Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

I'm not strictly against games being used as art, but I feel there's a point where something could be way easier to appreciate as a different form of media. This game has thought-provoking dialogue, a captivating soundtrack to compliment the story, and marvelous voice acting. The problem is that it's hard to appreciate all of these good elements when the gameplay lulls you into a catatonic stupor of boredom because the gameplay does not go past slowly shuffling through a barren overworld. This would go better as a book or movie because you don't have to engage in those forms of media like you would a video game. The developers of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine are incredibly talented and I hope if they see this, they're not discouraged because I just know they can make a great movie production or novel.

"It's an artgame. The walkspeed can be whatever we want." No it can't. Go away. The vibes and writing and music here are fine and if the game just shuffled events and dealt them to you from a deck of cards this would be a nice casual little experience but listen. You. You the person that's reading this. I want you to go on youtube and look at this game's walkspeed. Best of luck to the devs, the graphics and music are dope, I hope the next game is playable.

Interesting aesthetic. Pleasant soundtrack. Decent writing. Great voice acting. And an absolutely miserable way to navigate it via gameplay. You slowly walk from one random location to another to pick up a couple of paragraphs that make a short story. Rinse and repeat. It really drags. It's pretty much like listening to an audio book with a two minute break between paragraphs. Someone needs to recycle the content into a 2D map where you can click to fast-travel and interat with the actual narrative, rather than a screensaver.

音乐很顶， 剧情的话主要是在各个主要NPC上， 然后就是看着自己讲的故事会被以讹传讹成什么样= = 比较纠结的是貌似无法自己控制故事的传播方向？ 然后走得真是太慢太慢啦！ 适合那种下午拿着茶慢慢品味的步行模拟器 喜欢看各种不同故事的人很适合玩这个游戏…… 但是个人评分也就7分这样吧

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine might best be summarized as a game that is vastly more than the sum of its parts; the travelling can often feel slow, the fatigue and health mechanics are often a little half baked and unclear, sometimes shifting between too much and too little in surprising succession. And yet for every slight gameplay frustration, this game always offers something fantastic around the corner; a perfectly thematically timed strum of an Appalachian banjo in the East or a beautiful spanish duet guiding me into the southwest of New Mexico and Arizona. The central premise of the game revolves around the repayment of a 'debt' incurred by losing a card game with the devil, collecting and spreading stories across America as you travel. Stories grow in the telling, and a suspiciously familiar story about a strong woodsman may turn into the legend of Paul Bunyan, or a story of a winged goat laying in the ruins of a New Jersey house becomes that of the Jersey Devil. The character's you meet are often 'elevated' archetypes, pastiches of American life out of time and place; cowboys, bonus army vets, coal miners, Harlem Hell-fighters and dustbowl refugees, in order to bring out their true stories, you need to swap the ones you've collected with them to get them to open up. Stronger, stranger stories work better, so the incentive is to roam the lands and absorb as much as you can; whether the stories are funny, sad, scary or thrilling and so on. In that sense, you don't so much explore the map to 'collect' as you do to create and spread the American myths and legends of the land. The conversations you share with your fellow travellers are essentially short stories told in sharp exchanges that are equally striking for what and what isn't said: Some are on the road by choice, others are forced out, they face conflicts with the lands, the contradictions external and internal, and they're all elevated by the fact each traveller often has a different writer, which lends more weight and authenticity to the intensely personal stories you'll hear. The writings are often political, personal and reflective treatises on how the country has changed for both the better and worse, delivered with the kind of confidence to come off thoughtful rather than preachy. Confidence is present throughout this game, particularly in the presentation, scrawled drawings, vivid fantastical and religious imagery all set to an *incredible* soundtrack that shifts to fit where you travel. All of it comes together to form a cohesive and compelling journey across America that scratches that 'roadtrip' itch for me in a way many conventional games simply wouldn't even think to do; a trip defined by memories and conversations, and not the mechanical act of moving itself, which is definitely fortunate as the travelling systems are far from ideal, and I will admit that I was using the fast travel items in the last third of the game, but your mileage may vary with how much this undermines your experience. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine really comes to life as a tale of humanity spread form coast to coast, from the fleeting half-glimpsed stories you don't complete, to the classic american legends, and the visions of its people that give the land their textures. This game will hinge on its narrative, not its systems; it is greater than the sum of its parts. Fortunately for this game, I found the writing to be superb through and through. This isn't a game that's going to reward you with ticking numbers and streams of achievements, in fact one is very deliberately unachievable in keeping with the themes of wanderlust and struggles to find contentment both external and internal, and much like the gold bars in New Vegas' Dead Money, everyone hates it and tries to break it apart. If that's the kind of gamer you are, then frankly this game isn't going to be for you, that's fine. If you're a strong advocate for games as art however, in the vein of experimental re-toolings such as Papers Please and Kentucky Route Zero, it might be worth a look, even if it isn't exactly everything you want, it's a testament to the plethora of forms video games can take.

很复杂，你要说玩肯定不好玩，表现也遭，但是游戏整体的氛围确实一流

[h3]Relaxing, slow-paced narrative game with a lot of soul[/h3] I was told it had a similar feel to Disco Elysium and while it is a *completely* different type of game, it totally does have *that* feel. If you have played DE, you know what I'm talking about lol The writing in this is incredible, most of it is voice acted and that is really well done, too; all points to having a copy editing team that was on top of things from start to finish and ends up being a solid and satisfying piece of work. Most of the complaints I see focus around the slow walk speed; which, if you can't sit back and enjoy the vibe, that doesn't make you a horrible person - but I'm curious to know what they were expecting. It's not billed as an action game; there's an auto-walk feature; it's not any more tedious than reading a video novel. The one thing I'd want to improve is the way the interface organizes all the different 'stories' you learn.[spoiler](there's a couple hundred of them)[/spoiler] I think they did it this way to force you to engage and connect with each story to remember what 'type' they all are, [spoiler](funny, exciting, sad, happy, scary)[/spoiler] but in practice I ended up having to track them all on a separate monitor and it was pretty immersion-breaking. Game like this thrives on immersion. Would have been nice to at least have a way to add my own notes in game, or something like that. [b]In any case - I still enjoyed this game quite a bit and recommend it to anyone who enjoys narratives.[/b] [added ~16hrs] I hadn't even got to the southwest yet when I wrote this, OMG [spoiler]"Lion, you so goooood!"[/spoiler]

音乐无敌了，题材有意思。但游戏模式太坐牢了

sometimes games feel like great novels

A beautiful game so far. I'm very glad that they made it.