It’s 1978 …
We play the role of a curious fourteen-year-old girl with journalistic aspirations – Casey Beumaris. Whether you like it or not, the girl has to spend a few days helping her mother, Ruth, who works as a nurse in a hospital located on the picturesque Australian coast and helps patients face the disadvantages of old age. It’s not just any hospital, no! If you think this is just a boring building then you are very wrong. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it was decided to convert an old German airship into this hospital. So yeah … right on the beach, there is a floating hospital in the air overlooking the dark waters of the ocean and a lighthouse shining in the sunlight. Fascinating, isn’t it? Casey thought similarly because although the vision of amusing the time of geriatric hospital residents does not seem particularly interesting to her, the hospital itself turns out to be amazing enough to write an article about it for the school newspaper. So this is how we set off on the airship deck – right next to the perpetually dissatisfied and stressed mom, clenching our fingers on the bag in which the notebook is hidden. We will list everything that may be useful in it.
Little old people’s world
Here we are in the airship! It is nice, clean and bright here. Mum decides to leave us in the care of Lily, the nurse, whom we can always turn to for help if we are particularly interested or worried. Usually, you can find her at the reception desk, but we have to take into account that she has patients under her care and must carry out her duties … After all, she is at work. And its absence behind the reception counter is a great example of how this small hospital ecosystem is doing perfectly well without our interference. We are only guests. The lives of all the other residents of the hospital run at a slow but independent rhythm. And although apart from our mother and the second nurse, the hospital staff also consists of other people, none of them has much time to look after us. So, in most cases, we have to organize our own time and decide with whom we spend it, and unfortunately it flows relentlessly. We are reminded of the inevitability of passing minutes not only by our new elderly friends, but also by the watch received from Lily at the beginning of the game.
While exploring the airship and learning about the stories of individual passengers, we have to decide which of them we will pay more attention to. It is impossible to discover everything with just one approach to Wayward Strand and find out what each patient has to offer us, so I recommend playing the game at least twice.
Our aforementioned faithful companion will help us in everything – a notebook that we can consult at any time to trace the course of interactions with individual residents of the airship.
Voices full of authenticity
Let me start by saying that the game is visually pleasing to the eye – mixing 2D and 3D may not be very innovative, but Wayward Strand does it in an unusual way that I immediately associated with comics. The comic character of the game is also marked by a side throw and speech bubbles, in which the lines of individual characters are placed. Everything is kept in delicate, subdued colors – nothing offends our eyes and does not stand out with flashiness.
The music that accompanies us during our adventure on the airship is also extremely pleasant, almost therapeutic, and I think that the soundtrack from Wayward Strand will often accompany me when reading or drawing.
However, it cannot be concealed that the element that deserves the greatest praise is phenomenal dubbing. This is due to the great cast, consisting of Australian actors, among which we can find people such as: Jennifer Vuletic, Anne Charleston or Erhard Hartmann.
Old age is presented differently
Casey is fourteen years old, which means that she is slowly leaving the world of children to enter the adult reality step by step. In my opinion, setting such a young person as the protagonist works well, because her curious and slightly naive disposition contrasts significantly with the nature of the environment in which she has to find herself. The school where she spends most of her life is filled with her peers, while the company from the airship is in the vast majority much older than she is. Wayward Strandit allows us to discover old age in a completely different dimension than it has been presented in pop culture so far. The age-old people in this game are open-ended, impatient mentors with impatient expressions, not crazy old ladies holding a few cats on their lap, monarchs not dying in a solemn atmosphere, or blind madmen, fortune-telling in exchange for a coin. They are just people. They have their daily schedule, their mundane routines, friends, dreams, passions, cares – they are just like us, the only difference is that they just had a little more time.
Wayward Strand should be treated not so much as a game but as a story to discover and live.
The production is available on PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, XONE and XSX.
