Epic
I wanted to love this game. Instead, I only liked it
i thought it was very very interesting. i need to get back to this one
Amo as histórias, odeio ser um esqueleto gigante andando pelos estados unidos
It could have been so much more
I love the idea of this game, the experiencing of so many little weird and wonderful and painful parts of a nation, and the sharing and telling and growth of those experiences into stories. And I did get that, occasionally.
But the rest of the game feels like a first draft of what could be. Editing issues, repetitive content, unpolished mechanics, and a lack of depth and meaning in at least half of the "main" stories.
But the rest of the game feels like a first draft of what could be. Editing issues, repetitive content, unpolished mechanics, and a lack of depth and meaning in at least half of the "main" stories.
In my top 5 favorite games. I understand it is not for everyone, the pacing is slow, the gameplay changes are small and progression can feel glacial. I don't see it that way though; walking from story to story i feel the world grow around. little stops and starts informed by the time period and region. Watching a story build and change as you share it, see your influence on the in game version of Americana is fascinating. I have replayed this game a half a dozen times already and I likely will continue to as the game itself feels akin to a good book being read in a comfy chair on a rainy day.
Lots of good ideas and tons of great talent working on the project almost entirely fumbled by critically trite design. They called it Where The Water Tastes Like Wine but only really gave you Water That Tastes Like Water and a few sips of Wine every couple of hours.
It's not bad just not my type of game. The walking speed is slow and there doesn't seem to be anything else except walking around and collecting stories.
I didn't finish this game. I started playing it like four weeks ago, played it all throughout a weekend, and haven't touched it since until I played a short while today. I can't imagine actually finishing this game.
I'll start by saying I really like the stories from the road. It's a nice varied collection of vignettes. Sometimes realistic, sometimes supernatural. Sometimes a microcosm of a longer narrative, sometimes just a happening you've seen on the road. The best of these stories can really sit with you. Also, I really like the mechanic of stories growing to be tall tales; it just jives with the actual phenomenon it's trying to show.
But, the game between those stories just isn't good. The character stories should be the anchor of this game; it's the thing that should be bringing you back until you traveled the whole country. But, for the most part, the character stories aren't really even stories; there's no development as you progress, instead you just learn more about the character. The first person you'll meet in this game is Quinn and, from what I've seen, that's the highlight of these stories. You get a sense of him growing more cynical between the chapters as people screw him over, and it's heartbreaking to see this kid's portrait transform into a grizzled wolf in the final chapter. Knowing that the final chapter for these stories features a new portrait got me excited to at least see what the art change is, even if I'm not particularly interested in the character. And then I got to Mason, and the final chapter portrait was just the lamest, most hack portrayal of PTSD I've ever seen. The character stories vary in quality, but at their worst, the characters are just overly broad depictions of a type of person in 20th century America (PTSD veteran, socialist coal miner, black porter, etc) that lack any characterization outside of their stereotype. It's offering depth to a stereotype, but not an actual character.
Also, the actual experience of playing the game just isn't fun. Traveling sucks no matter how you do it, and reorganizing your story inventory to try to maximize your effect on a character is just so lame a process. I think the biggest flaw in this game is that it's scope is just too big. Obviously traversing the entire country is a ridiculous ask, but I also think that there are just too many road stories. Like when you pass by Columbus, OH and there are three different stories popping up, you just have to rush through them. There's no time for the those stories (the best part of the game) to actually marinate, and soon you're looking at the story menu and trying to remember what the hell happened at the Creepy Sawmill in Cleveland.
The little vignette road stories are the best thing this game has going for it, and the game around it does a disservice to those stories, unfortunately.
I'll start by saying I really like the stories from the road. It's a nice varied collection of vignettes. Sometimes realistic, sometimes supernatural. Sometimes a microcosm of a longer narrative, sometimes just a happening you've seen on the road. The best of these stories can really sit with you. Also, I really like the mechanic of stories growing to be tall tales; it just jives with the actual phenomenon it's trying to show.
But, the game between those stories just isn't good. The character stories should be the anchor of this game; it's the thing that should be bringing you back until you traveled the whole country. But, for the most part, the character stories aren't really even stories; there's no development as you progress, instead you just learn more about the character. The first person you'll meet in this game is Quinn and, from what I've seen, that's the highlight of these stories. You get a sense of him growing more cynical between the chapters as people screw him over, and it's heartbreaking to see this kid's portrait transform into a grizzled wolf in the final chapter. Knowing that the final chapter for these stories features a new portrait got me excited to at least see what the art change is, even if I'm not particularly interested in the character. And then I got to Mason, and the final chapter portrait was just the lamest, most hack portrayal of PTSD I've ever seen. The character stories vary in quality, but at their worst, the characters are just overly broad depictions of a type of person in 20th century America (PTSD veteran, socialist coal miner, black porter, etc) that lack any characterization outside of their stereotype. It's offering depth to a stereotype, but not an actual character.
Also, the actual experience of playing the game just isn't fun. Traveling sucks no matter how you do it, and reorganizing your story inventory to try to maximize your effect on a character is just so lame a process. I think the biggest flaw in this game is that it's scope is just too big. Obviously traversing the entire country is a ridiculous ask, but I also think that there are just too many road stories. Like when you pass by Columbus, OH and there are three different stories popping up, you just have to rush through them. There's no time for the those stories (the best part of the game) to actually marinate, and soon you're looking at the story menu and trying to remember what the hell happened at the Creepy Sawmill in Cleveland.
The little vignette road stories are the best thing this game has going for it, and the game around it does a disservice to those stories, unfortunately.
this game is so fucking nice i wish i could be a travelling skeleton who gathers stories along his adventure
Where the Water Tastes like Wine is an indie narrative adventure game that fits right in with the other artsy adventure games of the last few years (KRZ, Disco) in tone, but diverges strongly in structure. You see, rather than following your own narrative really, you travel around the depression era USA and collect others’ narratives.
In particular, you’re trying to hear the stories of 16 particular people dotted around the country, and to do so you need to collect your own stories, watch them evolve, and impress/open up the people you’re seeking out. These stories don’t really have anything to do with each other besides the country they took place in, but when you mix them together you get a wonderful tapestry of experiences and emotions around the reconstruction, the depression, and the great war. My favorite was Jimmy, a black preacher who’d served in the war and seemed just, lost. There was no glory in it, and nobody saw him as anything more when he got home.
The game as a whole plays with the idea of story as both currency and power in itself, oftentimes the only thing keeping you going as you trudge from city to city. Which I guess I should talk about, as it’s easily the weak link here. In-between gorgeously rendered art of the characters and picking up random stories that could transform into any one of a number of classic folktales, you play as a skeleton walking on a giant, heavily stylized map of the United States. It really feels like something out of some illustration of a tall tale, and it’s gorgeous, if a little cheap looking sometimes. Unfortunately, I had loads of performance issues as I played, not much more than a stutter every couple minutes, but when you’re trudging slowly for minutes at a time, nothing else on your brain, it gets distracting.
Besides that though, my biggest issues with the map-walking are that it doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the game artistically, and that it’s just kinda thin. I would’ve much preferred an illustrated 2d map, but even then, something like that implies exploration, and you’re not really exploring so much as drifting, listening to stories. I’m not sure how to represent that with gameplay, but I don’t think this game does it well.
Still, the stories really are fantastic. They feel very true to life, and the voice acting and art accompanying them just elevates them to a wonderful level. The rest of it is passable enough, so if hearing cool, well-written stories about the 1930s sounds like your jam, you should definitely give this a shot. Plus it might run better on things that aren’t macs lmao.
In particular, you’re trying to hear the stories of 16 particular people dotted around the country, and to do so you need to collect your own stories, watch them evolve, and impress/open up the people you’re seeking out. These stories don’t really have anything to do with each other besides the country they took place in, but when you mix them together you get a wonderful tapestry of experiences and emotions around the reconstruction, the depression, and the great war. My favorite was Jimmy, a black preacher who’d served in the war and seemed just, lost. There was no glory in it, and nobody saw him as anything more when he got home.
The game as a whole plays with the idea of story as both currency and power in itself, oftentimes the only thing keeping you going as you trudge from city to city. Which I guess I should talk about, as it’s easily the weak link here. In-between gorgeously rendered art of the characters and picking up random stories that could transform into any one of a number of classic folktales, you play as a skeleton walking on a giant, heavily stylized map of the United States. It really feels like something out of some illustration of a tall tale, and it’s gorgeous, if a little cheap looking sometimes. Unfortunately, I had loads of performance issues as I played, not much more than a stutter every couple minutes, but when you’re trudging slowly for minutes at a time, nothing else on your brain, it gets distracting.
