Where the Water Tastes
Like Wine

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (2018) is a narrative adventure game about sharing stories. You travel across the Depression-era United States discovering and collecting the stories of the people and places you encounter on your journey. You use this ever-expanding collection to entertain, impress, and eventually befriend a diverse cast of fellow travellers. Once you’ve earned their trust, they reveal something important about themselves and tell you the most powerful thing, their own true story.

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Play consists of walking across the map and searching out story points and cities. As you learn and share stories throughout your journey, they begin to take on a life of their own as you make choices that shift the story in different directions, discover new information, or hear the same story retold by others with new details, twists, and embellishments. The stories you collect are sorted by fate into tarot-card based categories by topic once your choices have been made (for example: Love, Family, Travel, Freedom, etc) but the tone and characteristics of it can evolve or change completely, What may have started off as a happy tale about Travel can end up as a bizarre mystery, or perhaps gain an ending that is quite sad, but would still be a story about Travel.

You use this growing collection of stories as a way to build relationships with the main characters through a conversation mini-game around a campfire when you encounter one of the 16 main characters. During these conversations they tell you the kinds of stories they want to hear and you try to match their requests with stories you’ve learned, but you have to be careful because you can only tell one story from each tarot card per night! If you manage to meet their desires, by the end of the night your friendship will increase one step. You need to find and have several successful nights of storytelling with a character to earn their trust and learn who they truly are.

Each of the 16 main characters in the game was written by a different notable writer, bringing a unique and diverse voicing and depth to their stories. The soundtrack also consists of 30 folk, jazz, country, blues, and bluegrass tracks, featuring some notable musicians. These contributions, alongside a fully-voiced cast, add an atmospheric richness and heart to the game that helps capture the feel of the American landscape in the 1930’s.

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Our examiner, Angela Hickman Newnham, first checked Where the Water Tastes Like Wine 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 10 months ago.