There is a split between what this game Is and what this game is About.

What this game Is, is a walking simulator in a very literal sense. Your character, transformed by a talking wolf into a ragged skeleton hobo (please just go with this), spends his days walking the hills and plains and streets of the United States of America. You can hitchhike or whistle to move faster.

Scattered all over the country are your resources: Stories and People. You collect the stories in the form of mini text-adventure vignettes which are limitedly interactive. Often you can affect the tone of these via choices, shifting a horror story into a comedy by noticing some detail, or vice versa. Once you have the Stories, you take them to the People. "Tell me a hopeful one." they say, and you dig through your notes to try to remember which tale has an uplifting ending.

If you use the stories enough, they grow in the telling to become stronger. Hit the people with enough Strong Stories and they'll open up to you, showing their true selves. You win by making all the people open up to you with their full tales.

So that's what the game Is.
What the game is About is America. Not our actual America right now, but an America that's timeless and eternal. Where events from the 1880s co-exist with the hippies of the 1970s and everything between, and where you can walk the cities and towns and find every wonderful, horrible, tragic and beautiful thing the people of this country can do and have done to, with, and because of each other.

Every story you collect has some roots, and you can watch them grow and become twisted and strange and unfamiliar in the telling. Every person you meet has a kernel of truth at their center, and you can follow their joys and their losses. Also there's a fricking ton of ghost stories, but if you read some old folklore you will realize that America has always been haunted as ♥♥♥♥, so that doesn't really scan as unauthentic to me.

The amount you enjoy this game, thus, is equal to the amount you can stand to sit and play an experimental text-heavy game that sometimes feels like infotainment but often just stares directly at what America does to people and has always done to them. Sometimes it's uplifting. Sometimes it's crushing. Sometimes it's just how life works out there.

Also the frame rate gets really choppy sometimes when you're walking around. That's sort of irritating.

tl;dr: Excellent concept, but poor execution. The stories, the voice acting, the 2D illustrations, and the music are all fantastic; you can feel the devs have poured their heart into these artistic elements. However, the game mechanic is doing a complete disservice to these efforts. If you are interested in American folklore and do not mind spending 10 hours out of 20 hours of gameplay in a dreary walking simulator, then this game is totally for you. Otherwise, stay away.

More details:
The gameplay is very simple: you control a skeleton to walk on a 3D overworld US map to collect over 200 vignettes (each with a short and independent plot and a full voice-over) and to encounter 16 NPCs and uncover their stories. The main problem is that your character walks excruciatingly slow, while the overworld map is far from as gorgeous as in the trailers (in fact, it is dreary). What is worse is that you have to be at a designated spot to be able to cross a river. And you have to chase NPCs around the map, since they move a bit after each encounter. And there is no escape from this chore:
- Cities only allow you to fast travel by train to other nearby cities and this costs money, which you don't always have enough. In fact, the inventory system only allows you to carry at most 2 coins, so you cannot rack up your savings along your journey. And a train ticket costs exactly 2 coins.
- Hopping on a train outside of cities is as inflexible as fast travel in cities and has a risk of lowering your health.
- Whistling sightly accelerates your walking speed. But to this end, you have to continuously press a button and keep reacting to QTEs, which is not exactly what I would qualify as relaxing. Besides, the sound of whistling will mask the background music, which is far better than the whistling itself.
- Autowalk is possible, but it still requires you to adjust your direction, so almost useless.
- Hitch-hiking needs you to be near a route. It only takes you to the end of that route, and you still need to watch the animation of a car driving from where you are to your destination, the duration of which is not much shorter than the walking.
- After encountering an NPC a third time, you get an item that allows you to fast travel to where you first met the NPC. This is the most ideal way to fast travel. However, it comes too late in the game, since you mostly have to meet an NPC 3 or 4 times to finish his/her/their story.