Besides that though, my biggest issues with the map-walking are that it doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the game artistically, and that it’s just kinda thin. I would’ve much preferred an illustrated 2d map, but even then, something like that implies exploration, and you’re not really exploring so much as drifting, listening to stories. I’m not sure how to represent that with gameplay, but I don’t think this game does it well.
Still, the stories really are fantastic. They feel very true to life, and the voice acting and art accompanying them just elevates them to a wonderful level. The rest of it is passable enough, so if hearing cool, well-written stories about the 1930s sounds like your jam, you should definitely give this a shot. Plus it might run better on things that aren’t macs lmao.
Great concept, boring gameplay.
Man, did I feel bad when I realized I just wasn't the demographic for this one. In no small part because I think I very much AM the demographic - I love short stories, I love storytelling, I love many of the contributors (Austin Walker, Cara Ellison, Kellan Jett to name a few) and I love Old West / Depression-era stories.
Unfortunately, I've always had a hang-up when it comes to listening to an actor recite lines that I can already see on screen. I've read the words, why should I wait for you to finish saying them? Likewise, your performance is good, so who am I to cut you off in the interest of time? It's so bad that it often becomes a mini-game in and of itself, me attempting to time the cut-off to what sounds like a reasonable end of a thought, even if it's not the complete line.
And unfortunately that's about all the gameplay there is here. For whatever reason, sensing this, Dim Bulb had the bright idea to make the map a real thing you could traverse, but in declining a road trip mechanic of some kind or anything other than the bare minimum (and somewhat inscrutable) stamina system the player is left to reckon directly with how slow, dull and ugly this part of the game is. It's not meditative or ponderous, it's purely a waste of time.
Random events are strewn across the map to attempt to add any flavor at all to this mess, and these are often the seeds for the stories you'll later tell the main characters, but once you meet these characters you realize they only want to hear certain types of stories, types of stories you haven't yet experienced or don't yet know how to tell the way they'd like you to tell them, it wasn't two hours before I felt unwanted and unappreciated by this game.
I'm glad some people found the avenue to loving this, and I'm deeply sad that the game's economics turned out so poorly for its clearly well-intentioned and well-connected developer, but this game is a spectacle of misfires the likes of which I rarely have the displeasure of experiencing.
Unfortunately, I've always had a hang-up when it comes to listening to an actor recite lines that I can already see on screen. I've read the words, why should I wait for you to finish saying them? Likewise, your performance is good, so who am I to cut you off in the interest of time? It's so bad that it often becomes a mini-game in and of itself, me attempting to time the cut-off to what sounds like a reasonable end of a thought, even if it's not the complete line.
And unfortunately that's about all the gameplay there is here. For whatever reason, sensing this, Dim Bulb had the bright idea to make the map a real thing you could traverse, but in declining a road trip mechanic of some kind or anything other than the bare minimum (and somewhat inscrutable) stamina system the player is left to reckon directly with how slow, dull and ugly this part of the game is. It's not meditative or ponderous, it's purely a waste of time.
Random events are strewn across the map to attempt to add any flavor at all to this mess, and these are often the seeds for the stories you'll later tell the main characters, but once you meet these characters you realize they only want to hear certain types of stories, types of stories you haven't yet experienced or don't yet know how to tell the way they'd like you to tell them, it wasn't two hours before I felt unwanted and unappreciated by this game.
I'm glad some people found the avenue to loving this, and I'm deeply sad that the game's economics turned out so poorly for its clearly well-intentioned and well-connected developer, but this game is a spectacle of misfires the likes of which I rarely have the displeasure of experiencing.
Don't know much about USA history or about this game but I really enjoyed the stories on it. Nice voice actors and fine art. Loved the true appareance of the characters.
Though the gameplay felt a bit long, maybe too much stories to collect or to complete. Or maybe was the movement, slow even though there are options for fast travel.
Nevertheless, it is quite an experience to play it and let those stories to get you.
After all, who doesn't like to hear a good story?
Though the gameplay felt a bit long, maybe too much stories to collect or to complete. Or maybe was the movement, slow even though there are options for fast travel.
Nevertheless, it is quite an experience to play it and let those stories to get you.
After all, who doesn't like to hear a good story?
great writing, but im not sure if ill play it again.
I gave this game a couple of chances but it's difficult for me personally to keep at it. Let me know if I'm misjudging the cons in case the game opens up much further in the game, which it doesn't as you get to the middle of the U.S.
The pros: the art and voice acting for each story bit is a good touch... and that's about it. The actual stories are good and well written but they are each criminally short and lack engagement other than "do X" or "do Y" sometimes.
The cons:
- Visuals: The art style outside of the story section doesn't look good personally - seems to try to have a cell-shaded art style but is very flat and bland due to the world being simple. Also, there's this weird shimmering that is very noticeable on the docked display where during story sections, both the text box and the actual image shimmer annoyingly. This doesn't happen in other switch games.
- Audio: the same 3 tracks of folk music, gets pretty grating. Some of the voice-acting is actually good and sounds professional (narrator, hobo boy). Others sound like they're a random dev recording inside a cardboard box lol.
- Technical: performance is really bad for what the game is trying to achieve on the switch hardware. The radial menu to select stories is extremely finicky and at some points bugs out spamming a choice from the analog screen. Additionally, difficult menu navigation during storytelling.
- Gameplay: just.. walking. You can whistle which slightly increases speed and hitchhike, hop trains, and pay trains which is tedious to do (time, health, and money penalties respectively). It's all extremely slow.
- Progression: to complete the game, you have to track down 16 separate NPCs through the huge map of the U.S. (which is already really slow). You have to give the types of stories they ask for but even if you do, you could only progress them if you track them down somewhere else on the map and give them brand new stories they want to hear. This is done for each character, for multiple chapters, running after them a huge map that's tedious to navigate.
Ended up dropping it when I realized how tedious the game was, that it wasn't worth it to stick through for the more interesting micro-stories.
The pros: the art and voice acting for each story bit is a good touch... and that's about it. The actual stories are good and well written but they are each criminally short and lack engagement other than "do X" or "do Y" sometimes.
The cons:
- Visuals: The art style outside of the story section doesn't look good personally - seems to try to have a cell-shaded art style but is very flat and bland due to the world being simple. Also, there's this weird shimmering that is very noticeable on the docked display where during story sections, both the text box and the actual image shimmer annoyingly. This doesn't happen in other switch games.
- Audio: the same 3 tracks of folk music, gets pretty grating. Some of the voice-acting is actually good and sounds professional (narrator, hobo boy). Others sound like they're a random dev recording inside a cardboard box lol.
- Technical: performance is really bad for what the game is trying to achieve on the switch hardware. The radial menu to select stories is extremely finicky and at some points bugs out spamming a choice from the analog screen. Additionally, difficult menu navigation during storytelling.
- Gameplay: just.. walking. You can whistle which slightly increases speed and hitchhike, hop trains, and pay trains which is tedious to do (time, health, and money penalties respectively). It's all extremely slow.
- Progression: to complete the game, you have to track down 16 separate NPCs through the huge map of the U.S. (which is already really slow). You have to give the types of stories they ask for but even if you do, you could only progress them if you track them down somewhere else on the map and give them brand new stories they want to hear. This is done for each character, for multiple chapters, running after them a huge map that's tedious to navigate.
Ended up dropping it when I realized how tedious the game was, that it wasn't worth it to stick through for the more interesting micro-stories.
