Caravan SandWitch prides itself on being a “narrative-driven exploration adventure,” but what happens when the world I should love exploring only gets in the way of the narrative and overall pacing of the game?
The reviews were nice to a game like Plane Toast, which promises a lack of conflict and fail states, just driving around the post-exploitation world, helping nomads and other people left behind by the capitalist machine. It’s an captivating sci-fi setup, but one that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere meaningful or toothy due to limitations on the level of game design and a frustrating lack of focus.
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It always sucks to jump into an indie game with good intentions, a ton of passion and demanding work put into it, and then come away disappointed, but that feeling (for me at least) comes up more often than I’d like. This time I like what SandWitch Caravan I intend to do this, but I don’t think it all fits together into a coherent whole.
The premise is plain enough: Sauge arrives on the planet Cigalo after spending some time in space. Why did she leave? Why is she back now? These are questions that could drive the plot for hours if this were a narrative-driven game with a powerful initial hook, and yet they’re answered within the first few minutes. Cigalo was once a booming world “thanks” to colonization efforts, but now it’s been half-consumed by deserts and storms, and the native alien population of frog people is trying to survive alongside the nomads and workers who stayed because at this point they could call Cigalo home.
Now Sauge and her friends, most of whom are introduced simultaneously in the first half-hour or so, are trying to figure out what happened to her missing sister by following a mysterious transmission. It’s the kind of lean idea that other indie studios would have fleshed out into a tighter, more strong journey lasting five hours at most. In the case of Caravan SandWitch , however, your job is to drive a van to assist compact communities while compulsively collecting electronic parts. In fact, those parts are the key to all of this, as the hurdle of each chapter is simply finding the amount of junk needed to cobble together upgrades for the van.
It’s a strange way to structure a game whose exploration and puzzles are reduced to quickly looking/walking through ruins and pressing buttons as soon as you see them. It’s uncomfortable in its own skin. With each recent chapter, you’re reminded of the urgency of finding Sauge’s sister, but the backbone of the game is spending time interacting with the populace and helping them with their chores. It reminded me of the worst part of Fallout 4, the way the main story immediately clashed with the video game proper (your son’s been kidnapped, here are a thousand ways you can get distracted).
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I keep reading glowing reviews about the game’s world and exploration, but the tools and movement options I’m given are just too basic. There’s an attempt at a Metroidvania-style loop with the van’s gadgets, but you can access almost the entire surface map (there’s a confined underground section) from the start, and spoil the surprise by stumbling upon a particularly striking tech base that’s been abandoned. You won’t be able to open that one door, and that’s it.
In Chapter 4, where things start to get more stern Really grinds and meandering (even swift travel is a pain), it becomes abundantly clear that Plane Toast wanted to both tell a character-driven, melancholic story and deliver its own take on open-world “collectathon” fare, but couldn’t quite manage to weave both visions into a harmonious world. Perhaps a little deeper driving and platforming mechanics would have done the trick, but the final iteration of Caravan SandWitch feels too scattershot for its narrative to succeed and too focused on accessibility for any of its gameplay elements to really shine. Likewise, there’s a limitation in the overall design of the world map, resulting in a wide-open but ultimately compact patch of land that you’ll get to know like the back of your hand by the third hour, leading to a lot of frustration with backtracking.
On a more positive note, SandWitch’s Caravan is pretty and artistically consistent. The controls are also good enough, although the van itself gets stuck so easily the moment you stray a few feet off the beaten path that you’ll want to punch the screen after about the fourth time you’re forced to respawn in Nefle’s garage. It’s not exactly relaxing, I’d say. The music and sound design add a lot to the French Provence-inspired setting, and were the only thing that kept my sanity in check when I was told to drive all the way across the map again to complete a minor task. Sure, it never takes more than three or four minutes (unless I get distracted), but the promise of adventure quickly turns into a mundanity three times worse than what some people claim about Ubisoft’s open worlds.
If anything, the positive reception proves that there is untapped market potential in creating charming and colorful worlds that don’t bombard players with violence and progression systems. The fact that Cigalo isn’t presented as a depressing, post-apocalyptic wasteland is a victory in itself. I just wish that Caravan SandWitch offered more than just taking in the Mediterranean, alien vistas and collecting items, if you ask me to drive back and forth across the same dunes for eight hours, reading dialogue bubbles and chat logs. By the end, I can only hope that there’s some real sadness or joy waiting at the end of this dusty road.
