Where the Water Tastes Like Wine Review – A lonesome traveler

Sit down. Welcome, stranger.  Let me tell you a story…

Where the Water Tastes like Wine is a narrative RPG set in America during the great depression, manifest destiny, and the hippy movement.

You’ve lost a game of cards to a mysterious Wolfman, and to settle your debt you’re sent out to collect stories for him. All he wants are people’s stories. True, fake, sad, happy, all will do. Just sit and listen to some folk for a while.

There is a lot to love about this game. The narrative is spectacular. The soundtrack is beautiful. The art style is simple but poignant.

It’s a simple game. You collect stories by interacting with a character who you can find at campfires, and if you tell them stories they like, they’ll open up their life to you.

You can then tell their stories. Or, you can collect stories around towns, sometimes influencing how it plays out, and listen in on people re-telling them to grow and embellish them.  Of course, these are lies, but they sound better.

Each story is divided into a tarot card, focusing around the meaning of the card.

It’s simple to get into and seamlessly mixes supernatural themes with the horrors and trials of real life. There are only a few categories people will share- scary, thrilling, hopeful, happy and sad.

It is absolutely a  game to get lost in.  I think I spent about 12 hours on one playthrough, and I didn’t even collect all the stories.  Apart from the storytelling however, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is very sparse on game mechanics.

It may be the most literal definition of a walking simulator. You just walk until you get where you’re going. You can whistle to speed up using shift and the arrow keys in time to the tune (but then you miss  out on the wonderful soundtrack). You can also hitchhike, or catch a train, but then you miss stories along the road, and not everyone stops for you.

I will say, as an Australian though, I had no idea where I was going or where any town was and got lost nearly constantly. The train lines when you use them just tell you a town name and I never had any idea where that was. America is very confusing, and that can lead to you walking in circles a fair bit.

It does seem to account for that a little though, and the campfire of the next person’s story to collect will guide you to your next destination. But when I was on the opposite end of the map to the next person I had to talk to, I walked all over america twice before I got there.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine might have my favourite narrative in a long time.

There’s 219 stories to hear. This doesn’t count the absolutely adorable mechanic where you tell someone a story, and then later you’ll hear the same story embellished and better. It adds in this great little storytelling aspect for the player- do you lie, and tell your grandiose stories, or do you tell the real stories of the real people you meet along the way?

Despite, hearing about 200 of the stories, no two felt the same.

With an incredible bill of writers for different  and diverse characters, including a Native American character, Spanish characters, queer characters, POC, kids, elderly, and everything in between, this game is dense but powerful.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine tackles some heavy issues, and it does so with grace and poise. There’s issues of racism. There’s issues of colonialism. Unions, coal miners, death, children thrown away. A crisis of faith. Homosexual repression.

It knocks it out of the park with all of them, in my opinion. I obviously as a white person can’t comment on the POC narratives, but I was engrossed with the reality and historical accuracy put into these characters.

Also, just massive props to them getting an actual Native American writer to write the Native American character. Representation is important, but representation done right by the represented party is even better.

The other massive strong point for this game is the soundtrack. Bastion has been bumped off my favourite list in favour of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.

It’s soulful, it’s blues, it’s jazz.  It’s something you’d expect to hear in an old western salon.

Combine the narrative, the narration, and the soundtrack, and you have the perfect atmosphere. The soundtrack isn’t fully out yet, and I’ve been just loading up the game to listen to the music periodically.

The scrolling system just didn’t seem to want to work with me, and I found myself having to switch out stories two or three times to get the one I want. The most frustrating was that there wasn’t a back button so I always had to click out of the menu if I ended up not wanting to make a change.

It was also difficult to tell people the right kind of story they asked for. What I thought was sad, others found funny. Horror and thrilling were interchangeable a lot of the time, and this was a bit annoying.

For a game that took me 12 hours, that’s pretty good as the only faults. There was one or two technical glitches with my stories leveling up, but they really didn’t detract from the enjoyment for me.