework, and it didn’t help that there wasn’t a good mechanism for tracking what places I needed to come back to. For me, that often made exploration unsatisfying and uncozy.
On the narrative side, this is a sci-fi story set in an interesting world. You spend nearly all of the game on a planet that was abandoned forty years previously by an interstellar “Consortium” who were basically strip-mining it for resources to power their civilization; you meet people who miss the jobs and support from the Consortium and people who consider them ruinous exploiters who were destroying the natural life on this planet (including a very interesting sentient race that I would have loved to learn more about).
The problem is that the translation is surprisingly weak, making it hard to feel immersed in the game world or like you are really getting to know its characters and sometimes making the plot hard to understand. (STRUCTURAL SPOILERS IN THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH.) On top of that, the ending is structured in a frustrating way–it doesn’t really serve as a climax of what the story had been setting up, and it culminates in a completely unnecessary binary ending choice that just serves to make you replay the ending sequence, robbing it of what emotional impact it does have, so that you can see both anticlimactic endings. (END SPOILERS.)
The aesthetic and vibes are really good. The visuals are beautiful and the soundtrack is super chill. I got some enjoyment spending time in the game’s world, but by the end of my time (I 100%’d the game in almost exactly twelve hours) I was very much ready to be done.
I Stopped Playing When: I finished the game with all achievements.
Three Stars: Good. I liked the game enough to finish it (or just play it a bunch, for games that don't end). I recommend it to most genre fans.