Caravan SandWitch - Open World Done Right

"Get in, loser, we're dismantling the remnants of a mega corporation"

Open world games are a tricky genre to execute successfully. They’re all about balance, allowing freedom to explore, but some guardrails to guide the player as well. They shine their brightest when the world is actually designed with the player in mind, moving level geometry to give the player direction without making the environment feel like a hallway. I can count with one hand Open World games where every inch of the world feels purposely designed with both direction and freedom in mind. Caravan SandWitch does it so well it might already be a contender for my favorite game this year.

Developed by Plane Toast, Caravan SandWitch is (as you might’ve guessed) an Open World game focused on exploration, scavenging and driving around on your sexy caravan through the desert. The story revolves around Sauge coming back to her home planet Cigalo after receiving a distress signal from her sister who went missing years ago. Upon meeting the residents of her home planet, she learns that someone has been installing signal blockers around the area, and it’s her job to destroy them and return comms to the people of Cigalo, hoping that gets her closer to finding her sister.

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The World of Caravan SandWitch

The world building is fantastic. It explores the rural areas of a futuristic sci-fi world, and how people get by without easy access to food, water and money. The story explores the nuances of having big corporations in rural areas of a planet; the benefits of providing jobs for residents vs the damage they cause to the planet, but ultimately it’s very clear that the message is “capitalism bad”.

I love the industrial-desert setting this game takes place in. I’m normally not a fan of desert open worlds, as designers usually opt for making them feel empty and vast for the vibes, which ends up feeling boring (I heard some people talking about a Prime example). Not Caravan SandWitch – despite most of the world being just sand, it gives you multiple biomes to drive through, and several abandoned industrial buildings to explore.

The environment feels like walking through a history museum of an unknown world. The planet used to be leveraged for some sort of mining operation by The Consortium, your typical evil mega-corporation. They built several factories around Cigalo until the mysterious TAARASK incident occurred, so most of the exploration and scavenging happens within these abandoned facilities. It is so cool to learn the primary purpose of these buildings as you explore them, as they all make sense within the context of the world.

For a game of this nature, I was caught off guard by how many NPCs there are and their importance to the story. By doing side missions, you can explore several character’s backgrounds; how they ended up in Cigalo and what they do to survive. The designers made sure to have a very diverse cast from different backgrounds, personalities, races, and orientations, and I appreciate that very much. If you’re planning on playing this game, don’t sleep on the side content it offers, it’s truly one of the best aspects of this game.

I had no expectations for the story of this game, and I was blown away by how deep it is. I was already happy with the incredible world the developers created, but the story that takes place here is worth experiencing. I won’t get into spoilers, but I was genuinely shocked by some revelations in the main story missions.

Kudos to Caravan SandWitch for successfully telling a story in an open world game without constricting the exploration. Open world games of this nature normally deviate from telling a linear storyline because it can limit your freedom, but this game does an incredible job at handling that experience by separating the story into chapters and giving you story missions at an approachable pace.

Exploration is Everything

My favorite aspect of Caravan SandWitch is the balanced level of freedom it provides. The world has an accessible size – you can drive from one end to the other in just a few minutes – and provides you with a ton of places to visit. The entire world is open from the get-go and you can enter most abandoned buildings, but to keep a manageable pace, certain sections within these spaces are locked behind caravan upgrades. It encourages exploration while giving you reasons to come back to areas you’ve visited before. It was a ton of fun for me to make mental notes of places I wanted to revisit as soon as the new upgrade was available.

Caravan upgrades are tied to the story, but you still need to collect necessary parts to build them. You collect 4 different types of components (more of that in a second), and collecting all the requirements for a new part advances the story forward and opens up more sections for you to explore. It’s a gameplay loop that strikes a good balance between freedom, exploration, and continuing the narrative without being boring.

The Caravan is an extension of your character. It controls really well and has a lot of heft to it. You can tell the devs spend a lot of time refining the physics of your trusty caravan, as every hill or bump in the terrain makes the vehicle’s suspension bounce and adjust appropriately. Even the caravan’s speed feels intentionally fine-tuned where it moves at the perfect speed for navigating this world.

And this is how you spend most of your time playing: driving your Caravan across the world, and then going on foot to explore the old ruins looking for components. I was worried that the constant entering and exiting of the caravan would be tedious, but even that felt intentionally designed, since the devs opted to not have an animation for entering and exiting the caravan, making everything faster. Even when being far away from your caravan, the press of a single button takes you to it immediately.

Exploration is everything. Most of what you collect are electronic components belonging to broken pieces of machinery, each with different rarities depending on how well hidden they are: Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Exceptional. Each chapter poses a component quota you have to meet to obtain the caravan upgrade. If you naturally like exploring every single bit of a world, you will have no trouble obtaining the necessary components to continue with the story.

Inside the abandoned buildings, you will find several puzzles to solve. These are so organically designed into the environment that they don’t feel like a video game puzzle at all. Most puzzles revolve around moving energy around a building to open doors, activate bridges or set up ladders to continue exploring. I wouldn’t call them difficult by any means, but they are still very fun to solve. Sometimes the solution to a puzzle requires a Caravan upgrade, but the game still lets you go as far as you can, while collecting components in the process, so you never feel like every place is a dead end.

Something I love about this game’s exploration is that curiosity is always rewarded by rare components, hidden collectibles, or even additional world building. You can find several points of interest that unlock additional optional commentary for Sauge that provide more information on the world, her childhood or even the machinery. With no fall damage, no health, and no combat, it’s all about you driving through the dunes, scavenging for new components, and upgrading your caravan.

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Caravan SandWitch is an extremely well designed experience through and through. The world is vast, yet you never feel lost. The map is very reliable, but it’s not a necessity. It gives you enough side content to enjoy, characters to meet, and a bunch of world building. But its best quality is the perfectly balanced open world, guiding the player while encouraging self-exploration. It achieves all of that and more from a gameplay perspective, and still manages to tell a compelling story.

I could sit here and nitpick about the Nintendo Switch port being poorly optimized, but it would be just that, nitpicking. The game is so great that a few dropped frames and blurry textures could never hamper my experience of what is otherwise a masterpiece.

This game has climbed to be one of my favorite video games of all time. If I could imagine one game into existence with everything I love about video games, it would look exactly like Caravan SandWitch.