Sights & Sounds
- The visual design is a bit of a mixed bag. The artwork for the characters and story cards is amazing. The kind of stuff you'd want to buy prints of and hang on your wall. The main map where you spend most of your time, however, is fairly barren, largely uninteresting to look at despite the amount of time you spend looking at it, and maybe even a little ugly
- There's some intriguing sound design choices that wind up falling flat on their face due to the game's other deficiencies. I love the idea of having a central musical motif that changes as you visit other parts of the country. Unfortunately, you spend so long on the map that you'll grow weary of the same lyrics over and over again. At this point, I think I even know the Spanish version. In a vacuum, the song would be really good, but I don't think I ever want to hear it again
- The voice acting is pretty good. No complaints there
Story & Vibes
- A wolf tells you to go collect stories in the US for him to eat. I'm sure it's an allegory I don't quite understand
- The game takes place in the US, obviously, but the time period is intentionally ambiguous. It appears to be basically anytime and everytime in between 1890 and 1970
- At its best, the game is soulful, beautiful, and enigmatic. The art and music in the character transformation sequences are a feast for the senses. The character-focused stories that precede these are genuinely interesting and well-written as well
- Those moments are brief. The remainder of the game is mind-numbingly boring and honestly takes too long to complete. There's no payoff to the story, either. You just walk slowly around a map for several hours experiencing brief moments of whimsy until the game ends with no fanfare and barely any intrigue. The ending isn't bad on its own; I probably could have enjoyed it if the game weren't so monotonous
Playability & Replayability
- As you travel the country, you'll pick up little stories at the various locations you visit on the map. Some of them are familiar Americana (Paul Bunyan, the devil at the crossroads, La Llorona, etc), but others appear to be original. Compiling all these stories, even as small vignettes, is pretty impressive, and they're pretty cool to read. I liked the city-specific ones too
- These stories can grow and "level up" as they evolve into more unrealistic (but more exciting) versions of the actual events. These leveled up stories are important tools for entertaining the named recurring characters you meet along the way
- These named characters, 8 in total, appear at campsites that move around on the map. As you chat with them at their fire, they'll request stories with different emotional affects (funny, exciting, scary, sad, etc). If you pick an appropriate story, you'll learn a bit more about that character. Repeatedly succeeding at this task as you follow their campsite around will eventually transform the character and unlock their story for use at other campsites. These character stories function as wildcards and are pretty useful
- All of this would be enjoyable if your PS2 skeleton hobo didn't shamble across the map so slowly. Sure, there's ways built into the game to move across the US faster, but they have annoying drawbacks that make them more inconvenient then hitting the autowalk button and doing something else for a while. The trains cost money (you won't have much) and may or may not be headed in the direction you want to go. The "fast-walk" requires you to play a rhythmless rhythm game while skeleton bum whistles atonally (and in grating contrast to the background music). You may notice that if you're trying to control your direction and camera at the same time, you may not have another hand free for the rhythm game, so be prepared to alternate awkwardly between that and the camera. You'll eventually abandon all efforts of using it anyway when you realize it doesn't make you move appreciably faster. Even the fast-travel is only marginally useful; fast-travel locations are contingent on completing character stories, and there's no real reason to return to a region of the country after you've completed the character stories there
- The decision to never change the gameplay loop in any way whatsoever during the entire 10+ hours of the game adds a nuanced layer to the tedium
Overall Impressions & Performance
- This game takes a bunch of appealing ideas, memorable stories, catchy music, and gorgeous artwork, then arranges them in the least appetizing way possible
- To analogize the gameplay loop, imagine that you are going to see a highly-anticipated movie. Instead of watching it normally, you're required to leave your seat and walk--not run or jog--a lap around the theater's parking lot while the same Old Crow Medicine Show song plays on loop to advance the movie 15 minutes. Sure, the film is nice, but you spend most of your time looking at a flat surface with lines on it while being behaviorally conditioned to hate banjos
- While walking around the map, I frequently experienced inexplicable framerate issues on a setup that has no trouble playing modern AAA games
Final Verdict
- 3/10. If the entire game were scaled down (or maybe if the travel options were better), it would have been a better experience. It's frustrating how the pacing subverts every effort you make to enjoy the game
- The visual design is a bit of a mixed bag. The artwork for the characters and story cards is amazing. The kind of stuff you'd want to buy prints of and hang on your wall. The main map where you spend most of your time, however, is fairly barren, largely uninteresting to look at despite the amount of time you spend looking at it, and maybe even a little ugly
- There's some intriguing sound design choices that wind up falling flat on their face due to the game's other deficiencies. I love the idea of having a central musical motif that changes as you visit other parts of the country. Unfortunately, you spend so long on the map that you'll grow weary of the same lyrics over and over again. At this point, I think I even know the Spanish version. In a vacuum, the song would be really good, but I don't think I ever want to hear it again
- The voice acting is pretty good. No complaints there
Story & Vibes
- A wolf tells you to go collect stories in the US for him to eat. I'm sure it's an allegory I don't quite understand
- The game takes place in the US, obviously, but the time period is intentionally ambiguous. It appears to be basically anytime and everytime in between 1890 and 1970
- At its best, the game is soulful, beautiful, and enigmatic. The art and music in the character transformation sequences are a feast for the senses. The character-focused stories that precede these are genuinely interesting and well-written as well
- Those moments are brief. The remainder of the game is mind-numbingly boring and honestly takes too long to complete. There's no payoff to the story, either. You just walk slowly around a map for several hours experiencing brief moments of whimsy until the game ends with no fanfare and barely any intrigue. The ending isn't bad on its own; I probably could have enjoyed it if the game weren't so monotonous
Playability & Replayability
- As you travel the country, you'll pick up little stories at the various locations you visit on the map. Some of them are familiar Americana (Paul Bunyan, the devil at the crossroads, La Llorona, etc), but others appear to be original. Compiling all these stories, even as small vignettes, is pretty impressive, and they're pretty cool to read. I liked the city-specific ones too
- These stories can grow and "level up" as they evolve into more unrealistic (but more exciting) versions of the actual events. These leveled up stories are important tools for entertaining the named recurring characters you meet along the way
- These named characters, 8 in total, appear at campsites that move around on the map. As you chat with them at their fire, they'll request stories with different emotional affects (funny, exciting, scary, sad, etc). If you pick an appropriate story, you'll learn a bit more about that character. Repeatedly succeeding at this task as you follow their campsite around will eventually transform the character and unlock their story for use at other campsites. These character stories function as wildcards and are pretty useful
- All of this would be enjoyable if your PS2 skeleton hobo didn't shamble across the map so slowly. Sure, there's ways built into the game to move across the US faster, but they have annoying drawbacks that make them more inconvenient then hitting the autowalk button and doing something else for a while. The trains cost money (you won't have much) and may or may not be headed in the direction you want to go. The "fast-walk" requires you to play a rhythmless rhythm game while skeleton bum whistles atonally (and in grating contrast to the background music). You may notice that if you're trying to control your direction and camera at the same time, you may not have another hand free for the rhythm game, so be prepared to alternate awkwardly between that and the camera. You'll eventually abandon all efforts of using it anyway when you realize it doesn't make you move appreciably faster. Even the fast-travel is only marginally useful; fast-travel locations are contingent on completing character stories, and there's no real reason to return to a region of the country after you've completed the character stories there
- The decision to never change the gameplay loop in any way whatsoever during the entire 10+ hours of the game adds a nuanced layer to the tedium
Overall Impressions & Performance
- This game takes a bunch of appealing ideas, memorable stories, catchy music, and gorgeous artwork, then arranges them in the least appetizing way possible
- To analogize the gameplay loop, imagine that you are going to see a highly-anticipated movie. Instead of watching it normally, you're required to leave your seat and walk--not run or jog--a lap around the theater's parking lot while the same Old Crow Medicine Show song plays on loop to advance the movie 15 minutes. Sure, the film is nice, but you spend most of your time looking at a flat surface with lines on it while being behaviorally conditioned to hate banjos
- While walking around the map, I frequently experienced inexplicable framerate issues on a setup that has no trouble playing modern AAA games
Final Verdict
- 3/10. If the entire game were scaled down (or maybe if the travel options were better), it would have been a better experience. It's frustrating how the pacing subverts every effort you make to enjoy the game
Wasted potential - the video game.
The premise of the game is one that is absolutely dear to me: The power of stories, how they connect us, how they can change our lives a little bit. Personally, I believe that humans were made to tell and share stories, it's in our blood. They're something really sacred.
It pains me even more to admit that almost everything about Where the Water Tastes Like Wine felt pretty undercooked. From the practically useless map to its weird approach to plot progression, nothing really clicked with me.
Although I found some of the stories in the game rather beautiful, they felt also very shallow. I grew tired of the whole concept after playing for a bit, mostly because some of the tales you hear were quite similar to each other and never felt unique enough to actually be rememberable.
That being sad, I appreciate what the devs were trying to do. Just wish they would have thought about this a bit more before releasing it. The soundtrack is wonderful, though.
The premise of the game is one that is absolutely dear to me: The power of stories, how they connect us, how they can change our lives a little bit. Personally, I believe that humans were made to tell and share stories, it's in our blood. They're something really sacred.
It pains me even more to admit that almost everything about Where the Water Tastes Like Wine felt pretty undercooked. From the practically useless map to its weird approach to plot progression, nothing really clicked with me.
