I just finished up playing Caravan Sandwitch, a sci-fi sandbox game released a few weeks ago, and let me tell you: I have not been this pleasantly surprised in a very long time.
Before I start talking about it, let's just look at it for a minute:
Gorgeous, non? And that music, ah, c'est beau. As someone whose favourite game is Wind Waker--and whose favourite bits of Wind Waker are the little chores you can perform on perfectly-formed little islands--this game feels like it was made just for me.
But what really struck me about Caravan Sandwitch is that it knows its scale and its scope. It's a sandbox game that is fully aware of the limitations of what that genre is increasingly known for--tedium and bloat, mostly--and ducks out on them altogether.
Caravan Sandwitch's world is fully explorable, but it's a pretty small space. It has a cast of characters to chat with and run errands for, but not many; over the course of its six or so hours you'll get to know everyone. It has a few puzzles but not enough to overwhelm, some platforming that never frustrates and a lot of driving, but it's never too far.
It doesn't even have combat. Not a single punch or shot. This is an open world that's so uninterested in using fighting as a solution to problems--or a motivation for its story--that it doesn't feature hostiles, you don't have a health bar and can't die, not even if you fall from its highest peak.
This could feel reductive, like we're only playing parts of a game, but this isn't trying to be anything bigger. Caravan Sandwitch is more interested in putting exploration and story in the spotlight, so that's what we get. The game is long enough to make us care about those things but short enough to stop it from feeling limited. By the time I was done with the game it had felt like the perfect little diversion. I'd been whisked away to a beautiful make-believe world, met some people, helped them out then rolled some credits, never once feeling stuck or cheated along the way.
Too many sandbox games these days feel like a sprawl, like you're drowning in tedium and empty space for the sake of a marketing bullet point boasting about the size of a map. Here, it feels weird to even call Caravan Sandwitch a sandbox game at all. This feels more like a snowglobe, an approximation of something bigger, perfectly formed in miniature.
I don't want to sound like I'm reducing everything else here that's so good about this game, all its wonderful writing and visual craft, to a simple matter of me enjoying its scale and pacing, but that was just so important here! Because nobody outstayed (and nothing outplayed) their welcome, my memories of Caravan Sandwitch are nothing but fond ones; I'll genuinely miss my little frog friends, the rooftop cafe, the whine of my busted old van that became my best friend over the course of my explorations.
I'll also miss the sweeping visuals, the beautiful countryside, the surprisingly slick soundtrack. Now that I'm done I'll just...miss everything about you, Caravan Sandwitch. We parted on the very best of terms, and it's very rare I can say that about a video game, no matter its size or budget.