The story collecting and telling mechanic also leaves much to be desired.
- First of all, there is a Tarot card system: vignettes you collect are put under different Tarot cards. This system is superfluous because vignettes are, in fact, classified into five categories: hopeful, funny, thrilling, scary, and sad (however, the classification is hidden; it is also difficult to tell from the plot of a vignette since the story is usually arcane). To uncover an NPC's story, you need to find him/her/them and tell stories from the categories the NPC demands. So you can use a vignette from the right category under any Tarot card. This Tarot card system even detracts from the gameplay experience:
* At any time, you can only activate at most three vignettes under each Tarot card, and only activated vignettes can be told to NPCs. But you can change your line-up at any moment on the map, which means this restriction is completely meaningless and only adds more hassle.
* During each encounter with an NPC, you can only choose one vignette from each Tarot card, which does not make any sense either in the setting of the game.
- Secondly, an NPC's reaction to a vignette only depends on the category and the Tarot card of the vignette. So interaction with NPCs feels mechanical quite quickly.
- Thirdly, there is no way to read/listen again a vignette during a playthrough. Only its description is stored in your inventory.
- Last but not least, your vignettes get “enhanced” when they are told to the NPCs and spread on the map. The Enhanced version works better for advancing the NPCs' plot. However, only the title of an enhanced vignette is changed, and you don't get to read the enhanced version of the whole story, which is a missed opportunity to expand the lore further.

Finally, there is an unobtainable achievement, which is supposed to be an “artistic choice” according to the devs. The game itself is already ruined by many artistic choices in gameplay mechanics, and this achievement is only the last straw.

Although I really love the music and am intrigued by the vignettes, I lose all my energy to finish the game due to the dreary walking and lacklustre story telling parts. I really wish this game were implemented as a visual novel/interactive fiction (for which it has more than enough good materials) rather than a below average walking simulator.

I don't typically write reviews - I think this will be my first on Steam - but after reading a recent article about how this game has been written off as a commercial disaster I feel compelled to tell the world at large how much of a damn shame that is.

You play a hobo who finds himself in a poker game with the wrong anthropomorphic Wolf (effectively, and bewilderingly, voiced by Sting). A losing hand sees you literally stripped of your flesh and sent out into the world to collect stories in order to pay off your debt.

That's it - that's whole the premise of the game. A skeleton hobo, complete with straw hat and bindle, wandering a richly colourful, stylised version of the USA in search of stories. From Cassady the brooding beat poet to Quinn the Huck Finn-a-like runaway kid, each of the characters you'll meet are great American archetypes from various decades of the 20th Century, and you'll need to share the stories you've gathered on your travels with them in order to make them open up and ultimately tell you their own stories. It's a simple but compelling core mechanic.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a story about stories, but it's mostly a story about America; its people, its culture, and its ever-growing mythology. Reading isn't a requirement to enjoying this game, but an interest in any of these things is.

Ignore the "adventure" and "rpg" tags. Ignore the negative reviews of idiotic people who have played for 20 minutes at best.

So what IS WtWTLW? The easiest way to describe it accurately is as a hybrid between open world walking simulator and high function visual novel. These are both genres for which I have little to no love and yet I really enjoy this game. Which neatly brings me to the game's core strength - that it has a strong identity all of its own. The excellent voice talent and the well defined artistic style contribute to this greatly as does an exceptional soundtrack (the latter again something which has little impact for me in most games). It is vastly intellectual and artistic by nature and offers profound insight into both the human condition and how the oral tradition of narrative works. But if you are looking for some low-brow "game" where you have a clear progression and ending then this isn't for you. If you don't have at least a general interest in narrative then it is also likely not for you. It is primarily a story about stories and what may push them into existence in the first place.

So through one lense at least it can be read as one big degree level Literary lesson that also explores socio-historical elements and American geography for that majority of us that know very little of that. Sound boring? Well it absolutely isn't. It also has a strong occult/mythological leaning that hits directly at the fantastical wonder that SHOULD be the core of almost ALL gaming. Yet it should come with a warning stating that both higher brain function and an imagination are requirements rather than something you can get by without whilst playing.

Others have complained about the pace of the game and even referred to it as "glacial". Well there's no getting away from the fact that this is absolutely NOT an 'action' inspired title. It is, in fact, the single most laid-back game I've ever experienced. It is POSSIBLY also the most AMERICAN game I've ever experienced - but in a good way. It is, without doubt, A Game to Chill To. Each of its elements practically whisper this at the player in constant concert. So those looking for anything remotely high octane need not apply.