Although I found some of the stories in the game rather beautiful, they felt also very shallow. I grew tired of the whole concept after playing for a bit, mostly because some of the tales you hear were quite similar to each other and never felt unique enough to actually be rememberable.
That being sad, I appreciate what the devs were trying to do. Just wish they would have thought about this a bit more before releasing it. The soundtrack is wonderful, though.
Interesting and creativie concept with well written characters but wears out its welcome very quickly. Sort of janky in terms of production which really hurts the atmosphere . Music choices are also somewhat bizarre and get old very quickly unless you just so happen to love the pop-folk song playing the whole time. Overall just a bit of a tedious game. Almost felt like I was being catfished by the trailer because it looked so promising there.
Wandering through the countryside and collecting the stories was such a unique experience, I've never encountered another game quite like this. I spent hours immersed in this world and it really made me think about the power of storytelling... and it was always fun to see one of my threads evolve into a story I recognized from real life!
Unfortunately once you clear out more of the map it starts to get a bit tedious to walk around and the storytelling aspect becomes a bit grindy. But the journey is beautiful even if the ending isn't perfect.
Unfortunately once you clear out more of the map it starts to get a bit tedious to walk around and the storytelling aspect becomes a bit grindy. But the journey is beautiful even if the ending isn't perfect.
This review contains spoilers
A Note: This reveiw is a slightly edited version of a previous review I made on Steam.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is probably the perfect example of a "Diamond in the Rough" kind of game. A majority of the game play is a walking simulator, traveling between towns and cities, collecting stories and speaking to the sixteen characters(seventeen, if you count The Dire Wolf voiced by Sting, whom you can only speak to if and when you die) who are the closest thing to a "main objective" you have in the game. The stories you can collect range from hopping into a taxi and seeing the future, to meeting a man who makes molasses, to encountering a fish fishing for people, and even encounter famous characters from American Folk Tales, such as The Jersey Devil, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and even that oh so classic villain of American folk lore, none other than The Devil himself (Whom you can meet Twice, too, considering there's an achievement for it and all).
As you encounter these various tales, you'll find that as you tell them, they'll rather quickly grow and change from your initial encounters. The story about a lighthouse that is home to a pair of gay lighthouse keepers in love evolves into a lighthouse sanctuary for lovers and then to a magical lantern that can detect true love, or the story of the bull that kills travelers that changes into the bull king seeking vengeance which changes into the Devil taking on the form of a bull to terrorize sinners. So much of the game focuses on these strange and wild tales, but sadly it only uses them for a single purpose, as puzzle pieces to unlock conversations with the main Sixteen/Seventeen characters.
Now, don't get me wrong. Many of their stories are touching, sad, haunting, or all of the above. Some of my favorites(without major spoilers) are Ray, the Cowboy who loves a desert that is rapidly being fenced in and away under the control of the government and various private citizens, Little Ben, the fugitive Coal Miner wanted for joining one of America's first Unions, Alathea, the Blues Singer who made a perfect deal with the devil, only for the devil to show why he always wins, and Cassady, the poet stuck constantly thinking of the man he loves. These characters and the other twelve all have stories you must parse out, by telling them the many stories you've encountered during your travels.
This one area, the retelling of the tales, is personally one of the biggest failings of the game, because you don't actually get to "Tell the Tale". You don't get to spin the yarn, change the story as you go, or even get much in the way of forewarning about what kind of story you're telling. The characters will simply request a "Funny" story, or a "Hopeful" one, or an "Exciting" one, and when you choose one, the scene will shift to a gray background where the illustration representing the story will pop up, along with words that go along the lines of "You told them the story of the Cow with Scales" or some such. And that's it.
Add onto this how the names of the stories can be misleading to the tone the story actually has, or how the evolution of the story can change the tone completely, at least in theory, but not in the slightest in practice. For example, the tale of the Graverobber in the Indian Burial Mound whom I scared away to never return by telling him scary stories about ghosts is a pretty sad story. The tale of the Native American Robin Hood who Rescues the Remains of his People from the thieving white man sounds more like a hopeful adventure story, yet somehow retains the exact same tone as the original version in game.
Another odd part is the "True Stories", those stories of the Sixteen characters you're tasked with collecting, which can be used to help you with other characters, but are better than normal stories because these ones can be used with any request and still work. But, thematically speaking, they make no sense. Like, how can I focus on the "Funny Parts" of the WWI Vet's story about his brother dying. I mean, what the hell man? Or how do you focus on the "Scary Parts" of the Pullman Porter's story of being a black porter for a train company?
A few more things I disliked but felt a bit petty on my part or kinda stupid on the developers part.
While I never encountered any major glitches, I did encounter about half a dozen graphical bugs, such as flickering textures on the overworld and the like.
Despite having originally been released on the PC exclusively and only getting console ports a year after it's release, this game's controls are horridly designed for PC players, and don't even allow you to rebind buttons.
The hitchhiking system feels a tad half baked, mainly because you can hitch a ride with one car and get dropped off less than ten feet down the road, and with a second car get stuck in there for 8 states and completely miss the one place you were trying to get to because there's no way to just hop out of the freaking cars before they force you out.
Oh yeah, and the last achievement is actually impossible to get without cheating, as there isn't a place Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, because the place Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is actually when you're with good company. And like yeah, I get it, friendship and kindness are more important than any earthly Eden, but say that in the actual game, don't make it impossible to 100% your game. Or heck, they could have hidden the achievement behind you collecting all 200+ stories in the game world, and maybe have the Dire Wolf and/or the Narrator say something along the lines of how despite collecting all these stories, there still isn't a real place Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, because the real place is when you're with the people you met on your long journey or some such.
Yet, despite everything, I still love this game. The stories are sad, hopeful, inspiring, funny, and so much more. While I wouldn't recommend the game to everyone, I would recommend Where the Water Tastes Like Wine to just about anyone who's willing to put themselves through less than perfect game play for what believe is a rich and immensely rewarding set of stories.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is probably the perfect example of a "Diamond in the Rough" kind of game. A majority of the game play is a walking simulator, traveling between towns and cities, collecting stories and speaking to the sixteen characters(seventeen, if you count The Dire Wolf voiced by Sting, whom you can only speak to if and when you die) who are the closest thing to a "main objective" you have in the game. The stories you can collect range from hopping into a taxi and seeing the future, to meeting a man who makes molasses, to encountering a fish fishing for people, and even encounter famous characters from American Folk Tales, such as The Jersey Devil, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and even that oh so classic villain of American folk lore, none other than The Devil himself (Whom you can meet Twice, too, considering there's an achievement for it and all).
As you encounter these various tales, you'll find that as you tell them, they'll rather quickly grow and change from your initial encounters. The story about a lighthouse that is home to a pair of gay lighthouse keepers in love evolves into a lighthouse sanctuary for lovers and then to a magical lantern that can detect true love, or the story of the bull that kills travelers that changes into the bull king seeking vengeance which changes into the Devil taking on the form of a bull to terrorize sinners. So much of the game focuses on these strange and wild tales, but sadly it only uses them for a single purpose, as puzzle pieces to unlock conversations with the main Sixteen/Seventeen characters.
Now, don't get me wrong. Many of their stories are touching, sad, haunting, or all of the above. Some of my favorites(without major spoilers) are Ray, the Cowboy who loves a desert that is rapidly being fenced in and away under the control of the government and various private citizens, Little Ben, the fugitive Coal Miner wanted for joining one of America's first Unions, Alathea, the Blues Singer who made a perfect deal with the devil, only for the devil to show why he always wins, and Cassady, the poet stuck constantly thinking of the man he loves. These characters and the other twelve all have stories you must parse out, by telling them the many stories you've encountered during your travels.
This one area, the retelling of the tales, is personally one of the biggest failings of the game, because you don't actually get to "Tell the Tale". You don't get to spin the yarn, change the story as you go, or even get much in the way of forewarning about what kind of story you're telling. The characters will simply request a "Funny" story, or a "Hopeful" one, or an "Exciting" one, and when you choose one, the scene will shift to a gray background where the illustration representing the story will pop up, along with words that go along the lines of "You told them the story of the Cow with Scales" or some such. And that's it.
Add onto this how the names of the stories can be misleading to the tone the story actually has, or how the evolution of the story can change the tone completely, at least in theory, but not in the slightest in practice. For example, the tale of the Graverobber in the Indian Burial Mound whom I scared away to never return by telling him scary stories about ghosts is a pretty sad story. The tale of the Native American Robin Hood who Rescues the Remains of his People from the thieving white man sounds more like a hopeful adventure story, yet somehow retains the exact same tone as the original version in game.
