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The game designer playing through his own psyche

Davey Wreden found acclaim in his twenties, with the Stanley Parable and the Beginner’s Guide. His new game, Wanderstop, grapples with the depression that followed.

(Gabriel Winslow-Yost, writing in The New York Review of Books, invoked Nabokov, calling the Beginner’s Guide “a kind of interactive ‘Pale Fire.’ ”) Among gamers, Wreden has acquired cult-celebrity status, and his influence extends beyond his own medium: even the creator of the TV show “ Severance ”—another office drama that raises questions about free will as it veers between whimsy and dread—has cited the Stanley Parable as an inspiration. Both the Stanley Parable and the Beginner’s Guide were relatively simple to build; Wreden spent the bulk of his time writing and tweaking the narration, so that a fairly basic set of actions would feel “like something grand and captivating.” Wanderstop, by contrast, has mechanics—for gardening, resource-gathering, performing little tasks for other characters—that require far more technical know-how to implement. With Wanderstop, he twists the cozy formula, just as his previous works have played with other game-design tropes, telling what he’s described as “a really unpleasant and uncomfortable story in a format designed around comfort.” Alta has a dark alter ego—the personification of the goading internal force that won’t let the former fighter rest—and risks encountering this side of herself whenever she strays too far from the tea shop.

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