Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (2018)

Pfiou. La claque. Je vais avoir besoin d'un jeu tout doux après celui là. Where the water taste like wine est un de ces jeux qui est resté très longtemps dans ma liste d'envie et presque aussi longtemps dans ma backlog. Je suis contente de l'en avoir sorti.

Le concept est simple. Vous perdez une partie de poker contre Die Wolf qui vous maudit. Vous voilà donc squelette ambulant chargé de parcourir les USA en rassemblant les histoires de ses habitants. Ces histoires, vous allez pouvoir les raconter à des feux de camps et alors elles vous échapperont, vous revenant plus tard sous d'autres formes. En toile de fond se dessine alors sous vos yeux l'Histoire de l'Amérique et de ses désillusions.

Il faut faire son deuil. Comme vous, le rêve américain est mort. Vous comprenez vite que vous êtes dans un purgatoire de l'Amérique où toutes les époques se confondent. Ici on fusille des communistes. Là on déplace des tribus natives américaines. Le tout soupoudré de migrations sur la route 66 façon les raisins de la colère et trahison des utopies hippies. De feu de camp en feu de camp, ces visages du rêve américain se transforment, mutent en monstres étranges qui portent les stigmates sanglants de la Grande Histoire qui a cherché à les effacer. Ils sont là, les cauchemars, les monstres de l'Amérique. Ils sont revenus d'entre les morts pour vous parler.

Et il fait mal ce "Produce of America" à l'écran titre.

Les grandes marches à travers les états-unis sont peuplées de musiques d'une très grande qualité même si elles finissent par se répéter. J'ai une grande affection pour les thèmes des états du sud, que ce soit la musique hispanophone, les airs de blues où les instruments traditionnels natifs américains. De même, les artworks façon crayons gras rendent les histoires vivantes, les visages graves. On a l'impression de naviguer dans un carnet de voyage et c'est immersif.

Quel dommage alors que la technique ne suive pas. La carte du jeu (au sens propre puisque vous marchez littéralement sur un plan des USA) est laide et met en plus du temps à charger. Il y a aussi des erreurs bêtes comme des touches non mappables qui empêchent certaines commandes sur les claviers azerty, l'impossibilité de faire du stop dans les deux sens qui rend parfois les déplacements laborieux (dommage quand c'est le cœur du gameplay). Le concept de ramasser des histoires est plutot sympa mais leurs catégories sont un peu aléatoires. Les histoires sont ordonnées selon des cartes de tarot mais bénéficient aussi d'une catégorie cachée (Palpitante, Blague, Espoir, Tragédie) et celle ci n'est pas indiquée hors c'est la seule qui compte dans le gameplay. Les choix de ces catégories sont parfois discutables ce qui complexifie bêtement les phases d'échange d'histoire...

Cela reste néanmoins une très bonne expérience que je recommande chaudement.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine takes visual novel and adventure mechanics and crafts one of the best adventure games about American folk tales, if not one of the best adventures I've played.

Around the early 20th century, you are tasked by a Dire Wolf to gather stories from across the United States and pass them along. As you tell stories, the tales "level up" and grow more outrageous and mythical until they become legends. The player either walks, hitchhikes, or takes some form of quick travel from place to place, stopping by old houses to either discover stories, gain stats (the player can get tired, lose health, or lose money) or hear their stories retold in more exciting versions.

During story segments the player enters a visual novel style prompt where they can make choices to change the nature of the story and possibly change stats in the process. Each tale can take a form of hopeful, funny, sad, exciting, or scary tales (though the supernatural will have most of them seeming quite depressing or terrifying from the outset) - the array of tales told is immensely rich. The player will smile, they'll behold a gruesome creature, they'll mourn a loss along the way. This game has some of the most enrapturing storytelling I've seen in a game in a long time.

As for telling stories, the player tracks down sixteen characters across the countryside at campfires. With an array of stories equipped at a time, the player must tell stories the characters want to hear, figuring out if a story is hopeful, scary, etc. Each character has fantastic depth with at least three levels of storytelling that must be cleared to gain access to fast travel and later the end of the story. The voicework is also spot on.

The graphics vary from the overworld to the story segments. The 2D presentation of stories are gorgeous, with a rustic, darkened style. The overworld is a little more simplistic, with the only downside that the simple graphics seem to chug plenty on most computers - it doesn't ruin the experience.

As the player moves across the landscape they'll need plenty to keep them company along the way, and the music is there in spades. Some of the finest music I've ever heard in games carries itself through variation after variation based on where you're located, from Appalachia to the Deep South to the deserts of the Southwest. Every song is absolutely catchy and at times I'd just listen to the song instead of fast travel or use a whistling mechanic to speed up.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is an adventure dripping with story and heart. The United States and its myths may be their most captivating here.

I did not finish the game. Played for a little over 8 hours but no desire to continue.

Narrative

At first I thought the narrative was pretty great. The idea was cool, you're a wanderer collecting stories. Telling them, watching them evolve. Some other travelers cross your path, they tell you their stories. It was pretty good at first. But the characters were a bit underdeveloped in my opinion. You saw them for three nights (sometimes more) and then they were gone forever (at least as far as I know). The several characters I met all were depressed, melancholic, have hard lives. Yes those were the times, but it doesn't give much variety. Maybe others I haven't met will have more positive reasons for being on the road, but in the first half I met none that did. The smaller stories, at first pretty cool, but started to become pretty similar to eachother.

