Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

It is a walking simulator of a skeleton traveling over a poorly drawn USA map. The main goal is to collect stories and tell them to some NPC characters. The overall idea is rather nice and the game could be good. But for such setting the game is way too long and inconvenient. And bugs, of course. There's a feeling that devs have never played their own game. 1) The main game mechanic is to tell the NPC characters stories they want to hear (scary, funny, thrilling, etc.) There're more than 200 different stories and they can't be marked in any way. Neither you can reread a story once you closed it after encountering. That means you need to remember everything right off.Which is weird, inconvenient and unpleasant. Moreover, after the characters said whichever story they wanted to hear and the choosing menu opened, you can't check what they wanted if you forgot or missed it. 2) Traveling is tedious. You just walk. Slowly. The only thing you can do is "whistle" – that's another boring mini game of pressing arrows. Whistling speeds up you a little. If you hitchhike, you do nothing. Just move a little more faster. But usually not for a long... 3) The navigation is truly awful. You can try go by train or "teleport" using "artifacts". But there will only be mentioned the destination city. I am not an American, I have never been to USA. I don't know which city belongs to which state. City names don't even written on the map. I needed to use Google maps to understand where the train leads 4) Music strives to create some atmosphere of the past days. But I just didn't like it. It's primitive and quite disturbing 5) Stories... Well, for game about stories it is lame. The plot is faceless and meaningless. The atmosphere brought by them is uncomfortable and a bit depressing. 6) Ah, and the intentionally unachievable achievement The voice acting feels too good for this game. It is the only thing I really want to appreciate. Still, I guess, I will finish it someday. Sometimes when I don't know what game I'd like to play, I play some games like this one. Definitely do not recommend

This review ends up positive despite my limited time in the game because I really appreciate the stuff that the game obviously cares about: the writing. Its sharp, western vignettes with a nice folk-ish, country-ish soundtrack. The mechanical glue that turns it into a game just needs a little more. The walking between stories is so undetailed and frictionless that it ends up being boring and not meditative. Trying to select a story to tell a stranger also often feels like kind of annoying guess work and not like real problem solving.

Damn where did they find these writers and artists this was incredible

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

If you like walking sims, visual novels, games about walking around and reading stories, this is a solid one. Nails the classic Americana vibe perfectly. The visuals and music are lovely. I found it surprisingly engrossing - not even any individual story in particular, but wanting to walk a little further, get another little vignette, meet another character. My only complaint is that it's a little buggy - the sound and graphics can freeze/stutter sometimes, and I've had several stories not appear in-world despite being marked on the map in the inventory. But otherwise, it was lovely.

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I met a Hobo Kid. 10/10

如果是本小说我反而会更有耐心，但对于游戏而言很枯燥无趣，没有游戏性，本质走路模拟器+路上收集碎片小故事

This Trench was Dug for Me, and I love it here

Just amazing. I never would have guessed the USA got such a monumental folk culture. Thank you so much