The Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable Demo, and The Beginner's Guide were all “merely” Source mod “walking simulators”, but each of these games had a degree

The Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable Demo, and The Beginner's Guide were all “merely” Source mod “walking simulators”, but each of these games had a degree of precision in how they executed their vision that made them feel like very high-quality products, each in their own way. Yes, the nature of these games is such that there's very few “moving parts” that require coordination to provide a cohesive experience—it's mostly just the standard Source first-person character controller and interactable objects you can press +use on, with a narrator narrating the story—but each of these games felt solid to play, with the intentionally minimal “gameplay” getting out of the way of the intended narrative experiences these games sought to provide. I wanted to like Wanderstop on its own terms, but once I got out of the portion of the game that's accessible in the demo, I found myself honestly really underwhelmed by the game's presentation. The intended narrative gravitas of the first dialogue with the first NPC that comes to visit was ruined because one of those little penguin dudes happened to be walking by near her feet, so she kept glancing down at it during the dialogue sequence in a hilariously immersion-breaking way. The guidebook you're given is a series of flat textures, with no animation for turning pages or anything like that whatsoever. The opening “cutscene” is presented as a series of still images like a motion comic, and a couple of the “animations” within them looked amateurishly terrible. I'll try it out again sometime soon because I (want to believe I) still like Wreden's writing, but my initial experience with the game wasn't the best it could be by a longshot.