I could drone on about how much I appreciate its uniqueness and about how thankful I am for its existence, or go into more detail about its mechanics but this is one of those very rare times where no one can really tell you if it IS for you. It's Easier to say if it isn't for you but that involves assumptions that I'd rather not make other than the few points I have already made. It could be one of the best things you ever tried and it could also just be an exercise in tedium. Everyone's response to this is going to be quite personal in one way or another. As for me, my response is very, VERY, favourable. If anyone has any specific questions then I'm happy to answer them as best I can but Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is not a game that can be adequately explained by the regular gaming tropes with which we now pigeon-hole them.

Overall, like other positive reviews, I would recommend Where The Water Tastes Like Wine to people interested in narrative games in spite of the game's fairly glaring flaws that frustrated me at times.

First of all, the music and artstyle are both extraordinary. They bring texture and depth to the mythical, mostly-Great-Depression America the game is trying to describe, and frankly they would easily stand on their own without the rest of the game.

The writing is more uneven. It is split between small vignettes your character collects across America and longer stories, where you encounter characters who also serve as historical archetypes (The Dustbowl Refugee, The Hippie, etc). The vignettes are where the writing truly shines: they range from funny or heartwarming to acerbic horror reminiscent of Southern Gothic stories in some areas. They are definitely what I will remember from the game in a few years.

The characters on the other hand suffer from this game's main problem, which is that it is constantly stifling the writing with unnecessary, sometimes contrived mechanics that bring very little to the experience but obviously took a lot of development work. The map is huge (well, America is pretty huge) and walking across it is not only slow (which i would be fine with), but unwieldy, especially with terrible controls that were clearly meant for a controller. There is a hunger and sleep system that adds nothing but reminds you that wow, even your character is tired of walking across the wasteland! The list goes on.
As for the characters, the game has you go through a complex, underexplained pseudo-tarot system which forces all the writers to make their characters talk about the same generic topics, to the point that many of them feel interchangeable ("Freedom? Well, they say America is the land of the free, but, you know...sometimes it doesn't feel that way!" and other mind-blowing revelations).

I guess what I'm trying to say is this game could have been an amazing 10-hour visual novel with top-notch writing, music and art, but instead it got turned into a bloated 20-hour adventure game. But I played through all of it and I'm still thinking about it, so I can't say I regret playing it: when it's good, it's really good.

So much love and effort was put into this game, which is what makes it so tragic. Well, no, so much love and effort was put into the ~embellishments~ of this game, the game play itself is almost non-existent.

This game has beautiful:
- Writing
- Soundtrack
- Art
- Voiceover
- Style
- Premise

This game does not have:
- Interesting Gameplay
- Good Controls
- Meaningful Choices

All of the "game" elements slapped onto this should be removed in favor of taking the approach of a visual novel, which is what this game really is; a visual novel of vignettes. Get rid of the infuriatingly slow and barren map, the pointless resources of money/health/energy, etc.

And did we really need to have multiple versions of the same song with different vocalists in each version, and then for that song to repeat on inifinite loop? Seems like a lot of money and effort for something unnecessary.

But by far the biggest problem in this game is the lack of real meaningful choices, which is what the core mechanic of the game is supposed to be. -.-;; OK, so before I can explain properly, let me breakdown the basics of the game play:

1) Wander the map at an infuriatingly slow pace. It is mostly empty and has a bad camera.
2) Investigate buildings to trigger scenese where you learn new stories that fit into one of five categories: happy, sad, funny, scary, or exciting.
3) Find the quest NPCs and recite back to them the stories that match the category they want to hear to progress their quest line

OK, so back to the lack of meaningful choices. The limitation/challenge to overcome is that each NPC will only listen to a given story one time and telling them an incorrect story type for their current request does not progress their quest line but DOES prevent you from being able to tell them that story again in the future; additionally, each story belongs to a certain Tarot card and you can only tell one story per card during each encounter.

