Caravan SandWitch Is The Chill Death Stranding Of My Dreams

Highlights

Caravan SandWitch was shown off during this year’s Wholesome Games Direct, a wonderful little title with a focus on exploration and discovery.
With no threat of death, timers, and danger in any form, Caravan SandWitch flips the post-apocalyptic setting by telling a story about hope.
Pacific Drive and Death Stranding helped satisfy my road trip game craving, but Caravan SandWitch offers a calmer experience that I’ve wanted for years.

Every year, there’s at least one indie game that I develop a borderline unhealthy obsession with all the way up to release. It was Cult of the Lamb in 2022 and Sea of Stars in 2023, but I struggled to find a game this year that was immediately interesting enough to capture my attention. That is, until Caravan SandWitch was shown off during Wholesome Games Direct 2024, a game with vibes so immaculate that I was smitten by a single, minute-long trailer.

Caravan SandWitch’s entire premise is incredibly simple, plonking you and a van in the middle of a sci-fi world devastated by environmental disasters. There’s no combat, timers, or the threat of death lurking around every corner, just a welcoming community working together to try and make the best of their now ravaged and inhospitable home. It’s a post-apocalyptic setting in every sense, but Caravan SandWitch flips the usual dark and depressing premise on its head to give us a hopeful story of a woman on a road trip working with strangers to find her missing sister.

There’s a heavy emphasis on exploration in both the game’s trailer and Steam page, and developer Studio Plane Toast is clearly focused on giving you an interesting setting to explore however you like, while telling you a story of human resilience along the way. It could have been tempting for the devs to fill the silence with combat encounters, irritating obstacles, or stressful weather effects to break, worried that players may get bored or distracted, but I respect the commitment to creating a calm and hopeful world you can chill out with.

To top it all off, you’ll be doing this in your little van, which you’ll be able to upgrade and deck out with all kinds of gizmos and gadgets to open up new areas. It reminds me a little of Pacific Drive, one of the best games I’ve played this year, that let me experience for the first time what it’s like to be a “car buff” on a road trip, but the stressful mechanics never let me reach my desired state of zen.

Pacific Drive Developers Chat About Forming A Connection With Your Car In An Eerie World

We chat to Richard Weschler and Alex Dracott about Pacific Drive and the connection you form with your trusty sidekick.

Death Stranding is another game that scratches that same road trip itch, as you bike and zipline across harsh terrain to deliver packages with your baby pal Lou, but I always end up wishing some of the more intense sections just weren’t there. I want to navigate across mountains and valleys with Low Roar blaring without having to stop every few minutes to inch through an area teeming with spooky ghosts.

Caravan SandWitch looks like the game that will finally give me what I want, letting me drive across a world that evokes feelings of intrigue with nothing to worry about except who I’ll bring on my next trip and where the heck my sister is. If I want to check out some weird ruins in the distance, I can just fire up the van and go there without having to constantly check the mirrors for anything nasty on my tail.

A small yellow van scanning a nearby building and shipping containers

However, despite a lack of danger and its chill vibes, Caravan SandWitch’s brief showcase did a great job pulling me forward with a tantalizing mystery. The lone figure spying on the main character from above while she explores during the trailer’s final moments was enough to get my brain whirring with theories, wondering why someone so sinister has decided to isolate themselves in a world that seems to be living in harmony.

There’s more to the game than meets the eye, and that’s obviously by design, as Studio Plane Toast can’t exactly show off much in such a short amount of time. That only makes me want to dive in even more though, and its debut trailer has done enough to get its hooks in me. A game that lets me hop in a van and explore a mysterious world was always going to be on my radar, but Caravan SandWitch’s art style, music, and willingness to do something a little different and cast off standard gaming conventions such as death and combat completes the package.