Where the Water Tastes Like Wine Reviews
There are beautiful and tragic scenes, songs, and passages to find in WTWTLW's journey, but they're spread far too thin.
A continent-sized anthology of American campfire tales that will keep pulling you in deeper, once you acclimatise to its slow pace.
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine shines with its incredible voice work, well-told stories that take on lives of their own, and many profound moments
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine celebrates storytelling but loses the plot
A unique game about collecting and trading stories across the American Dust Bowl doesn't give much room to craft your own story in the process.
On the surface, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine seems like it has a recipe for an incredible game. It stretches the lengths of what story-driven, Twine-like games can accomplish in scope—thematically, narratively, and in terms of the dozens of writers from different cultures and backgrounds behind them. And yet, the game's onerous pace and the way it relegates the stories you collect to flash cards ends up doing a disservice to the game's strengths.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is an excellent exploration of stories and the meanings we place upon them. It's a road trip game through the American landscape that's punctuated by astounding writing and entertaining encounters. There's nothing quite like it, and it's doubtful that there ever will be.
The aesthetics, soundtrack, and writing here are wonderful and more than reward the patience required to fully unravel the game's mysteries. Playing it resulted in an immersion that went beyond my niggles with the gameplay.
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine gets to translate the oral narrative into a game mechanic. The way the game transforms and mutate the stories that we know and we tale make the game a deep reflection about the most human act of all: telling our experiences to other so they can learn from us.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
I love the idea of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. It has a lot of personality, and several days after I finished it, I was still humming some of the songs to myself. However, it's impeded by a few gameplay quirks, like how tedious it is to move around.
For me it ended up being more water than wine.
I do think Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is worth a gander, just don’t expect a swan song of a tale or gut punch metaphor about early America. Enjoy it for it what it immediately offers: a fun series of tiny vignettes and discoverable characters to unwind with. Forget the rest.
An inspired attempt at something new, like an Americana graphic novel read through at a snails pace. The lovely meditative quality to the gameplay eventually becomes somewhat frustrating because of repetition, the limitations of the concept and how much the player can interact with the characters and stories. Regardless of these shortcomings, anyone looking for some fresh ideas in their games should give it a try.
Where the Water Tastes like Wine is an amazing piece of storytelling caged in an unwieldy game structure. The journey through the States is a charming trip about the importance of the stories we share everyday and a great portrait of America form many point of views. On the long run, unfortunately, the lacklustre gameplay simply fails to sustain the sense of wandering and discovery of such an amazing journey.
Review in Italian | Read full review
_____________________ “There's a lot to love about Where The Water Tastes Like Wine
As an interesting intellectual exploration of the role that word-of-mouth plays in storytelling, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine plays like a proof of concept that never graduated beyond an initial prototyping stage. Sure, it has plenty of narratives to uncover, but ultimately the repetitive, shallow mechanics prevent the experience from meeting its full potential. Despite the best efforts of the excellent visual presentation and voice acting, the net product is a hollow shell of what it could've been.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine takes a bold step in trying to make a game based on a concept that is very unusual in this medium. That's something to praise but even though the game features an interesting plot and the stories are certainly worth reading, the gameplay experience does not feel adequate to what is on offer and way too often the game feels like it should have been done differently and with other mechanics.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
There's no other game like Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, even if it does lose the plot when it celebrates the art of stories and the power that they possess.
There is space in gaming for narrative output like this, but they need to be carefully tailored to be games first and experiences second. You don't even want to know what this water tastes like.