We will immediately dismiss the entire Tarot card system though, because it is pointless and does not actually provide any meaningful game play choices. Why? Because you have unlimited number of encounters with each NPC, so if you need to tell them two stories from the same card you can just stop talking to them and then talk to them again and everything is peachy. Basically the system has no impact on the game whatsoever. Sad really, since the Tarot cards are pretty much the entirety of the plot hook.

So, for the challenges you can't ignore, you need to manage both the total quantity of stories you have and what category of stories you have (happy, sad, funny, scary, or exciting). You get more stories just by looking at random map locations; you can control what type of stories you get by how you react to each story as it is happening. THIS is supposed to be the core game element. Your choices are SUPPOSED to shape your experience by giving you a different repertoire of story categories based on how you act in the game world. But.....it doesn't actaully matter because of two things.

1) There is actually a sixth story category, a Life Story that is a wild card for any request, and you get these from talking to the quest NPCs. Balancing your story categories doesn't matter because there are enough Life Stories in the game to meet every request, so you never need to actually have the right story type.
2) NPC reactions and storyline endings don't care one bit about the actual stories themselves, just the categories. So a funny story about a rich ghost is just as good as a funny story about a Canadian in the woods. The NPCs don't care and don't react. You can't run out of correct stories to advance quest lines and the individual stories don't matter, so you never need to worry about what types of stories you collect or tell.

The core element of the game - meaningful choices - is totally absent. Nothing you do matters; the only thing that matters is walking through the empty map for hours upon hours at a snail's pace to collect everything.

I really liked this game. It's very unique. Haven't seen something this like before.

The game is mostly about going around the US, collecting stories, and sharing them to characters you meet. The end goal is to collect all the stories, including the special/epic stories you get by befriending the characters you meet.

It's a hard game though. And long. Don't go into this with the expectation to collect *all* the stories, because that will take quite a while. In 6 hours, I managed to collect about 1/3 of the stories and half the characters. I think that's plenty to get a feel for the game.

Well worth the purchase!

The Glory and the Dream: Where the Water Tastes like Wine

In its loading screen, at first glance, it proudly presents itself as a produce of U. S. A. But soon, very soon you'll find out, it's a more bitter manifestation of Americana, where the often chanted Dream struggles only to find itself shattered throughout hundreds of years and worse still, after the dust settles in-game, years yet to come. It's nonetheless a loving piece of collective effort, embodying all the effort and struggle of commonfolk and in acknowledging them rather than a nation -- an abstract, nonsensical concept that often times tries to abduct its main component -- the love is as deep and real as it can possibly be.

This is, Where the Water Tastes like Wine.

It's a game starts off, seemingly, in the era of the great depression. A time where Hooverville was still a thing. But as you delve deeper and venture further into the heart of the States, you'll find many, many people and stories preexisting that period of time, many follow-ups long after the end of it. Time in that Americana is convoluted. In your painstaking journey of story-curatorship, you'll come across a wild array of characters, some of them legendary, mostly not note-worthy, representing their struggles against different times and different themes.

You'll meet along the way mythical figures with more fiction than truth such as lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe, John Chapman or Mr. Appleseed. Pecos Bill. Pale rider. Devil himself. Even the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, among other mysteries and fables of talking animals, spirits, memories and dreams. Tales. Legends. Myths. Ideas. Usually unrealistic, sometimes outright surreal. Yet they are what a language -- a tongue defining a culture -- is made of.

But more often than not, you find small-timers like you and me. People that are devastated by poverty and unemployment. People that are confused as they've grown used to poverty are given jobs by WPA. Cotton-field slaves singing their mind out of misery, underground communists, gamblers and cheats, shepherds, lighthouse keepers, farmers, mechanics and the like. Nobody. Commonfolk. Sometimes the oppressed. Yet they are what a nation -- a so unnecessarily glorified concept -- is made of.

Yet with so, so many a story you've seen, heard of and partaken in, at the end of the day you're a nameless wanderer, an eternal vagrant, not to be remembered. It's the nature of your job: story curator and carrier, to pay your debt, but never a creator. In traveling, stories grow several sizes, into myths, songs, legends, inspiring and aspired. In sharing tales you, too, grow several sizes. Not in terms of reputation, but in knowing another person's story, it adds to yours, and you're gonna carry that weight. In carrying and sharing, you, from mere no one, grow into everyone.

