What if you were to live in a Dystopian world in which humanity’s main goal was to go around to various new planets, cultivating life and wealth as you went, but, as soon as the planet's resources were depleted, you’d move on to the next one without a second thought to what happened to the world you were leaving behind? Better still… what if you were one of the people left behind on that barren planet, abandoned to figure out how to survive and maintain a life with limited resources? Anytime you needed something, you’d have to brave the raging desert and heat and pray that a traveling nomad, or small village, would be willing to share their wealth. Well, that’s the reality that awaits in Caravan SandWitch, and your main goal, or so it would seem, is to restore the vitality of the planet to bring back the humans that… didn’t have you in their best interests in the first place, but it’s the only way to save the dying rock you call home.
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Story:
When you arrive in the world that is Caravan SandWitch, you’re quickly greeted by the reality that you’re not in Kansas anymore. Starting off in a space station, you’ve received a distress signal from your sister who’s been long missing for over six years. Your first course of action is to get off the space station you call a place to sleep and head down to Cigalo, the planet you’d left behind for your spaceship flight school when your sister originally disappeared.
Upon arrival, you’re greeted by what we can only assume are familiar faces to you, and the more you play, familiar they become. Though all the townees aren’t exactly thrilled that you’re back home, holding resentment for the day that you left in the first place, but through time and good deeds, they all warm up in the end.
Your main goal throughout the story, and the entire reason you’re back on the desert rock in the first place, is to uncover what exactly happened to your sister six years ago. She’d disappeared into the heart of a deadly storm, never to be seen again, but now her spaceship is sending off a distress signal and there’s only one person in the village with any idea of what happened. At least, that’s all I’ll spoil for now.
As you advance through the game and quests, you’ll come to learn more about the villagers and what they’ve gone through in your absence. You might realize that this harsh planet is actually a haven for many and that through unifying your town with neighboring nomads, it bears enough fruit to live prosperously as a community. Ultimately, it’ll be up to you to decide your planet's fate in the end, so take your time to get to know the place and people before you make such a heavy decision.
Exploration & Upgrades:
Aside from the story, a vast world sits ripe and ready for you to explore. As the name suggests, you’ll have your trusty caravan, kindly rented to you by one of the elders in the village, to explore the desert sands and avoid perishing from heat exhaustion. Though, you should note there are no survival aspects to this game, so while the theme exists for the story, you won’t be punished if you spend hours wandering around the place as I did. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Once you’ve had the chance to break free from the initial story quests, which doesn’t take long, you’ll be unleashed unto a world rich with resources, and by resources, I mean spare parts scattered everywhere. From onboard vehicle computers to old desk terminals, to broken-down robots, you’ll find a variety of parts with scaling rarities that will serve as upgrades for the caravan you’ve been lent. To start, you’ll stare longingly at doors locked behind power stations only reachable through ziplining and have no idea how to obtain one. Eventually, you’ll realize your friend in town Nefle will be your one-stop shop for upgrades including a scanner, pulley system, zipline feature, and even a driving powerhouse that you can plug into batteries to provide the juice those exclusive doors need to open. Heck, you’ll even be able to hack nearby communication relays to pick up old messages from your sister and get that much closer to discovering what happened.
I personally adore a map that evolves with time, and Caravan SandWitch achieved that by refusing to give you all its secrets at once. Yes, you might feel a sting of frustration as you’re going through an old ruin and desperately wanting to reach the tippy top to uncover what secrets await you, but you’ll find that patience is key, and while you might want to blast through every place the moment you step foot in it, taking your time to explore, collect parts, and upgrade your van, will serve you much better than attempting to one hundred percent the entire zone within the first two hours.
Eventually, you’ll be able to hop, jump, power on, and hack everything on the planet, so don’t worry, nothing is out of reach for long.
Side Quests & Collectibles:
Aside from the spare parts lying around the world, and your main quest to figure out why your sister's spaceship sent out a distress call in the first place, quite a few side activities await you on Cigalo. While you might want to focus solely on finding your loved one, it’s extremely obvious that the local village is in desperate need of help. They lack food, resources, and medication, resulting in more people than ever debating leaving the dusty rock behind and trading it for a mediocre life on a stuffy space station. That’s not an ideal outcome for anyone, so we took the time to figure out what they needed and to lend our aid whenever we could.
Side quests can include something as simple as finding a stuffed toy on a polluted beach for a little girl who’s having trouble sleeping without it, and scale all the way up to working with the local nomads to find seeds suitable for the planet, as the ones the space station have provided don’t have the vitality and strength to survive the desert heats. Our personal favorite was helping our frog friends honor their ancient traditions by exploring the various ruins to learn about the planet and what exactly happened six years ago. It’s clever that the team decided to leave this as an easter egg to be found within the side quests, rather than forcing you to know if you’re not the person who particularly cares about the back story. I am though, so you can bet I sang with the frogs. Curious what I’m talking about? Then don’t skip them.
