When’s the last time you took a walk through Americana? Nothing but the clothes on your back and the stories in your heart. A story can be powerful thing and it’s the main antagonist and motivation in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine by Dim Bulb Games. You’ll take to the road and collect over 200 stories through 12-15 hours of playtime throughout the course of the game. While the stories are always interesting the gameplay is not. By the end of your journey, you’re not sure if the adventure was worth it or if you should have even started it at all.
“You don’t have to put on a gas-light”
The game begins with your character seated at a card game against a mysterious ‘Grey Man’. Come to find out it’s a giant Wolf that’s voiced by Sting (yes, THAT Sting); who sets you on your path of collecting stories. Each story you collect will be passed on to different travelers that you meet along your path in Dustbowl-Era America. The premise is pretty simple as you leave the anthropomorphic Wolf and set off on your adventure. From the artistically drawn card table, you transition to a skeletal visage and begin walking your way across America. You are LITERALLY walking across the country and this is where the game starts to take a turn for the mundane.
As you can imagine, going from place-to-place and hearing stories can be a bit of an arduous process. Sometimes the stories are pretty quick, but most of the time you have to click on what direction you want the story to take; and that adds more time. Between locations you can sometimes hitch a ride, but the controls can be a bit glitchy and just waiting for the cars to come makes you think that you’d be better off just continuing to hike.
Once you get to the crux of the game, meeting other travelers at campsites and sharing tomes; you get to see the point of what WTWTLW is really all about. Sharing the stories gives you the ability to weave a tale that’s sad, happy, scary, and a myriad of emotions in-between. At that point, you will collect that new story into your checklist of other tales until you’ve gotten them all. Think Pokemon Go! if all you did was walked around and listened to people make up whatever lies that wanted and you didn’t really get any excitement out of collecting the next anecdote.
That’s really what it all broke down to for me. Was the juice worth the squeeze? After going about for hours on end, I began to ask myself if it was even really worth it. Ultimately I decided it wasn’t and just stopped. Yes, the stories were pretty cool. Yes it was neat to weave my own; but in the end it just didn’t matter. If this game was more in line with a Telltale Game and the stories somehow changed your outcome, I’d appreciate it more. If the game wasn’t a game at all, but just a book with all the collected tales; sign me up, I’d read it. Yet, it’s a video game and in the end the amazing soundtrack wore on me, as well as my fingers started to cramp up as I meandered from one city to the next.
Overall, I’d try this game out for the visuals and the narratives but I wouldn’t expect you to play it for more than a few hours. This is the perfect purchase for a Steam Sale and I feel bad saying it, because I really would like Dim Bulb Games to continue what they’re doing; if only, in a different and more engaging way.
DFAT received a preview copy from the publisher.