And God, do they not weigh heavily.

Your job is collecting and sharing, but your grim yet benign employer's goal is to weave small, truthful stories into a grandiose false narrative called "this country", to tear it up and let the pain, lament, and struggles be remembered, not overshadowed by that Dream. I, as an outsider sharing no common native tongue nor nationality, dare not explicitly lash out on it, but there are stories that don't define themselves by the country they happen to happen in.

I'm all too familiar with the stories of the march of the Bonus Army. In attempting to collect what the country owed them in times of dire need, they found themselves at the wrong end of bayonet tips, gun barrels, smoke bombs, tanks. The 3rd Cavalry, the 12th Infantry, the 13th Engineers, and the 34th Infantry. Under MacArthur's command. With their president Hoover locking himself in White House. It's always been a rather peculiar thing to think about, that in fact, soup and bread are way cheaper than gas grenades. That's what Mason, a WWI veteran with one brother and one leg forever gone, has faced, in his home country.

And I'm all too familiar with the stories of the early union movements, the Gatling guns the owners set up pointing at the miners, the Pinkertons Ford hired to sabotage strikes with rubber batons and pistols. Broken bones and black fingers. Mining companies had two major ways to extort workers. Either by providing tools, but charged insane prices for food and shelter. Or, miners are allowed to hold onto their hard earned money, but they would have to buy their own equipment. The second manner is slightly less brutal, but either one renders hard labor into hopeless servitude. Like a mule. And many did die like one, never walked out to the sun again. That's what Little Ben, a miner, a union activist has faced, and fights against and was hunted for.

I'm also familiar with black people in their enduring grew strong in mind, and withered at the same time. It was a country so injust that, if black people wanted to fight for its war, they would have to enlist in the French or Canadian armies. Yet fiercely they fought, earning them a fearsome nickname: "Hell-fighters". That's 369th Infantry Regiment, where Jimmy served his time.

There are still more stories, each more colorfully shades of grey than another, weighing more than another. Each of them is one of many, each of them survived up till the day the wanderer greets them. They are stories told in a really concrete and tangible way. But, even though they may have prevailed against every day of their past life, in each victory big or small, there are more failures invisible. More of them just couldn't make it to your visit. But there's hope. Like how Jimmy puts it:

It might not be the next stop on the journey or the one after that. But we are on a journey to a better America.

Only thing is, I don't think I have the strength to walk much further. So walk for me, alright?

Walk far.

In the end, it's about the journey. Your journey through Americana's space-time is meaningful, but more so for the stories. They unfold and weave themselves into the big story. Seeds are sowed. And they will grow, some will even thrive. There's hope in fleeing light.

One thing the game should have done it to include other minorities. It's about a nation in which a large portion of railway was built upon the broken backs of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ labors. And they were Yellow Peril. A considerable number of Californian plantations were run by ♥♥♥♥ that had to marry picture brides and were later moved to internment camps. And they were Yellow Peril. Stories that are often overlooked. The thing is, they may have not been able to find accomplished writers that are representative. Understandable, but a pity nonetheless.

I held great expectations towards it as I really like the works of some writers in the team (such as Matthew S. Burns, Emily Short), but when I finally started playing it still took me by surprise. Never had I ever expected that it would be so audacious to tear open the facade of that Dream, only to leave players exposed to grave pain and struggles. And afterwards, in it, love and hope.

I love Where the Water Tastes like Wine in a very personal way as I find myself far more left than right, enjoying reading history a lot more than playing video-games, and thus I did not and will not recommend this to everyone for it's lacking gameplay stimuli. But for the ones I chose to recommend to, they often ended up having a similar resonance.

I started playing Where the Water Tastes like Wine as soon as it came out, but I paused for quite some time because I felt so obliged to write about this game, but I just couldn't find the right words. I fretted from the idea of not being able to convey its greatness. Now in retrospect, how funny I should think that. It doesn't matter. The words are in me, because the stories they have told are in me. The seeds are planted, where songs and myths start.

