I wanted to stop and listen to it but for all of its apparent tranquility, the game had filled me with a need to move forward at all times. They evoke a past that probably only exists in the blues and folk music, history shot through with imagination and artistry.īut as the backdrop to these lonely hikes, the music felt disconnected. The aesthetic that acts as a backdrop to all that nothing is superb, the map a patchwork of fields, mountains, cities and rivers, and the songs that play as you explore, changing with the territories, are uniformly superb. And that means much of the time I spent playing was made up of these scattered half-minutes of nothing. A trek from one state to the next, or to a story token on the horizon, probably takes thirty seconds at most, but it's half a minute of nothing. It's large and the character moves across it slowly. The map, where I spent most of my time, quickly became a dreary place. It's during the rest of the interactions that my patience started to wear thinner than road-weary boot soles. Those are my favourite interactions in the game, when encounters play out like tiny text adventures. You can be a passive observer if you choose, but you can also strike out or lend your voice to the suffering during certain events. Often, choices in the encounters that make up some stories relate to an anger or sense of injustice on the part of the player character. It's often a bleak game, but empathy and respect for people is the common thread in the writing. And the stories cover a whole range of humanity and its various conditions, including the multitude of ways people harm one another because of love, prejudice, desperation, anger, grief, greed and poverty. A story about a ghost or terrifying urban legend might become a romance or a farce, a scarecrow takes on more sinister qualities. Often, their meaning or emotional impact is hard to pin down until you've heard them retold and reshaped, at which point the phrase that describes them hints at their content and the likely response to them more clearly. This is important because when the time comes to share the stories, your listeners will have specific requirements: tell me something sad, they might say, or perhaps they want to laugh in the face of adversity. Sometimes you'll hear a retelling of a story you already know, embellishing it or changing the tone completely. An inventory item, basically, to be traded for new stories. You hear and read the story, the narration beautifully delivered in just the right kind of gravely bone-tired voiceover.Īt that point, the story is in your possession. Icons on the map tell you where stories are located, you walk, very slowly, to those icons. The reason I haven't is quite simple though exploring these states is exhausting, and I too often lost the meaning of the stories during the long treks from one place to the next.Ī game about storytelling might seem like a complex thing to describe, in terms of its inner workings, but Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is quite simple. There's so much to admire and enjoy in this tale of tales that I'm sad and slightly surprised that I haven't slapped a Recommended badge on it. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine flits between genres like a whip-poor-will, one moment reminding me of forced migrations and hard journeys through the dustbowl, the next of runaway slaves and departing souls. The creepy ones, mainly, and the tiny tragedies. I'll remember some of these stories forever. It's at the campfires that stories become currency, and also where the game's combination of folktale and interactive systems becomes muddled. Along the way, you meet many people and witness many events, most of them insignificant in the grand scheme of history and the land, but all contributing to a complex tapestry of a certain time and place.Įverything that you witness and every conversation you have becomes a tale in your repertoire, and in retelling these tales you learn about the characters you share them with, around campfires that are dotted around the map. You walk the backroads and fields of the United States during the Great Depression, occasionally freighthopping or hitching a ride from one town to the next. In Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, stories are currency.
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