Where the Water Tastes Like Wine Reviews
A story packed adventure which spans across the USA, with some wonderfully written stories, a fantastic soundtrack, and some sublime voice acting. However, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is let down by a map that is too large often resulting in a lot of time spent walking, doing nothing.
Your enjoyment of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is completely dependent on whether you value story more than gameplay. That element is second to none when it comes to enjoyment, due to both the writing and your evolution as the simple stories grow into complex tales. As a game, that section doesn't hold up. Movement is slow, and the different meters that you have to manage feel rather tacked on. As a whole product, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine can be a drag, but if you're in it for the story, bump up the score and have fun with a game that spins an excellent yarn.
If you treat Where the Water Tastes Like Wine as a visual novel with added interaction, you'll find a unique premise surrounded with a host of interesting characters and stories. As a video game, however, it is too stripped back to feel substantial and remain engaging through its lengthy run time.
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.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is an original narrative experience. He's got a lot of American stories to tell us, supported by a perfect dubbing and high-class illustrations. The problem is that the end result is harmed by a repetitive gameplay and extremely slow character movements, all that ending up causing a deep feeling of boredom after one hour or so.
Review in French | Read full review
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
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine could have had deep mythology building for 1930s Americana, but instead it offers only enough to get you intrigued before forcing you back into the grind-laden, story-gathering crawl the rest of the game is.
With a lovely art style and an entirely intriguing concept, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is unlike anything you’ll have played before. Its uniqueness makes it worthwhile, but some slow-moving elements, inconsequential mechanics and a few lacklustre stories mean it doesn’t stand out quite as much as it should.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine contains charming stories, wonderful illustrations and voice-acting that fits the game’s slow-paced and relaxing nature. And this is where the budget ran out. I have to assume that after paying Sting, the writers, and the illustrators, there was no money left to design the over-world and flesh out the short stories. This leaves Where the Water Tastes Like Wine being half of a great game that requires you to wade through the weaker parts to get to the good content. It’s an eight to ten hour game when it would have been better as a four to five hour one.
There are beautiful and tragic scenes, songs, and passages to find in WTWTLW's journey, but they're spread far too thin.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a simple game about traveling the USA while listening to and telling stories.
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.
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.
At the end of a long road, emotions can be mixed, with many exhausted by the experience or rejuvenated by the discoveries made along the way. WTWTLW instills the former, driving players to feel dragged through the mud as opposed to fulfilled. Although the game touts the importance of the journey over the destination, neither offers any real sense of satisfaction. In the end, an interesting concept and great art direction cannot save the game from the weight of ambition. The attempt is admirable, but the execution leaves much to be desired. WTWTLW is lacking the narrative punch and cohesion of other story-focused games, as well as the freedom and gameplay quality of other exploration-based titles. WTWTLW has all the promise of a long and exciting road-trip across unknown territory, but ends up only offering flat tires and postcards of better places.
Another example of that latest trend of videogames with "high artistic quality," Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is not something brand new, unique, and meaningful, but something boring, boring, boring that uses big words to say things that aren't that interesting. Oh, and it has Sting in it…
A continent-sized anthology of American campfire tales that will keep pulling you in deeper, once you acclimatise to its slow pace.
For me it ended up being more water than wine.
'Where The Water Tastes Like Wine' is a giant leap forward for video game storytelling
This is slow burn gaming experience that is not for everyone, but those that fall into the demographic it’s aiming for are going to be absolutely smitten with it. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is like nothing else I’ve ever played and is a title I intend to keep savouring over coming weeks.