Good Game.

Nice BGM. All those small stories might not suitable for players looking for a complex plot, but I like the piecemeal vignettes of upheavals at that time: the arrest of Grasmi, the Bonus Army March... Good for English learners too.

This game will really speak to a handful of people and really alienate everyone else. If you love old americana style art and that sort of rustic, romanticized idea of a hobo storyteller and don’t mind the lacking gameplay I can’t recommend it enough.

Breathtaking game that brings us back to the times of "Of Mice and Men," and we can live the stories our Great-Grandparents were told. The music is amazing and pairs perfectly with the voice acting. The stories do become repetitive and the game play is frustrating. This game is incredibly tedious and takes a long time to finish any sections of the US.

All in all, the best part in my opinion is the music, which almost makes up for the agonizing tedium of the game. 7/10.

There are a lot, a lot of problems with this game. It's mechanically both boring and confusingly frustrating (the main thing you do in this game and walk and listen to the music, the thing that makes you walk a little faster has you whistle poorly over the music), and it really reads like a game that was made by artists, writers and musicians, but not game developers. however, what those artists writers and musicians put together was a unique experience. walking isn't so bad when you just sit and digest these stories of american folklore. The characters that appear drop little bits of lore about themselves that makes them seem like whole people you're only capable of getting glimpses of. I'm a fan of the way the game handled its achievements (if you play through, you'll understand). the ending was surprisingly corny and bad in comparison to the rest of the game's tone. unparalleled vibes, though. the music is very very good. play it, if you're forgiving of some janky gameplay and looking for a unique, atmospheric (sorry for the cliche) experience. this is more of an experience than a game.

Where The Water Tastes Like Wine (henceforth WTWTLW, because, like, that's a long name dawg) is a walking simulator-visual novel hybrid. The walking part is slow, painfully so at first, but over time the pain will fade into the background as your character whistles along and speeds up through the empty land. The point of it, I imagine, is to give off the same vibes of such a long trek: it gets monotonous quick, yet the task never ends. The other part--the visual novel--is where the meat of the game is. WTWTLW is set in the United States, and the player character is tasked with scouring the land in search of stories to collect during the Great Depression. Well, it's not exactly depression-era America, not really, as there are dozens of anachronisms. Some are of lesser importance, like automobiles being presented as already widely-established means of locomotion, which wasn't that much of a thing even at the tail end of the Depression, or the mention of Volkswagen, which didn't start as a company until like '39. Some others are relatively puzzling in a game that is often attentive to the social norms of the time and those who skirted around it, like the concept of nuclear family being brought up, since if you've taken a Sociology 101 course you'll know it became an established thing in American consciousness only halfway through the century. Some of them are, admittedly, infuriating if you care about history and/or literary tradition: beat poets, hippies and IBM are all covered by the game for some reason, even though there were DECADES between the Depression and any one of these. Conversely, the beat poet character is also some of the best writing WTWTLW has to offer, so I guess it was a decent bargain in the end. And yet the game does, mostly, weave its stories about events that happened during the Depression, like the market crash, the dust bowl, or the innumerable famines.
While gathering stories, you'll encounter a variety of characters to tell your stories to. Gathering the "real" life stories of these characters is the objective of WTWTLW. In your last encounters with each of these characters, they will reveal an "alternative form" for themselves. These forms are supposed to let let the player gleam further into some aspect of their mind or life story, and although some of these alternative forms function well as insightful as metaphors, a good half of them are either confusing or simply don't say anything new or of value about the characters. This hit-or-miss quality is, I imagine, a consequence of contracting a different writer for each character, though I don't mind WTWTLW's decision to do so, as minority characters were written by people of their respective minorities, and the writers knew how to portray them (the Navajo woman, for once, was a highlight of the journey).
WTWTLW is generally fascinated with "Weird America" stories (I don't have a better term to describe the subgenre, and I trust this one's enough). If you like the subgenre, don't mind reading in your videogames and want something boundary-pushing, this is what you're looking for. The caveat is that if you've already read a bunch within the subgenre, it's highly likely you'll find WTWTLW to be retreading old, well-known ground. I've only consumed a handful of pieces that could be considered "Weird America" stories, and I could easily spot the things that WTWTLW lifts almost directly from Gaiman's American Gods, for example.
The presentation of the game is highly stylized, and most of what you'll see was hand-drawn. This makes the game feel like it was cobbled together by five or six people, and I don't mean this in a negative way, as games like this tend to be my favorites. The music is also fantastic--I literally ALT+F4d to buy the soundtrack only an hour into the game. For my fellow music nerds: yes, it comes with FLAC files. I will admit that the music can get repetitive over the 12 or so hours the game lasts for, but it's not for a lack of tracks: there's several variations on the main theme, and one track for each of the 16 characters you'll encounter. I'm already learning a few songs from WTWTLW's soundtrack on the guitar and enjoying myself thoroughly.
By the time I was getting done with WTWTLW, I was genuinely regretting that it was over already--despite its flaws, the game is kind of a unique little gem, the kind that's far more easily found in different mediums, and I miss it already. Overall the game is worth it at the starting price point, and definitely worth it on sale--I got it for 2 bucks, and lemme tell ya, that was some of the best 2 bucks I ever did spend.

Great game to just get lost traveling if you can't do it irl atm

Not for everyone, that's certain. But if You like to read good stories and wander about then give it a try. Music's great too.

⠀

I'm going to be honest, this game can be quite boring at times, being from the endless walking or from the quantity of dialogue that goes on. But despite all that, this game is one of those that really stick with you and makes you really think about what certain characters say and their stories. So if you don't mind the crazy dialogue or want to just play it casually, buy it