Caravan SandWitch and the Reduncancy of Combat in Open World Games
Caravan SandWitch is a triumph in proving combat is entirely optional when creating a compelling open world adventure. As is made clear by the subsection of the genre SandWitch is playing in, the removal of physical violence is not a binary when it comes to conflict. Rather, other forms of friction can drive play in lieu of bloodshed; narrative can and does provide a struggle to overcome, while a puzzle- and navigation- centric approach can engage a player just as readily as any hack and slasher. This is no new revelation, yet it's a lesson that continues to be forgotten among works shying away from classic Gamer Bro sensibilities.
A World To Explore
Following in the footsteps of A Short Hike and Sable, Caravan SandWitch offers up an absorbing open world filled with discreet points of interest to explore, people to talk to and secrets to uncover. The world of Cigalo is easily the game's most impressive feature; bright and colourful, dense yet also sparse, and filled with a sense of history.
The destruction wrought on this place happened long before you landed, with your story to be uncovered by digging through the rubble left in the wake of shareholder greed. Strewn about the play space are various ruins of previous corporate exploitation, remnants of a large scale operation abandoned after a mysterious forever-storm altered the cost vs profit calculations of the suits considering spreadsheets over people. Luckily for us, these structures make for fun discrete puzzle boxes; combinations of switches, ladders and access pads to be navigated, unlocked and scavenged.
A Mobile Companion
Your Caravan is your anchor to this place of desert, forest and corporate ruin. Aside from a zipline pulley, every upgrade you obtain throughout your journey is focused on this neat little indestructible buddy. While how you traverse the landscape doesn't change throughout the 6-8 hour runtime, your caravan becomes an indispensable tool in puzzle solving and narrative progression.
The van becomes a constant companion, always by your side. Crucial in interacting with the environment and for delving further into half buried structures, as well as navigating across all forms of terrain, the caravan very much feels like an extension of the player character more than just about any other game. Rather than an optional tool to make travel faster, it gives exploration a very hub and spoke form: get in the van, drive to a spot, get out and explore around the area.
As if to hammer home this point of being always connected to the player, the van can be returned to at any point, from anywhere in the world, by hitting the triangle button. This makes the process of getting out on foot and clambering about incredibly freeing, skipping the tediousness of navigating back to your mobile companion. It's a small detail, but completely changes how you go about interacting with the world around you.
A Message That Matters
As you dig through abandoned concrete structures, most of what you pull from the wreckage are electrical components. this scavenging focus leads into one of the strongest themes of the game: self sufficiency.
Despite the world being fully open almost from the jump, the game takes place over chapters. The loop becomes comfortable fairly quickly; each chapter has a main objective which requires a certain amount of components, with a handful of side quests (some needing to be finished in that specific chapter) becoming available to help obtain said components (either by guiding you to places containing them, or as rewards for finishing the quests themselves).
Despite the planet being abandoned by its corporate overlords decades prior, small collectives of sentient beings live their lives in various forms of symbiosis with the environment they have found themselves in. Just about every side quest reinforces the idea of sustainability in concert with your surroundings - be it obtaining native seeds for growing food, understanding the relationship between a frog-like race and the mushrooms that sustain them, or helping a collection of sentient robots find collective peace in a central server in order to reduce their impact on the environment.
The culmination of the main story - a search for the main character’s long thought dead sister - focuses this idea of nature symbiosis as a juxtaposition against the corporations that simply seek profit via natural exploitation. Though, the English translation for the game does unfortunately let down the tear-jerker of a story down somewhat. You can very much tell this game is French, with the English option in need of some heavy editing.
The odd conversation response might barely make sense, with some sentences requiring a focused re-read to understand what the message is meant to be, and some words don’t quite fit their intended use. While this can unfortunately block the player fully connecting with the characters, intellectually you can still understand what is going on and why, and the strong personality of the game overall (alongside stellar audio design and soundtrack) help alleviate misunderstandings in straight dialogue or descriptions.
Caravan SandWitch stands as a strong example of how interesting themes and intriguing storytelling can exist without the need for combat systems bogging down the experience. Through joyful puzzle design and a fantastic little extension of the player in the caravan itself, this game is definitely a solid entry into the non-violent open world niche that comes fully recommended.