Another odd part is the "True Stories", those stories of the Sixteen characters you're tasked with collecting, which can be used to help you with other characters, but are better than normal stories because these ones can be used with any request and still work. But, thematically speaking, they make no sense. Like, how can I focus on the "Funny Parts" of the WWI Vet's story about his brother dying. I mean, what the hell man? Or how do you focus on the "Scary Parts" of the Pullman Porter's story of being a black porter for a train company?
A few more things I disliked but felt a bit petty on my part or kinda stupid on the developers part.
While I never encountered any major glitches, I did encounter about half a dozen graphical bugs, such as flickering textures on the overworld and the like.
Despite having originally been released on the PC exclusively and only getting console ports a year after it's release, this game's controls are horridly designed for PC players, and don't even allow you to rebind buttons.
The hitchhiking system feels a tad half baked, mainly because you can hitch a ride with one car and get dropped off less than ten feet down the road, and with a second car get stuck in there for 8 states and completely miss the one place you were trying to get to because there's no way to just hop out of the freaking cars before they force you out.
Oh yeah, and the last achievement is actually impossible to get without cheating, as there isn't a place Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, because the place Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is actually when you're with good company. And like yeah, I get it, friendship and kindness are more important than any earthly Eden, but say that in the actual game, don't make it impossible to 100% your game. Or heck, they could have hidden the achievement behind you collecting all 200+ stories in the game world, and maybe have the Dire Wolf and/or the Narrator say something along the lines of how despite collecting all these stories, there still isn't a real place Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, because the real place is when you're with the people you met on your long journey or some such.
Yet, despite everything, I still love this game. The stories are sad, hopeful, inspiring, funny, and so much more. While I wouldn't recommend the game to everyone, I would recommend Where the Water Tastes Like Wine to just about anyone who's willing to put themselves through less than perfect game play for what believe is a rich and immensely rewarding set of stories.
Interesting concept - I like the idea of sharing stories and seeing them develop and change over time. The main gameplay itself leaves a bit to be desired, but overall I enjoyed it and loved the aesthetic. It's a bit slow at times, but like I said the concept is on point and I had enjoyed it.
I really wanted to get into it but it's too slow and too vast for me to enjoy.
The game is very unique and ambitious, I appreciate it for these qualities but it lacks refinement and you have to be in a very zen mindset to get into it. I'm not there at the moment
The game is very unique and ambitious, I appreciate it for these qualities but it lacks refinement and you have to be in a very zen mindset to get into it. I'm not there at the moment
I was shocked to discover that zero of the three auxiliary volume sliders turn down the whistling - apparently it is not music, sound, or voice, but some unholy convergence of the three. Some of the writing is good, but none of it is exactly Flannery O'Connor, and Flannery O'Connor won't force you to snail-crawl across an identikit Unity texture package for twenty hours while whistling the same eight bars directly into your ear.
This game is currently in the Humble Choice for December 2022, this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before January 3th, 2023, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.
A game for story lovers.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is strange. You’re a player trying to find true stories, as you cross the United States as a skeleton. You find normal stories as you travel but also run into 16 characters, each one asking you to tell them stories before they start to tell you their real story. The stories become your currency but also your goal.
What’s exciting about Where Water Tastes Like Wine is how it evolves the folk tales told. A simple interaction becomes a tall tale that continues to grow over time. The evolution shows the power of writing and story crafting. It doesn’t hurt that the game is narrated by an amazing voice, and uses different voices for each character. Though the one issue I have is he’s a little slow if you’re a fast reader, but his voice and delivery are perfect, which makes sense because that's Sting from The Police. Wut?
Pick this up if you’re enamored with stories, this is the perfect game for someone who loves narratives in video games and just sitting back and enjoying each campfire story to the fullest is exceptional. The gameplay also is unique as you try to use your stories to satisfy the requests of the strangers you run into. But that also might be why someone will skip this game. I however will return.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/EazjkOuE3A0
A game for story lovers.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is strange. You’re a player trying to find true stories, as you cross the United States as a skeleton. You find normal stories as you travel but also run into 16 characters, each one asking you to tell them stories before they start to tell you their real story. The stories become your currency but also your goal.
What’s exciting about Where Water Tastes Like Wine is how it evolves the folk tales told. A simple interaction becomes a tall tale that continues to grow over time. The evolution shows the power of writing and story crafting. It doesn’t hurt that the game is narrated by an amazing voice, and uses different voices for each character. Though the one issue I have is he’s a little slow if you’re a fast reader, but his voice and delivery are perfect, which makes sense because that's Sting from The Police. Wut?
Pick this up if you’re enamored with stories, this is the perfect game for someone who loves narratives in video games and just sitting back and enjoying each campfire story to the fullest is exceptional. The gameplay also is unique as you try to use your stories to satisfy the requests of the strangers you run into. But that also might be why someone will skip this game. I however will return.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/EazjkOuE3A0
john steinbeck's "depression quest"
It was only two hours into my playthrough of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine that I realized how much of a slog it was going to be. Within that two-hour timeframe, you will have seen everything you need to know about the game: that is, what you will be doing for the next 8 or so hours should you choose to stay in for the long haul, a venture that I do not endorse in any way.
Where the Water is theoretically premised on the concept of stories- how they evolve, drive mythologies, and convey truths and lies. The narrative involves you losing a game of cards to a Devilish-figure, who gives you a chance to repay him via collecting tales strewn throughout the land.
It’s a fascinating idea, but there’s a reason I used the word “theoretically”- it falters completely. An atrocious open world combined with a lack of presentation makes for a wasted premise.
Let’s talk about that first part- open worlds games have come under scrutiny in recent years over their interiors- once the wonder of being able to walk to the farthest horizon wears off, it appears most gamers care about the quality of the actual content. If you’re just providing copy/pasted vistas and repetitive side stuff ad nauseam, then you are not going to find much love from the gaming community.
And such was the case here. Where the Water has the worst open world I have ever had the privileged misfortune to experience. It’s an example of a concept that should have never even gotten to that stage- a concept that would have worked far better as a purely or near-purely linear video game. You have the entire (scaled) continental United States open at your fingertips, only to find that it is literally the same copy/pasted terrain, mountains, rivers, and cityscapes sprinkled everywhere minus some reskinned hues done in a pathetic attempt to reflect geographical changes.
But that wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing if the actual content was diverse, but no, you find stories the exact same way- walking to a spot on the map and pressing X. Other activities like earning/losing money or seeing a pretold story grow are done the same way: walk over to a spot on the map and press X. It’s a walking simulator with barely any kind of exploration that would have at least made the journey between all the areas all the more exciting.
Compounding THIS part even further is the horrible navigation. While a lot of points are within reach, there are a number of larger character arcs that are spread across multiple states, and the walking mechanic is PAINFULLY slow. Like, slow as in it’ll bring back memories of the beginning of Morrowind. Perhaps realizing this, the developers put in the ability to move quicker via a whistling minigame reminiscent of the QTE system from Fahrenheit, as well as hitchhiking through passing cars. But both of these have their own issues: the former only has one song, meaning it can come at odds with the music playing in the background, and either way doesn’t move you particularly fast, while with the latter, you cannot decree when you will stop, meaning sometimes you will only move a few feet more before getting kicked out, or other times go past your intended destination before departing. Trains are available as a fast travel option, but they’re not universally connected meaning you’ll have to take multiple ones, and because those cost money you most likely won’t have enough to do successive trips- and while train hopping is an option (minus the risk of getting beaten up), these have even MORE limited destinations, making them not helpful for any place not closeby. Oh, and to top it all off, all of these trigger MASSIVE framerate drops that essentially render them not worth doing in the end.
Rivers are an infuriating aspect as well- you are only able to cross them at certain ford junctures, but their placement is haphazard and can often result in you having to walk a considerable distance just to find them- a simple solution would’ve been just to allow the player to walk across waterways- it’s not like it’s imperative to any learning curve or game mechanic.
The only positive thing I can say about Where the Water’s open world is that the music changes depending on what state/region you are in, and the score is so wonderful that these changes feel natural and awesome (more on that below), but that’s about it.
Graphically, Where the Water has a solid art style. I wish I was more educated in art history to give an accurate description of what it was Dim Bulb Games and Serenity Forge were trying to evoke, but it definitely seemed to be some kind of pastoral vibe. Every area has a limited color palette that, combined with simple shapes, goes a long way towards radiating a rural ecosystem, and it works. This is a beautiful overworld that screams Americana. Close-ups of characters, both small-time and large-scale, are done in a colored pencil aesthetic that comes off as hand-drawn, with excellent chiaroscuro conveying shadows and lighting perfectly. In the macro world, a dynamic day/night system has been implemented to showcase hourly changes.