One last thing to note about side quests is that the game is separated into acts. Each van upgrade will signal the start of a new act, and certain side quests can only be done in the act that you received them in, so if you’re someone who wants to go above and beyond to learn about the land, then make sure you’re completing these quests before moving on.
As you’re adventuring through the world, whether on the main storyline, or a side activity, you might find spare objects sitting around. My favorite happened to be the ironic sandwiches lying in places that people used to inhabit, which are surely too old to be anything but rotting. You can also expect an array of hidden notes with pieces of lore on them, objects that might lead you on another side quest, or just something that sits in your inventory all game that you can say you found. While a few felt entirely unnecessary to pick up, some were critical pieces to the history of the world, so they’re far from pointless either.
Graphics & World Design:
To touch on the visuals and graphics themselves, I have to admit that Caravan SandWitch is going above and beyond your typical indie. The world was incredibly well designed, with helpful pieces of cloth or dirt in places meant to be climbed upon, making it easy to understand the map layout visually, and a scanner that makes finding every hidden crack and cranny of the desert a breeze. They’ve designed their environment to scale with your van upgrades, but I had a blast with what was accessible right from the start. Best yet, if you get tired of wandering around the world, there are plenty of observation points for you to take a seat and enjoy the view for a while.
Despite being a desert planet, you won’t be robbed of expansive oceans, mushroom forests, and dark caves filled with adorable frogs and glowing fungi, so while the place might seem like a barren wasteland, there's far more to it than that.
Accessibility:
If you’re curious about the different accessibility features within the game, then we’re pleased to report that the team has included an array of options to make it more welcoming for a variety of players. Included in these are the ability to reduce motion sickness, adjust the UI scale, increase the visual guides for objectives, and even activate sounds that will alert you when you’re near objects you can interact with. Keybinds are also present, allowing you to adjust your keyboard bindings to cater the experience to your preferred play format.
Kudos to the team for ensuring that a variety of players could enjoy their mysterious world.
Our Complaints:
While we’ve greatly enjoyed our time with Caravan SandWitch, we boast being honest about our experiences with the games we play here in our Fort, and so shall we honor that. I only have three things of note to share with you though, so in terms of complaints, the good vastly outweighs them.
First, we had a mostly seamless experience through the entire story and game in general, however, towards the end there was one quest in particular that failed to have proper tracking and led to me spending an hour revisiting places over and over again to find some missing clue or piece of information that might lead me to where I needed to be. In the end, and after speaking with multiple creators who’d also played and gotten stuck in the same place, it was largely due to a quest that sends you out on your own looking for a relay, but past the piece of text sending you in the right direction, did nothing to notify you if you were in the right area or what you needed to really do in said area. Through eventual trial and error, we were able to piece together where we needed to go and what we needed to do, but it definitely jaded the experience considering every quest up until that point had guided you through each step carefully, so to all of a sudden flip that switch and do the opposite, felt rough.
Second, and this one is exceptionally minor, but at some points, particularly when driving up hills or talking to someone at a weird angle, your in-game camera would clip into a piece of geometry and present you with a beautiful rock wall to stare at until you either drove high enough up the hill to be on flat ground again or finished speaking with the NPC and got back into the world. It didn’t happen often enough to do anything more than mention that it could happen to you, and it was extremely far from lessening my experience in any way, but it was a bug to mention, and so we have.
Lastly, and I’ll do my best not to spoil anything with this complaint, but I wish there was more context after the ending of the game. The way it was left I felt a huge lack of closure in knowing what happened to the people of Ciaglo and Sauge after the last quest. Did their lives improve? Did Sauge become a SandWitch? Did the evil corporation come back to the planet and take over? These are the what-ifs that aren’t answered with the ending, so hopefully they either have a sequel planned, or perhaps a DLC in the future, but as it stands, I’m a bit dissatisfied with what we were given.
Other than that, we’re happy to report our time on Cigalo was an enjoyable experience free of large hindrances or gameplay bugs, so a great job to the team on this one.
Our Rating:
Caravan SandWitch in all its glory did a beautiful job of sucking us into the story, but also into the world itself. We felt a genuine connection to the NPCs that Sauge calls friends, and the history of the planet itself felt intriguing enough to get us sucked into the side quests. The detailed environment and lovely soundtrack wrapped it all up in a nice bow, and so we’re happily awarding Caravan SandWitch with our Pillow Fort stamp of approval. If you're craving an immersive RPG with a captivating storyline, a vast world to explore, and a dynamic upgrade system that keeps the gameplay fresh, then this is a title you won't want to miss.
That’s going to be it for this review, but if you have any questions about the title or experience, please let us know in the comments and we’ll be happy to answer. We want to give a huge thanks to the Caravan SandWitch team for allowing us to play and review the game prior to release, we’ve had a blast with our experience and look forward to their future creations.
Game Information & Links:
Consoles Available: PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Studio Plane Toast
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie
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