I stumbled upon a new game, Caravan SandWitch, by pure happenstance while browsing through Steam. I wasn’t looking for anything like it and I was completely unfamiliar with the developers, Studio Plane Toast. And so I wasn’t expecting this wonderful little game to be an experience that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Contrary to what the use of the word “Witch” in the title might lead you to believe, Caravan SandWitch is a sci-fi exploration game that focuses far more on the “Van” and “Sand” parts of the title. Our protagonist is Sauge, a young space resident who returns to her home planet of Cigalo after a 6 year absence to search for her thought-dead sister. She is promptly tasked with exploring the wastelands near her old village using a borrowed van, one of the last functioning vehicles left on the planet. Reconnect with the townsfolk, scrounge for the supplies needed to ensure the town’s survival, and uncover the mysteries surrounding what brought the planet to ruin and what happened to your sister.

The plot’s summary itself isn’t the main draw here, however. What makes SandWitch so special is absolutely nailing the various aspects of the game and seeing them culminate into something beautiful.

The Really Interesting Part

SandWitch knows exactly the type of game it wants to be and the story it wants to tell: a hopeful melancholy about family and rebuilding. To that end, the developers made the ultimately beneficial choice for the game to feature no combat whatsoever. The gameplay is dedicated exclusively to exploring this beautiful ravaged world in your van.

This has the effect of perfectly highlighting the main themes of the narrative. The world isn’t just void of enemies to fight, this wasteland is barren. The people of Cigalo aren’t battling mutants, aliens, or robots in their apolalypse; they’re dealing with the very human drama of surviving while cut off from the rest of the galaxy. Cigalo is a world that has been ecologically devastated by a space megacorporation who left the planet and its inhabitants behind. The story you tell as Sauge isn’t one of blasters and swords, its one of combing through the rubble after disaster to build something new and beautiful.

To this end, the character writing and emotional stakes are phenomenal. All of this plot and world-building is explored naturally through some of the best dialogue I’ve seen in ages. And since there is only a handful of NPC’s in the entire game, seeing a new face out in the wasteland immediately gets your attention. Especially when you meet the race of alien frog people native to Cigalo, who are wonderful and need to have merchandise made of them.

Player-friendly design? In my gameplay?

The gameplay is well crafted exploration and puzzles to complete quests and find resources, both for your own upgrades and for the people of Cigalo. Your main tools to aid in this endeavor are the titular van and its many unlockable functions. The van really ends up feeling like a constant companion rather than just a vehicle, so its a good thing it was designed to be easy and fun to use.

Exploration-heavy games often feature modes of transportation like horses and cars. I bring this up because I often end up not using these options because the design of exploration-heavy games tend to work better on foot. I’ll speed through the countryside on my cobbled together Zonai car and see something of interest; so I get as close as I can, park the car, and comb through the abandoned structure for all of its valuables. Now the car can’t really go up stairs, deal with narrow hallways, or climb sheer vertical surfaces, so it doesn’t serve any purpose while scavenging and I do all of that on foot. Then, just as I feel I’ve picked the site clean of all that it’s worth, oh look over there! Another close-by structure prime for looting. Aaand it’s up a hill that the car can’t handle, great. So I just leave the car behind and clamber over to the second site on foot, where-after I see another sandbox distraction, and at that point why bother even going back for the car? Assuming I can even find it.

SandWitch has circumvented this in several smart ways. One, there is always a HUD icon reminding you exactly where the van is at all times, so there’s no risk of losing it. And two, at literally any moment in time, you can teleport back to the van with one button press.

This blew my mind initially. It saves you so much time because after finishing something you don’t have to walk yourself all the way back before continuing on. I was almost immediately able to implement this in a clever way, parking the van outside of an elevator before exploring the interior. Once I was satisfied that I had seen everything on the other side of the loading screen, I zapped back to the van and continued on my merry way.

The van itself is also something that you want to be using. This indie game isn’t massive by AAA standards but the world was designed to be traversed by vehicle, so walking would take awhile. This isn’t even mentioning the van’s tools, many of which are vital to completing important puzzles. Out of all of these tools I want to mention the scanner, which you can use to highlight literally every single object of interest nearby.

I’m the type of player that will spend hours combing every single square inch of a game to make sure I missed absolutely nothing of value or interest. So for me, the scanner is another gamechanger. I don’t have to worry about missing something when the van scan plan confirms every single item nearby. Which frees me up to simply enjoy the puzzles of how to get to where I need to go. And doing one final scan of an entire structure before I leave gives me the confidence to move on OR lets me know that there’s something I need to come back for later.

All of these little design choices show tremendous care and thought by the developers. These are clearly people who play these types of games, who have had these issues and want to build in solutions. Plane Toast, your efforts have not gone unnoticed. And these high quality quality of life mechanics free up my mental bandwidth to simply play the game and enjoy the beautiful world that you’ve built.

Timeless Art Direction

What first drew me to the game was the visual design, which expertly combines cel-shaded character models with a stylized world design. While games that shoot for realistic visuals often age poorly, SandWitch has a style that I will never get tired of looking at. I want so many more games that look just like this.

Beyond just the style of the world, the environment is excellently crafted as well. Town, forest, desert, and abandoned structures all look great and evoke exactly the feelings they’re meant to, and you get a lot of variety between these locales. I feel particular attention was paid to rocky environments, which somehow manage to feel exactly as craggy and weathered as they should be without ultra high resolution textures or models. It might be weird to specifically praise a game’s rocks but these are some quality rocks.

And I must praise the soundtrack. The world-space wouldn’t be complete without the background ambiance, which pulled me in in a way I can’t recall experiencing in a game lately. Normally when I’m exploring in a game I’ll have a podcast or the like playing to give me words to focus on while I play, but for SandWitch I neither needed nor wanted that. I just wanted to exist in the world.

Also the main title song, Pensée Dérobé, is an excellent and surreal track that is still stuck in my head. The whole soundtrack was done by the artist Antynomy and you absolutely should give it a listen.

I Cannot Sell You This Game Hard Enough

The experience of playing this game has been such an unforeseen bright spot for me and I wish I could play it again for the first time. It’s one of my only Steam games where I went back to get every achievement because I didn’t want my time with the game to be over. I implore you to give it a look, I hope it resonates with you as much as it did for me. And I really hope to see more things like this, both from the amazingly talented developers and artists who made it and from the games industry at large.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to listen to Pensée Dérobé on loop for the entire foreseeable future.

Caravan SandWitch was made by Studio Plane Toast and is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch eShop, and PlayStation Store for PS5. All screenshots and art are property of Plane Toast

If you like this review, see what I have to say about Starfield here!