Unfortunately, graphical hitches take away from this beauty. I mentioned the framerate drops above, but other smaller things like constantly clipping through every object you walk through and inconsistent shadowmapping for the clouds above are also prevalent. Finally there’s the fact that, as well-crafted as all the main NPCs are, their blinking eyes feel creepy and out-of-place!
Sound is a massive disappointment if only because it’s practically nonexistent- there’s no effect for walking, driving, collecting, or really anything. I don’t even think riding trains had any discernible audio. It’s like the devs didn’t even bother trying to implement anything, which is a crime for this title in particular for a couple of reasons: one, as a walking sim, sound is necessary in evoking an atmosphere, working in conjunction with music to craft a distinct identity, and two, the individual stories would have benefited TREMENDOUSLY from unique sonority, turning them into radio plays of sorts that would have made up for the lack of presentation (more on that below).
Thankfully, the music is on the opposite end of the spectrum. My gosh, is this one of the best OSTs I have ever had the privilege to listen to. I’ll copy/paste this from Wikipedia: “The soundtrack of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine gained praise as an authentic representation of Americana: The 30-track compilation spans folk, jazz, country, blues, bluegrass, and more.”
Yeah, I really can’t summarize it better than that. As you move from location-to-location, melodic changes happen to reflect the area that you’re in: closer to the Mexican border garners you latino beats while going inner-city produces jazz of sorts. They always fit the mood, but in the event you want to listen to something different, you have the option to change the track much like you could with the sea shanties in Black Flag/Rogue. The one downside though is that you are limited in what you can change it to based on the region: a place may only let you cycle through three different pieces, for example, until you move out of its radius. I suppose this was done to help preserve the vibe of your travels, but it impacts player choice to a fault IMO. All that being said, this is one game that I am grateful has a vinyl release as you can be sure I will be purchasing it (side note, why can’t more video games have vinyl versions of their soundtracks done?).
Because Where the Water is about storytelling, the voice acting can be divided into two distinct categories: your main NPCs (16 in total) and then the side tales. To get the good out of the way, the main NPCs are all solidly performed- each has a distinct vocalist who superbly conveys their persona’s overarching life story and accounts. On the other hand, the (apparently over 200!) side tales you collect are all voiced by a single narrator. He speaks like a character from an old revisionist western: deep voice, southern accent, and a cool delivery conveying a chill demeanor. He sounds badass and his actor’s name is Keythe Farley, who apparently voiced Thane from the Mass Effect series. Unfortunately, as talented as he is, having him do the voices for EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE STORIES has to be one of the dumbest decisions I have ever seen in sound design. As TES series has pointed out, when you have a ton of side characters in a game, you need a round cast of at least 7-10 members to help create the mirage of diversity. One person doing it, even if he’s trying to do a slightly different voice, just doesn’t cut it, particularly when the stories involve a slightly bigger cast, supernatural characters, and, oh I don’t know, FEMALES (seriously, they couldn’t ask one of the seiyū from the group of 16 to play the females at least?). Another issue I had with Farley is that he often speaks too slow, taking unnecessarily long pauses after any kind of punctuation mark (commas, periods, semicolons), which does not befit the presentation-style of the game at all (more on that later). Combining these 2-3 factors led to me often fastforwarding through the conversations since they were inherently immersion-breaking.
Before moving on, I’ll give a brief shoutout to Sting for his performance as the devilish Dire Wolf. While I’m not someone who has listened to his music, I will say he should consider a career in voice acting since he was phenomenal in every scene he was in (no matter how sadly few there were).
Now we finally come to the gameplay, of which there is a lot to speak of. I already briefly talked about the gameplay above as it pertained to the open world and navigation, but there is more to rant about. Where the Water didn’t want to put any kind of effort into collecting stories- no puzzles, no minigames, no narrative riddles, nothing. It is purely a collectathon of running around, finding a button prompt, and hitting it, triggering a pop-up conversation sequence that plays out against a single picture in the back. Occasionally there is some dialogue choice, but this barely makes a difference in the outcome.
I’ve heard Where the Water described as a visual novel or VN of sorts, and I would agree with that. All cards on the table, it is not a genre that I am a particular fan of given the limited gameplay/lack of exploration value, but WTW goes out of its way to make it even worse than it is by giving no presentation value. Whenever you come across one of these stories, as I said, all you have is a single photo in the back while the narration drones on, and it’s just not immersive.
What would have been a lot better would have been to create short, minimalist animation sequences for the stories. There was this dropped animation pilot from I believe MTV called Deadtime Stories that had a simultaneously choppy and smooth animation style that consequently gave it a hypnotic feel. If you were to take that style and craft it in the aesthetic of WTW, I believe you would have had a truly entrancing visage that would have made collecting each story an invigorating mini-adventure. The aforestated slow narration would have also synced better with it since each pause would have allowed the directors to transition to a different part of the story as the voiceover resumed. Would this initiative have cost money? Of course, but you could have easily made up for that by cutting down on the number of NPCs and getting rid of the open world (and all its useless systems).
As it stands, what do you have instead? You have a single middle-aged man giving a sluggish account of a diversity of individuals while players stare at a photograph with no ambient noise going on in the backdrop; just the muted drawl of the OST as it dropped in volume. I hate to say it, but it just feels really cheap, like the devs ran out of funding to put in any substantial production value. The writing for them itself is hit-or-miss. The vast majority of the tales are entertaining on some level- some try to go for a Cormac McCarthy-esque western message, others as the basis for some folklore, and still others for just plain amusement. You do run into plenty of pointless, annoying, or repetitive ones, but I’d be lying if I said that they took away from experience. In terms of the big picture stories of the 16, each manages to be a unique tale telling of a singular human being, but overall they honestly should have trimmed down the number from 16 to 8-10, largely because there is very little thematic range. Almost all of the accounts are about the breakdown of tradition vs modernism, freedom of the open land vs. authority, and how the elites are screwing over the working class. It gets kind of mundane to hear what is ultimately a slightly-different take on a motif that you heard the last four people say.
To be clear, the display of a single picture works out better for the one-on-one NPC convos due to them being talks where you’re both blatantly sitting down and chatting face-to-face compared to those minisodes where you’re often witnessing or participating in some kind of action beat. Unfortunately, these have their very own gameplay flaw. See, all those yarns you walked around collecting? You will get prompts from the NPCs informing you that they want to hear some kind of anecdote: either humorous, hopeful, sad, or scary. Successfully telling them one of these results in you getting their favor and filling up a meter represented by an eye opening- if you manage to fully open it, you unlock the next chapter in their personal spiel. Doing this 3-4 times in a row (depending on the character) completes them, earning you a Tarot card and getting you one-step closer to completing the Wolf’s task.
It sounds simple enough right? Here are the two glaring issues with it: one, from an immersion point-of-view, the way each NPC asks you for your stories is so stupid and out-of-the-blue. They will be telling a strong, passionate chain of events that occurred in their past, only to suddenly stop and ask “hey, i’m in the mood for chills, you got any terrifying tales?”. It’s like wtf? You were just in the middle of telling me something interesting about your life, and now you want to change gears for no reason at all? What it comes down do is a writing problem- the writers for each of these could have EASILY incorporated a quid-pro-quo dialogue/response into their scripts that would have felt natural and smooth. Heck, it would have been nice to have scripted reactions contingent on the specific story you told them (though I acknowledge this would have required LA Noire-levels of writing). But at the very least, they could have very simply done the former, and that isn’t the case. It honestly comes across like an outside writer wrote in these parts and haphazardly inserted them into the pre-written dialogue of the diegesis.
The second glaring issue is that a lot of your stories are frankly hard to categorize. Scary and sad stories tend to be the easiest to figure out, but what constitutes joyful or hopeful is hard and can honestly get frustrating at times, especially when you are only given the title of your tale and not its contents to review. For example, take the apologue of a bull who was pierced with an arrow and bleeding out yet could not die- does that sound sad to you? Well, it’s actually classified as hopeful, although even that’s subject for debate since different characters might interpret stories differently- what one sees as laughable is actually more hopeful. This latter part is thankfully rare, but it does come up and will piss you off when it does.
