Casey Beaumaris, a young girl with journalistic ambitions, gets drafted for the weekend by her mother to help at the nursing home where she is the head nurse. The help itself does not entail much. In fact, it doesn’t require any work at all. Casey’s only job is to keep the patients company. And to listen. It’s a task that Casey takes on very reluctantly, but it is up to the player whether she goes on to perform it gracefully or not.

Many stories intertwine in this lovely interactive narrative, released in September 2022 by Australian studio Ghost Pattern, but you can only experience them once at a time. The stories never wait for you, so there are no triggers that will take you in any direction. You are free to roam, listen in, keep company, follow, help, just hang out, or even leave the room mid-conversation. You can read your journal and recall what you learned about the characters and the airship’s history. Not one play will be the same and the choices you make will impact mostly what you will end up learning, but not much of the story itself.

Wayward Strand is set in the year 1978, in a reality that is, in almost everything, similar to ours but somehow managed to make airships happen. It’s played in a decommissioned German luxury airliner, where this nursing home/healthcare facility is established and where all these wonderful stories come to reside. Funnily enough, it is also the only airship that can be seen in the landscape making it look like airships are not a thing that really caught on.

Why the seemingly curious choice of backdrop? Well, it’s an apt metaphor. These are the stories of lives in suspension. And what better setting than an object that doesn’t belong on the ground, but can’t reach the skies either because it’s still tethered? The airship itself is already very worn out, irreparably damaged, and retired from its previous functions. It used to host parties, now it’s a home for people in waiting. Literally sitting between sky and land, the allegory becomes confirmed in the wary words of Dr. Bouchard’s character: “Airborne purgatory”.

Even though there are no objectives and you are absolutely free to experience the game as you please (even by just sitting down and letting the time pass by), you’ll see that there is no shortage of things to do, especially if you love snooping around. Every story is rich in detail. Every character has a full life and even the ship itself has its own mysteries to uncover.

The game ends when three days pass. I finished it three times and every time the experience was different as I learned more about each character. I am yet to experiment with just letting time pass without talking to anybody. Or I could just choose to bond with only one character and ignore the others completely. Wayward Strand is very flexible like that, only limited by your imagination.

To be clear, this is a narrative experience and not a mystery game. There is nothing to solve, but there are plenty of things to discover, even about yourself. And there is an arch that is mostly Casey’s relationship with her mother. It is not too dramatic, though, and I very much appreciate that. Casey is still a sassy teen, but she can also be kind and thoughtful, while her mother is impatient and overworked, but highly competent, self-aware and very loving.

The only downside is a technical one. The game only allows you to save after each end of day (labeled “chapters”), but not at any point in the middle of it. So you are left with two options: either you play through one game day in a sitting (which takes a little over an hour), or you leave the game open when you need to take breaks. Hopefully, it will get sorted eventually, but even if it doesn’t, that aspect did not interfere with my enjoyment of the game in the slightest.

The longevity of this game is impressive. I still feel I have a lot more to discover and will definitely come back many times to see if I can experience all of it and hunt for the achievements I am yet to obtain (in a total of 30).

The music is in line with the beautiful simplicity of the game. The seemingly effortless and unpretentious melodies created by Maize Wallin, mostly with an acoustic guitar craftily paired up with beach sounds, are built in a way that will help you drift into daydreams. Good enough to hear on its own, so I would recommend downloading and enjoying it during a lazy day cosied up to a book and some herb tea.

Death and dying are intrinsically tied to the main theme of this game. Expected, given our setting. However, it is not dealt with dread or morbidity, but instead appropriately approached by the expression of normal human emotions: fearfulness, denial, anger, and acceptance. There is no sombreness, but more solemnity and even happiness.

Wayward Strand is mandatory if you consider yourself a fan of interactive narratives, as it is different from titles like Gone Home or Dear Esther : in Wayward Strand, you are experiencing the past and the present intertwined in a way that is still alive in the characters, seeing that they are not just mere repositories of narrative. They breathe their own lives into you. Whatever they share with you, you’ll carry that along long after you completed the task you were basically imposed.