Gameplay

Well there really isn't much of it. It's a visual novel at it's core, and I usually like those, but it has this gameplay mechanic in between, that fails to hit the mark. You walk around on a big flat map of the US searching for stories, and those main characters. Walking is very slow. There is a whistling mechanic that speeds up the walking which is basically a QTE, and there are some means to travel. Trains with known destinations require money, which can only be earned once in cities, and sometimes in other random places. You can also hop a train with a chance to be wounded, and not knowing where exactly you will wind up. You can also hitchhike, which is slow, and you might overshoot/undershoot your target. Whistle walking is pretty much the way to go but this overpowers the amazing soundtrack which sucks. The walking gets really tedious and there is just not much to see on the way. The music being the only redeeming factor. There is also the fact of huge FPS drops and stuttering which got pretty annoying after a while. I do have a PC that should be able to more than handle this game so that's certainly not the issue. I did find old threads about this talking about a fix back in 2018 but I guess it never happened.

Setting

The music sets the scene very well in this game, and it's one of the biggest redeeming factors. It's amazing, fits the area your currently in and it's just high quality. I don't even really like western/country music but I did love this. There is also more jazzy tunes up near Chicago for instance. But I'd rather than just listen to the soundtrack. Which I found on bandcamp & steam. The art of the characters during the visual novel bits was also good, I really liked it. There is only two art pieces per character though, could maybe have been a bit more. Maybe cutting out the gameplay entirely and just have more art. I would be down.

Conclusion

No. I didn't really love this game. Gameplay got tedious quickly, and the story was not gripping enough to make it worth slogging through. I do love the art and music, and as it happens the soundtrack is on sale on steam right now, and includes a digital art book! Well, I guess I can enjoy parts of these games in some way, but playing it won't be one of the ways.

Like all the indie games I play, I came across this one on accident. Looking through a GOG sale, the title caught my eye. Just reading the game page, you can tell it's a bit of a high concept game. You collect stories and travel around telling them to other wanderers.

The limited gameplay of this game involves just walking around a condensed, artsy rendition of America. You come across little events that are all text with a little hand-drawn vignette and you have two options on how to respond, sorta like a choose-your-own-adventure book. These are the best part, the traversing is a little more tedious. I kinda get with what they're going for, you have to make the map big enough that it feels like you're traveling to different parts of the country and give a good sense of pacing, but sometimes the distances equal boredom more than whimsy. I guess it could be sort of an interactive difficulty as stories are easy to come across in the populated East, but you'll have longer stretches of walking out in the West. You can hop trains or hitch a ride to help speed up the process, but they never seem to be going the way I'm headed. The game has some lagging issues too. It may've been my laptop, but for a pretty simplistic game it chugs along at points a lot.

Now, on to what the game is really about the narrative. The game is set during the Great Depression era of a mystical America. You're a supernatural hobo wandering across the country collecting folktales for this trickster wolf. The stories you hear upon the land range from mundane to paranormal. And the developers did their homework, most of the stories are from real American folklore. You come across the Jersey Devil, Paul Bunyan, Bigfoot, Ichabod Crane, etc. There are also some more mundane stories, and all of them are purposefully placed; you come across cowboy stories out West & coal mining tales in Appalachia. Of all the Tall Tale heroes, I never came across John Henry, but there's over 200+ stories, so I may've missed him.

Each story has three levels, this is part of the gameplay loop. You don't just stumble across Pecos Bill, you watch a cowboy ride a horse near a tornado, then you tell the story to someone in Ohio, time passes, and a person in Utah will tell you about Pecos Bill who rides tornadoes. Some still have a more fantastical beginning, like talking dogs or three headed birds. The game is about how these tales build up over time, how the stories we regard now as folktales may have more grounded origins. The narrator who reads these stories out for you does an excellent job. He's got that perfect grizzled, old voice that fits great with old Americana storytelling. I didn't skip most of the text because I enjoyed listening to his renditions. You "upgrade" these stories by telling them to one of the 9 characters in the game. These are other downtrodden hobos from different walks of life.

These main hobos are the weakest narrative point for me. They don't get super pretentious as most indie games are want to do, but most of them aren't well developed. They seem to have sorta the same personalities, lots of Godless Communists, which yes, the Depression was a trying time on America and there was a Red Scare just a few years earlier, but it seems more like the developer's beliefs. And none of them don't have much to say, each one has one big thing they constantly yammer about. They don't feel like real conversations, more like listening to a street corner nutcase. You tell them the legend of Johnny Appleseed, they go on about how they like being a train porter. There's no real connect. Most are Depression era caricatures, but there's this random hippie that doesn't belong. And some of the hobos have good voice actors, Dave Fenroy's in it, but a few of the hobos have really bad voice actors or sound like they recorded on an amateur mic.

The music in this game is great. I'm a fan of bluegrass, Western, and blues. Each region of America has it's own playlist. The songs do get repetitious if you stay in one region for long, and the main theme has a different version for each region that plays when you enter it, which gets old if you're hoping between two of them. Of all the areas the Southwest had the best selection of songs. All this music helped the long travel times.

I did some research and apparently this game was a flop, I mean it wasn't marketed at all. Also, it seems like this is a very niche title made for, like, me. I don't know how much the gamer & American folktale demographic cross over. And as I play through it, it does seem like it has the issue indie games can have. They went so hard on the narrative side that they spent too much money on actors and not enough on making gameplay fun. And like all indie games, if this had a bigger budget, it've been a great game.

All in all, even with it's failings, this game has a lot of charm, humor, and Americana. And as my profile states, I'm a sucker for any game with history, Western themes, or folktales, and this game has all three so I can't hate it.