Making this matter worse are three additional problems: one, your stories can evolve through interacting with certain prompts on the map wherein an NPC will tell you how he heard this variation of the tale you experienced/heard beforehand (how some of these even got out to the point of falling prey to telephone is beyond me)- while these sometimes serve as a good explanation as to the basis for some of our nation’s longest-running myths (Ichabod Crane, Johnny Appleseed, the Jersey Devil, etc….), most of the time they come off as random developments and seemingly change the tone of a story despite it not actually changing from its original genre (for ex. A girl who carries around rocks is turned into a witch who lures strangers using magic stones; it went from kooky to creepy, yet you’re still supposed to treat it as kooky). And because, as I said, you have no way of reviewing a story’s writing, this makes it even harder to pinpoint its classification, meaning you can end up throwing darts at a board and wasting your few chances at upping one of the 16s’ favorable meter before they have to depart. Two, stories are grouped into tarot cards schemas: when you tell one from one of them, it locks off the rest of the yarns in there until you meet the NPC again, meaning you lose access to a lot of potential plot movers. And three, NOT ALL OF YOUR STORIES GET COLLECTED. What was the point in compiling/writing/producing over 200 of these if you can’t even add half of them to your arsenal to use in this game of oral Go-Fish? I can get fleshing out the world, but this was overkill.
Thankfully, the charm system doesn’t work like Oblivion’s persuasion system wherein telling an unappealing chronicle drops their favor- it maintains the same progress each time you successfully reciprocate a request, allowing you to successfully push them over the course of multiple meetings even if you fail here and there.
Finally, there is apparently a survivalist system in place in the form of health and sleep. You can restore them through triggering world events (like helping a family who provides you a meal) or using money (also earned through world or city events) to buy nourishments from cities that successfully rejuvenate them. Listening to one of the 16’s campfires also restores all attributes. However, it’s not like it matters as “dying” simply results in you briefly meeting the Dire Wolf again, wherein you can leave and spawn at your last checkpoint, which usually isn’t too far from where you perished. Worst comes to worse, you can initiate an autowalk and go-off and do something else while your protagonist navigates to the area (assuming there are no obstacles stopping them). To clarify, it is particularly hard to “die”, but even if you do somehow, it’s not like you’re playing a roguelike.
But look, I think I’ve ranted enough. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine had a lot of potential, however it just didn’t have the vision and/or possibly budget to execute on it. The idea of seeing a heterogeneity of stories that expressed the very basis for the current status of the country could have been exciting, but lackluster production value in the graphical and sound departments hampered this completely. The open world is pointless, there are optimization issues, and the only real-gameplay mechanics are chock full of stupid flaws. I would honestly recommend purchasing the soundtrack over the game.
Where the Water is theoretically premised on the concept of stories- how they evolve, drive mythologies, and convey truths and lies. The narrative involves you losing a game of cards to a Devilish-figure, who gives you a chance to repay him via collecting tales strewn throughout the land.
It’s a fascinating idea, but there’s a reason I used the word “theoretically”- it falters completely. An atrocious open world combined with a lack of presentation makes for a wasted premise.
Let’s talk about that first part- open worlds games have come under scrutiny in recent years over their interiors- once the wonder of being able to walk to the farthest horizon wears off, it appears most gamers care about the quality of the actual content. If you’re just providing copy/pasted vistas and repetitive side stuff ad nauseam, then you are not going to find much love from the gaming community.
And such was the case here. Where the Water has the worst open world I have ever had the privileged misfortune to experience. It’s an example of a concept that should have never even gotten to that stage- a concept that would have worked far better as a purely or near-purely linear video game. You have the entire (scaled) continental United States open at your fingertips, only to find that it is literally the same copy/pasted terrain, mountains, rivers, and cityscapes sprinkled everywhere minus some reskinned hues done in a pathetic attempt to reflect geographical changes.
But that wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing if the actual content was diverse, but no, you find stories the exact same way- walking to a spot on the map and pressing X. Other activities like earning/losing money or seeing a pretold story grow are done the same way: walk over to a spot on the map and press X. It’s a walking simulator with barely any kind of exploration that would have at least made the journey between all the areas all the more exciting.
Compounding THIS part even further is the horrible navigation. While a lot of points are within reach, there are a number of larger character arcs that are spread across multiple states, and the walking mechanic is PAINFULLY slow. Like, slow as in it’ll bring back memories of the beginning of Morrowind. Perhaps realizing this, the developers put in the ability to move quicker via a whistling minigame reminiscent of the QTE system from Fahrenheit, as well as hitchhiking through passing cars. But both of these have their own issues: the former only has one song, meaning it can come at odds with the music playing in the background, and either way doesn’t move you particularly fast, while with the latter, you cannot decree when you will stop, meaning sometimes you will only move a few feet more before getting kicked out, or other times go past your intended destination before departing. Trains are available as a fast travel option, but they’re not universally connected meaning you’ll have to take multiple ones, and because those cost money you most likely won’t have enough to do successive trips- and while train hopping is an option (minus the risk of getting beaten up), these have even MORE limited destinations, making them not helpful for any place not closeby. Oh, and to top it all off, all of these trigger MASSIVE framerate drops that essentially render them not worth doing in the end.
Rivers are an infuriating aspect as well- you are only able to cross them at certain ford junctures, but their placement is haphazard and can often result in you having to walk a considerable distance just to find them- a simple solution would’ve been just to allow the player to walk across waterways- it’s not like it’s imperative to any learning curve or game mechanic.
The only positive thing I can say about Where the Water’s open world is that the music changes depending on what state/region you are in, and the score is so wonderful that these changes feel natural and awesome (more on that below), but that’s about it.
Graphically, Where the Water has a solid art style. I wish I was more educated in art history to give an accurate description of what it was Dim Bulb Games and Serenity Forge were trying to evoke, but it definitely seemed to be some kind of pastoral vibe. Every area has a limited color palette that, combined with simple shapes, goes a long way towards radiating a rural ecosystem, and it works. This is a beautiful overworld that screams Americana. Close-ups of characters, both small-time and large-scale, are done in a colored pencil aesthetic that comes off as hand-drawn, with excellent chiaroscuro conveying shadows and lighting perfectly. In the macro world, a dynamic day/night system has been implemented to showcase hourly changes.
Unfortunately, graphical hitches take away from this beauty. I mentioned the framerate drops above, but other smaller things like constantly clipping through every object you walk through and inconsistent shadowmapping for the clouds above are also prevalent. Finally there’s the fact that, as well-crafted as all the main NPCs are, their blinking eyes feel creepy and out-of-place!
Sound is a massive disappointment if only because it’s practically nonexistent- there’s no effect for walking, driving, collecting, or really anything. I don’t even think riding trains had any discernible audio. It’s like the devs didn’t even bother trying to implement anything, which is a crime for this title in particular for a couple of reasons: one, as a walking sim, sound is necessary in evoking an atmosphere, working in conjunction with music to craft a distinct identity, and two, the individual stories would have benefited TREMENDOUSLY from unique sonority, turning them into radio plays of sorts that would have made up for the lack of presentation (more on that below).
Thankfully, the music is on the opposite end of the spectrum. My gosh, is this one of the best OSTs I have ever had the privilege to listen to. I’ll copy/paste this from Wikipedia: “The soundtrack of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine gained praise as an authentic representation of Americana: The 30-track compilation spans folk, jazz, country, blues, bluegrass, and more.”
Yeah, I really can’t summarize it better than that. As you move from location-to-location, melodic changes happen to reflect the area that you’re in: closer to the Mexican border garners you latino beats while going inner-city produces jazz of sorts. They always fit the mood, but in the event you want to listen to something different, you have the option to change the track much like you could with the sea shanties in Black Flag/Rogue. The one downside though is that you are limited in what you can change it to based on the region: a place may only let you cycle through three different pieces, for example, until you move out of its radius. I suppose this was done to help preserve the vibe of your travels, but it impacts player choice to a fault IMO. All that being said, this is one game that I am grateful has a vinyl release as you can be sure I will be purchasing it (side note, why can’t more video games have vinyl versions of their soundtracks done?).