I've kept Where the Water Tastes Like Wine installed for a couple years now, hoping that one day I would feel inspired to come back and finish it, but I never do. The problem is that the game only has about 6 hours of decent content, but it has been stretched out to well over 12 (my play time at the point of giving up, somewhere west of the Missouri).

At first glance, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine falls somewhere between a walking sim and a VN. You walk around America exploring, occasionally meeting folk or witnessing unusual events. Sometimes something good happens, sometimes something bad happens, but you always survive to tell the tale. It captures the feeling of whimsical, hobo-like travel quite well.

The problem is that the underlying mechanics also shoehorn in a deck building game. It's not noticeable for the first few hours because you are just roaming the country, hearing new stories... Until it clicks that the stories don't exist in their own right. The whole gimmick is that you need to "play" certain stories against certain characters so you can "level up" your relationship. Stories can be "upgraded" as well, which allows you to reuse them to achieve your apparent goal of hoovering all the icons on the map. And once you realize this, all the magic in the game disappears. It doesn't feel like a traveling game any more, it feels like a grind where you are just trying to max out a bunch of counters. Doesn't matter that the music is great, it's just become a tedious deck builder.

If only the developers had been brave enough to make this game an actual walking sim. If only they had not tried to graft a tacky mobile game mechanic underneath it. It's so close to being a great game. Perhaps even for the first few hours it is that great game. I don't regret the time I spent with it, but it's also disappointing when you have to abandon a game because continuing it feels like a slog. Not to mention the controls are uncomfortable to the point of being physically painful during longer play sessions. If the writers are trying to make a clever commentary about how life on the road eventually becomes just as soul-crushingly mechanical as clocking in and out of a 9 to 5, mission accomplished.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (WtWTLW) is a game about stories. You play as a vagabond who crosses Depression-era America collecting stories, which grow and change with the retelling. I bought the game mostly on a whim because I liked the look of it, and on paper the premise is promising. Unfortunately, the game disappointed me on almost every level.

First, the game's sole good point: it has incredible music. As you move about the country, you are treated to variations on the game's main theme as well as other tracks specific to various regions, all of which are excellent. The narration is also very high quality. Sadly, the rest of the game seems designed to undo the merits of the game's audio.

The gameplay consists almost entirely of watching your character (a rather bland model of a skeleton) plod along at an agonizingly slow pace. You can increase your character's pace, but in order to do so, you have to hold down a key in order to pop up a rudimentary minigame. One of four icons will appear, and pressing the corresponding key will cause your character to walk faster, until you miss a keypress. This could have been a chance to add an element from the rhythm genre, but infuriatingly the keypresses come at semi-random intervals, The minigame also causes your character to whistle, which stops the game's soundtrack from playing and forces the player to choose between boring audio or tortuously slow walking speed.

The point of all this walking is to find and listen to the many stories scattered across the country. These come in two kinds: the small stories which you can collect and share with others, and the larger ones which will advance the game. You share the small stories with the speakers who tell the larger stories, and in exchange they share their own story with you. In the process, you will find new, more powerful (and more fanciful) versions of the stories you have told as your audience in turn shares your stories around. This is entertaining in its way, as it is fun to watch a given story transform from a mildly interesting anecdote to a folk legend. The sheer quantity of stories, however, and the inability to go back and reread more than the title of the stories, makes them start to run together after collecting a sufficient quantity of them. The larger stories that you hear by interacting with various characters around the country are a nice change and involve their own minigame, but only a couple of them were really interesting to me. After a couple of hours, the novelty wears off and the game begins to transform from entertainment to chore.

It could be said that the whole point of WtWTLW is that the promise of America is never fulfilled, and that the game tries to convey this in its design. I would argue, however, that poor game design is not the way to achieve this end. I was terribly bored by the time I got to the end, and just wanted the game to be over. I was irritated by the nonsensical ending, which struck me as a ham-fisted attempt at a metaphor whose meaning I was no longer interested in trying to understand. Making the game's final achievement unobtainable felt like salt in the wound at that point. I can respect that metaphor: the myth of the place where the water tastes like wine doesn't exist, it's just the excuse we use to continue the journey. Unfortunately, this game was a journey that wasn't worth taking.