The fantastic art attached to each encounter and major location you visit across the country looks as if it were crafted for a classic adventure novel. It helps that there’s a storybook quality to Where the Water Tastes Like Wine on a visual level. It’s a smart nod to how storytellers always adapt, not repeat, experiences in their own renditions - changing the life of the story, just as it changes your own life. Encountering new people can also expand these stories, either because the tales have migrated throughout the nation and evolved in the telling, or because you’ve acquired new details to fill them out. And these are the tamest of the many eerie things hidden in America’s nooks.
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I still think fondly of the girl with a basket full of kittens, for example, and the boy who stowed away on his dad’s trip, despite being commanded to stay home I mourned for the mysterious woman with the yellow ribbon who, as I discovered long after I first encountered her, had died. In the game’s most crucial parts, your stories become objects There are so many colorful characters to stumble upon and interact with - through action and dialogue choices - that you’ll want to be patient with the expansive landscape.
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Walking (or taking a train, or catching a ride with a driver on the highway) from home to any place in the States is slow-paced, but it doesn’t drag. It becomes overbearing as you accumulate more and more miles on your journey I don’t think I missed anything by shutting it off.Ĭoupled with a folksy, Oregon Trail-like feel, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine’s freewheeling journey evokes a time when the only way to see more of the world was to go out there. Listen: I dig the guy, but I could only take so much dramatic, slow-paced reading of the on-screen text. The most important thing is to stop by as many houses, train stations and other highlighted spots on the map as you can, investigating each one to ensure that you leave with some kernel of a memory - all narrated by the wolf himself, as voiced by Sting. From there, you crisscross the country from East Coast to West Coast and back again in a sense, the direction you take matters, but there is little guidance on which direction that may be.
A bizarre run-in with a talking wolf spurs your journey on, as his vague recollection of this foretold place demands to be further defined. Playing as an anonymous traveler, you hitchhike across America to find the place where the water. Where the game fails isn’t in its individual stories, but in what becomes of them: pieces in obtuse, transactional conversations, where experiences are reduced to progression tools.ĭim Bulb Games, Serenity Forge/Good Shepherd Entertainment Its greatest success is in capturing the wonderful, unpredictable nature of unraveling the moments that comprise our lives. The rub is that, while building up a bank of memories is a pleasure, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine gets bogged down by an impulse to make this game less of a gorgeous, interactive storybook and more of.
(Names include Waypoint’s Austin Walker, narrative designer Cara Ellison and critic Leigh Alexander.) It’s a game in which your travels across the American expanse are driven by what you encounter along the way, as much as they are by your need to recount those experiences for the fellow storytellers you meet.
Telling stories is an inextricable part of our lives, and that’s at the heart of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, the debut project from developer Dim Bulb Games and a group of writers well-known throughout the gaming industry.
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We may tend to think of our memories as fixed and finite, but as soon as we deem a story worth repeating, we set it free to be changed. An experience worth committing to memory is one part of the process sharing it cements it and its value, and gives it the power to evolve over time. What’s just as important as stories themselves is telling them. We gather up thousands of these throughout our time, constantly accumulating memories and secondhand tales. Life is a collection of stories: factual and fictional, our own and each other’s.
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