Caravan SandWitch is a game in which the qualifiers really matter. It’s the post-apocalypse, but it’s also gentle and dreamy and kind of lovely. You’re looking for your missing sister, but in an unhurried, holidaying sort of way. The game’s futuristic landscape is based on Provence, and maybe it’s hard to get too serious about things in Provence. The rocks and mountains are the colour of milky coffee. The sky is endless blue. There’s a jouncy little van to take you from one mission spot to the next. Hey, even “mission” is too weighty a word.
This is not a game based around urgency, in other words, and so I spent the current Steam demo dawdling cheerily and poking around in the corners of the map. The demo gives you a good chunk of coastline to play in. Alongside a little town there are cliffs and strange water processing installations built into mountain walls. There’s scrabbly copses where you might find an abandoned building of some kind, and there are people, cheerful post-apocalyptic people who are feeding their babies or gathering items for a nice lunch.
My objective, not that I paid a huge amount of attention to it, was to collect technological scrap so that we could build some kind of antenna to track the location of a mayday signal we’d received. There was also a signal jammer along the coast somewhere that was blocking off an area of the map. These two things shuffled themselves together quite nicely over the next half hour, as I wandered off in my van to look for the signal jammer, and ended up finding a lot of scrap as I went.
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