Caravan Sandwitch

Caravan SandWitch is a relaxing open-world adventure whose peaceful gameplay is focused mainly on exploration, solving light puzzles and interacting with the characters of the game world through dialogues and various quests. You take the role of a young girl called Sauge, who receives a distress signal from her sister’s ship, six years after she mysteriously vanished from their home planet Cigalo. Sauge then decides to travel back to Cigalo to find the source of the signal and further investigate the circumstances of her sister’s disappearance. Upon arrival, she finds the planet in a semi-apocalyptic state, with her family and friends being among the last survivors.

Caravan SandWitch’s gameplay consists mainly of exploring the wasteland of Cigalo in a cozy, rusty car-a-van and visiting every ruin to collect old computer parts or items needed for quests. The map is fairly small, and after a couple of hours of gameplay, you will have already become familiar with it like the back of your hand. However, the progression is heavily gated by the upgrades you can buy for your van, which obviously require a certain amount / type of computer parts to craft. Thus the gameplay loop boils down to visiting the major locations more or less every time you get a new upgrade (which happens 3-4 times in the game) that allows you to go one level further into the ruins. They’re designed in a linear way, making it very easy for the player to know where to go or what floors are blocked by not having unlocked a certain upgrade yet. The computer parts to collect are very abundant and found everywhere on the map, even outside ruined locations too (thus there will be no grinding for those), yet scattered in a way that motivates you to progressively visit new places. There’s some light puzzling involved in some locations, where you will need to press a button to activate doors and open new paths, but there’s nothing complicated about it, nor anything requiring deep logic.

The gadgets you can unlock for your van are very fun to use. Aside from a radar that will highlight all collectible components, doors, generators and other essential game elements within an area around the player, you will further unlock a grappling hook that can be attached to poles located on higher platforms, thus creating a zip line for you to slide up there. This will also be used to uncover hidden containers in the sand or to pull down doors, Mad Max style. With further van upgrades, you will be able to hack platforms and communication terminals, allowing you to read the secret messages that Sauge’s sister tried to send to Cigalo.

The story slowly unravels as you explore the planet and its abandoned compounds. It’s a sci-fi story that has an environmentalism theme at its core, as Cigalo’s now-arid habitat proves to be the result of human resource exploitation. The “SandWitch” in the title refers to the fact that Sauge’s every step is monitored from afar by an enigmatic creature presumed to belong to the controversial Sand Witches faction.

The peaceful vibe of Caravan SandWitch is given not only by the lack of combat but also by the interactions with the NPCs and their own stories filled with nostalgia. Aside from humans, two races live on the planet in harmony with the nomads, and their own narratives, shared as they prepare to soon become extinct, will also tug at your heartstrings. Everything here is topped up with an outstanding soundtrack, bound to stir up even more emotions inside you.

To fully complete Caravan SandWitch will take you around 12h-15h. While there is no requirement to collect all computer parts available, some of the achievements are extremely missable. The game offers a few very nice QoL features, such as returning to the van or the garage with a button press from any location, however, there’s nothing that can help players with these missable achievements. The hardest to obtain are the ones requiring you to use all the springboards and to visit all locations. These are indicated on the map, but not highlighted in any way when you visit them. More so, some locations are quite hidden even if they’re visible on the map (or reachable only by foot) and the game doesn’t naturally send you there through its storylines. It’s quite difficult to track these without any outside help, some of them also being very small. Having a check mark applied on the map whenever you use a springboard or visit a location would be a tremendous improvement. Without it, I ended up spending an extra 3 hours aimlessly roaming around, revisiting every visible spot on the map and while the game was a very pleasant experience for me, this last bit was quite infuriating.

I would compare Caravan SandWitch either to Lake (although Lake is mainly about driving your van to deliver packages) or to Death Stranding, although the latter is much more complex. It’s certainly a very chill and easy game, that I would warmly recommend to fans of cozy games and wholesome stories.