Wayward Strand

During the three in-game days players spend on Wayward Strand‘s airborne nursing home, time does not stop.

Much like the characters main character Casey interacts with, time is a valuable commodity. Miss a moment and it is gone forever… at least until you start a new game.

Wayward Strand treats the passage of time as an unflinching force that constantly moves forward with no regard for who it sweeps off their feet. The player, along with the patients, only have a limited time in this world and hopefully the most can be made of it.

Developer Ghost Pattern is keen on delivering a wholly unique piece of entertainment. Few games are like Wayward Strand. In fact, I would argue there are no other games like it, or at least none that offer a glimpse at this minuscule aspect of life. Plenty of narrative-based games exist anymore with the primary purpose of telling a story with varying degrees of intensity. But I do not recall one taking place in an elderly ward of a hospital or focusing on the day-to-day of individuals in their twilight years. Outside of roguelikes I don’t know many games that have multiple replays seemingly baked into their DNA.

But with Wayward Strand, players can bypass every goal and ignore every breadcrumb laid out. During those three days, players can sit down at a table and have Casey read while the minutes tick by, acting as a recluse in this bustling hub. The game will end and that, simply, can be that.

There are no time loops here, no second chances. Just a young girl dragged to her mother’s work instead of getting to enjoy her holiday away from school.

Casey has a primary goal in mind–a Golden Path, if you will. She is using the opportunity aboard this floating vessel to learn more about it for an article for her school paper. The game nudges players towards this goal early on by providing dialog choices geared towards Casey admitting her intentions and her mother chastising her for bringing her notebook along. Unless you read up on Wayward Strand’s summary on the game’s store page, you may not immediately know of Casey’s desire to delve into the airship’s history and its inner workings.

Ghost Pattern immediately allows players to shape their own narrative with Casey, darting away from greater purpose and embracing whatever unknown that is chosen. She can be defiant towards her mother and lament having to spend her days off surrounded by old people or skirt responsibility and never look into the ship at all. Wayward Strand is a game built with branching narratives, dialog choices, moral choices, and other nebulous things that drive stories towards their end.

What is fascinating about this game in particular is that outside of the first hours of the first day, there’s no specific hook that tries to catch the player by the mouth. Casey’s mom Ruth is the head nurse at the facility and tasks her daughter with helping out, whether it be doing simple tasks for the other nurses or merely idly sitting with a patient while the hours count down. Outside the few times Ruth summons Casey, control is left to the player, giving them the opportunity to explore and talk to anyone they wish.

A smart decision is made early on to tease out intrigue and guidance for the player. Right after entering the ward, an old woman named Esther mumbles something about looking for a goat and disappears on the elevator. Casey has limited time to inquire as she is summoned by Ruth to the nurses’ station. From there, Casey meets Lily, another nurse, and is told to assist her.

So where do players go from here? They can speak with Lily and ask if anything needs to be done, inquire about the airship, walk away, follow up with Esther about this goat situation, run after Casey’s mom, or do something else. Wayward Strand makes a point not to flood character interactions with numerous dialog choices. Most of the time, players will exhaust a conversation after a handful of inquiries or statements and then be left to idly stand by or move on to something new. By asking Lily about the airship, players will learn that a nurse recently left who may have known more. Or Lily directs players to Ida Vaughan, a kind patient who is easy to talk to.

Players’ brains may lightbulb Ida as a kind of tutorial but that simply is not the case. Instead, she’s a gentle nudge by Ghost Pattern to merely point the player in a direction. On rare occasions I noticed that a dialog option would be highlighted in blue, perhaps indicating it might be the most fruitful response or question to ask. But I hardly felt guided during my time with Wayward Strand, at least during the first playthrough.

Really, Wayward Strand is about interacting with the workers and residents of this quaint, isolated space. Initially there are threads to follow and goals to keep in mind but the game is perfectly okay with letting players put multiple things on the backburner. On my first day, I flitted around the entire ward hoping to meet everyone and acquire a few nuggets of information about them, using those pieces to fuel further discoveries or conversations. Players will notice that they can eavesdrop on conversations at lunch tables, linger outside a bedroom door while two residents converse, or merely sit in silence and say nothing.

Early into the first day players can happen upon Dr. Bouchard, a doctor that used to treat Casey when she was younger. Dr. Bouchard is extremely ill and barely acknowledges Casey. Over the course of the three days I would attempt to form a bond with Dr. Bouchard only to find that most of the time she would only exchange a few words with Casey, even while sitting in silence for hours. Often I would leave the room in search of more lively developments.

This is one of the deeper messages behind Wayward Strand. Are players–with Casey as a vessel–merely trying to unlock greater stories? Are they using these elderly people as narrative fuel? The game begins to tug at players’ empathy by taking Casey’s article out of the spotlight and putting her own personal growth and the well-being of the airship at the forefront. Certainly, players can choose to follow leads that hint at the mysterious origins of how the ship came to Australia in the first place but I became surprised at how quick that thread became an afterthought for me.

Frequently I would sit in silence with another patient simply because I wanted to hear what they would say and did not want them to feel alone. Maybe with more time they would open up and feel happier? Each of the characters players can talk to has a distinct personality and their own quirks but it takes time to hone in what they are open to talk about and what makes them happiest. Mr. Pruess who was wheelchair-bound spoke slowly and deliberately but would eventually tire of questions and express when he had had enough or if a subject was too sensitive. But players also learn that Mr. Pruess may have some of the deeper knowledge of the airship. Do you press him for information at risk of angering him?