Because Where the Water is about storytelling, the voice acting can be divided into two distinct categories: your main NPCs (16 in total) and then the side tales. To get the good out of the way, the main NPCs are all solidly performed- each has a distinct vocalist who superbly conveys their persona’s overarching life story and accounts. On the other hand, the (apparently over 200!) side tales you collect are all voiced by a single narrator. He speaks like a character from an old revisionist western: deep voice, southern accent, and a cool delivery conveying a chill demeanor. He sounds badass and his actor’s name is Keythe Farley, who apparently voiced Thane from the Mass Effect series. Unfortunately, as talented as he is, having him do the voices for EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE STORIES has to be one of the dumbest decisions I have ever seen in sound design. As TES series has pointed out, when you have a ton of side characters in a game, you need a round cast of at least 7-10 members to help create the mirage of diversity. One person doing it, even if he’s trying to do a slightly different voice, just doesn’t cut it, particularly when the stories involve a slightly bigger cast, supernatural characters, and, oh I don’t know, FEMALES (seriously, they couldn’t ask one of the seiyū from the group of 16 to play the females at least?). Another issue I had with Farley is that he often speaks too slow, taking unnecessarily long pauses after any kind of punctuation mark (commas, periods, semicolons), which does not befit the presentation-style of the game at all (more on that later). Combining these 2-3 factors led to me often fastforwarding through the conversations since they were inherently immersion-breaking.
Before moving on, I’ll give a brief shoutout to Sting for his performance as the devilish Dire Wolf. While I’m not someone who has listened to his music, I will say he should consider a career in voice acting since he was phenomenal in every scene he was in (no matter how sadly few there were).
Now we finally come to the gameplay, of which there is a lot to speak of. I already briefly talked about the gameplay above as it pertained to the open world and navigation, but there is more to rant about. Where the Water didn’t want to put any kind of effort into collecting stories- no puzzles, no minigames, no narrative riddles, nothing. It is purely a collectathon of running around, finding a button prompt, and hitting it, triggering a pop-up conversation sequence that plays out against a single picture in the back. Occasionally there is some dialogue choice, but this barely makes a difference in the outcome.
I’ve heard Where the Water described as a visual novel or VN of sorts, and I would agree with that. All cards on the table, it is not a genre that I am a particular fan of given the limited gameplay/lack of exploration value, but WTW goes out of its way to make it even worse than it is by giving no presentation value. Whenever you come across one of these stories, as I said, all you have is a single photo in the back while the narration drones on, and it’s just not immersive.
What would have been a lot better would have been to create short, minimalist animation sequences for the stories. There was this dropped animation pilot from I believe MTV called Deadtime Stories that had a simultaneously choppy and smooth animation style that consequently gave it a hypnotic feel. If you were to take that style and craft it in the aesthetic of WTW, I believe you would have had a truly entrancing visage that would have made collecting each story an invigorating mini-adventure. The aforestated slow narration would have also synced better with it since each pause would have allowed the directors to transition to a different part of the story as the voiceover resumed. Would this initiative have cost money? Of course, but you could have easily made up for that by cutting down on the number of NPCs and getting rid of the open world (and all its useless systems).
As it stands, what do you have instead? You have a single middle-aged man giving a sluggish account of a diversity of individuals while players stare at a photograph with no ambient noise going on in the backdrop; just the muted drawl of the OST as it dropped in volume. I hate to say it, but it just feels really cheap, like the devs ran out of funding to put in any substantial production value. The writing for them itself is hit-or-miss. The vast majority of the tales are entertaining on some level- some try to go for a Cormac McCarthy-esque western message, others as the basis for some folklore, and still others for just plain amusement. You do run into plenty of pointless, annoying, or repetitive ones, but I’d be lying if I said that they took away from experience. In terms of the big picture stories of the 16, each manages to be a unique tale telling of a singular human being, but overall they honestly should have trimmed down the number from 16 to 8-10, largely because there is very little thematic range. Almost all of the accounts are about the breakdown of tradition vs modernism, freedom of the open land vs. authority, and how the elites are screwing over the working class. It gets kind of mundane to hear what is ultimately a slightly-different take on a motif that you heard the last four people say.
To be clear, the display of a single picture works out better for the one-on-one NPC convos due to them being talks where you’re both blatantly sitting down and chatting face-to-face compared to those minisodes where you’re often witnessing or participating in some kind of action beat. Unfortunately, these have their very own gameplay flaw. See, all those yarns you walked around collecting? You will get prompts from the NPCs informing you that they want to hear some kind of anecdote: either humorous, hopeful, sad, or scary. Successfully telling them one of these results in you getting their favor and filling up a meter represented by an eye opening- if you manage to fully open it, you unlock the next chapter in their personal spiel. Doing this 3-4 times in a row (depending on the character) completes them, earning you a Tarot card and getting you one-step closer to completing the Wolf’s task.
It sounds simple enough right? Here are the two glaring issues with it: one, from an immersion point-of-view, the way each NPC asks you for your stories is so stupid and out-of-the-blue. They will be telling a strong, passionate chain of events that occurred in their past, only to suddenly stop and ask “hey, i’m in the mood for chills, you got any terrifying tales?”. It’s like wtf? You were just in the middle of telling me something interesting about your life, and now you want to change gears for no reason at all? What it comes down do is a writing problem- the writers for each of these could have EASILY incorporated a quid-pro-quo dialogue/response into their scripts that would have felt natural and smooth. Heck, it would have been nice to have scripted reactions contingent on the specific story you told them (though I acknowledge this would have required LA Noire-levels of writing). But at the very least, they could have very simply done the former, and that isn’t the case. It honestly comes across like an outside writer wrote in these parts and haphazardly inserted them into the pre-written dialogue of the diegesis.
The second glaring issue is that a lot of your stories are frankly hard to categorize. Scary and sad stories tend to be the easiest to figure out, but what constitutes joyful or hopeful is hard and can honestly get frustrating at times, especially when you are only given the title of your tale and not its contents to review. For example, take the apologue of a bull who was pierced with an arrow and bleeding out yet could not die- does that sound sad to you? Well, it’s actually classified as hopeful, although even that’s subject for debate since different characters might interpret stories differently- what one sees as laughable is actually more hopeful. This latter part is thankfully rare, but it does come up and will piss you off when it does.
Making this matter worse are three additional problems: one, your stories can evolve through interacting with certain prompts on the map wherein an NPC will tell you how he heard this variation of the tale you experienced/heard beforehand (how some of these even got out to the point of falling prey to telephone is beyond me)- while these sometimes serve as a good explanation as to the basis for some of our nation’s longest-running myths (Ichabod Crane, Johnny Appleseed, the Jersey Devil, etc….), most of the time they come off as random developments and seemingly change the tone of a story despite it not actually changing from its original genre (for ex. A girl who carries around rocks is turned into a witch who lures strangers using magic stones; it went from kooky to creepy, yet you’re still supposed to treat it as kooky). And because, as I said, you have no way of reviewing a story’s writing, this makes it even harder to pinpoint its classification, meaning you can end up throwing darts at a board and wasting your few chances at upping one of the 16s’ favorable meter before they have to depart. Two, stories are grouped into tarot cards schemas: when you tell one from one of them, it locks off the rest of the yarns in there until you meet the NPC again, meaning you lose access to a lot of potential plot movers. And three, NOT ALL OF YOUR STORIES GET COLLECTED. What was the point in compiling/writing/producing over 200 of these if you can’t even add half of them to your arsenal to use in this game of oral Go-Fish? I can get fleshing out the world, but this was overkill.
Thankfully, the charm system doesn’t work like Oblivion’s persuasion system wherein telling an unappealing chronicle drops their favor- it maintains the same progress each time you successfully reciprocate a request, allowing you to successfully push them over the course of multiple meetings even if you fail here and there.
Finally, there is apparently a survivalist system in place in the form of health and sleep. You can restore them through triggering world events (like helping a family who provides you a meal) or using money (also earned through world or city events) to buy nourishments from cities that successfully rejuvenate them. Listening to one of the 16’s campfires also restores all attributes. However, it’s not like it matters as “dying” simply results in you briefly meeting the Dire Wolf again, wherein you can leave and spawn at your last checkpoint, which usually isn’t too far from where you perished. Worst comes to worse, you can initiate an autowalk and go-off and do something else while your protagonist navigates to the area (assuming there are no obstacles stopping them). To clarify, it is particularly hard to “die”, but even if you do somehow, it’s not like you’re playing a roguelike.
But look, I think I’ve ranted enough. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine had a lot of potential, however it just didn’t have the vision and/or possibly budget to execute on it. The idea of seeing a heterogeneity of stories that expressed the very basis for the current status of the country could have been exciting, but lackluster production value in the graphical and sound departments hampered this completely. The open world is pointless, there are optimization issues, and the only real-gameplay mechanics are chock full of stupid flaws. I would honestly recommend purchasing the soundtrack over the game.
amei a trilha sonora e as histórias. só queria que o esqueleto corresse mais rápido
Stupid game devs thought making a game about an economic recession was a good business idea lmao.