Wayward Strand wishes for its players to treat these characters like they would real people. This goal is helped by the well-written dialog and the warmth of the voice actors who make the Australian setting come alive… and sure, it helps that the developers are Australian as well. The amount of dialog written here is quite impressive, rivaling games ten times its size. But praise should also be heaped on how Wayward Strand doesn’t falsely express a sense of being profound. While there are poignant conversations and noteworthy bits, what’s more impressive is in how the mundanity of normal humans talking to each other is captured. Casey will timidly say “Hi” to a character and they will exchange short pleasantries. It may be nothing more but it feels entirely human and real.

Using a three-day time crunch that results in only a few hours of actual playtime, Wayward Strand can be over with in one sitting. And while it is perfectly okay to play it like that, there’s a wealth of game that is being missed by doing so. As Casey makes her way from room to room in the airship, players will notice that everyone else has their own schedule and is bustling about the airship having their own personal goals in mind.

The temptation to try and do everything in Wayward Strand is too great because players who grow invested in all the characters over the course of the game will likely try to maximize their time, potentially at the detriment of seeing more impactful moments in the individual narratives of other characters. Keep in mind, this just isn’t Casey’s story. It’s also the tale of the rarely seen Dr. Shen. Or the rumblings of Esther and Neil Avery as they try to piece together a “foreign visitor” that will arrive on the final day of Casey’s stay. With enough time players can learn more about Dr. Bouchard or the mute Tomi who has a beaming smile in her room full of plants.

I was happy to spend small bursts of time with every person each day in Wayward Strand, feeling as if I had gotten a few pages of their lives opened up to me. But I knew that deeper events were hidden beneath. Players can open up new rooms and be treated to untold storylines depending on how involved they become with a particular character. By using the knowledge from one playthrough, players can decide what to prioritize on the next.

Wayward Strand is meant for players to experience it around a dozen times to fully immerse themselves into the lives that are being lived on the airship. And considering the length of a full play, it isn’t a massive commitment and one most may not fully undertake. But I imagine myself literally taking one full playthrough to follow only Tomi and Dr. Bouchard around, the quietest of the two, just to know what they will do in the moments that aren’t being driven by other characters. Will Casey’s compassion and time cause these characters to open up more?

Whenever an important moment or piece of information is spoken, Casey will make note of the day and time it happened in a specific tab in her notebook. Players are able to pull it up frequently for consultation if they want to keep abreast of certain details on a character. And while conversations can reference knowledge gained from other characters, the notebook is more for players’ personal consumption rather than for Casey.

One frustrating thing about Wayward Strand is that upon completing it, players are forced into starting a new game that will completely wipe their old save. This includes all information written down in Casey’s notebook. It felt like a missed opportunity to not be able to keep old notes in hopes of completely filling out an individual’s schedule over the course of the three days so players don’t repeat conversations too many times. I understand Casey not retaining previous knowledge for use in actual dialog sections but being able to consult what I have already done would have been helpful in trying to unlock more of a character’s backstory.

It should also be said that Wayward Strand had a number of audio and visual bugs for me when I played it leading up to launch. Once, a character interacting with an object would shift in and out of the room they were in. Lines of dialog would be cut off or blend together, sometimes shortening conversations unnaturally. A few times Casey would appear stuck when eavesdropping or before being able to speak.

Despite the game having a wonderful, bold art style, it was distracting watching characters walk through each other mid-conversation. I was also distracted by Casey’s mom’s face bouncing up and down when she spoke, making her nose, eyes, and mouth appear to jiggle whenever she talked. I remember when playing Life is Strange for the first time years ago that the poor lip syncing eventually became second nature in a dialog heavy game. And though I understand Ghost Pattern is a smaller team, it can be problematic from time to time when a character you are focusing on breaks immersion, especially during an emotionally charged moment.

Regardless of those small shortcomings, Wayward Strand is a testament to how flexible the medium of gaming is for entertainment and creativity. Can you really imagine a game like this before now? I certainly couldn’t. And compelling me enough to experience it multiple times speaks to the quality of the narrative and its impact. As time moves faster than expected, players begin to dread the hour when Casey’s mom will summon her to the nurse’s desk to go home. Did she put in enough hours learning about the patient who just died before her arrival? As a player did you take the fastest route between rooms? Was there anything that could have been done to keep a friendly face from falling ill? The positive and the negative will haunt the player until the next time around.

Wayward Strand is a delightfully grounded game, despite its foreign setting. In this small, cozy space there is genuine hope, sadness, anger, and love. These are real people and Casey is a young girl learning how to grasp the world in new ways. Players have the ability to be an active part of this experience and let the world envelop them, or buck responsibility for personal gain. Like Casey, like Tomi, or Mr. Avery, or Dr. Shen, or Esther, or like Joe, I wish I had more time to see and do everything all at once. Alas, in life you do not get a repeat performance. At least here there are bountiful opportunities to make friends, to be compassionate, to listen, to sit, to breathe, and to exist. Each day and each run a chance to do something more valuable than the last.