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Where The Water Tastes Like Wine Review (Switch)

Game: Where The Water Tastes Like Wine
Genre: Adventure, RPG, Puzzle
System: Nintendo Switch
Developer/Publisher: Serenity Forge
Age Rating: EU16+|US Teen
Price: $19.99 USD |$24.99 CAD |$30.00 AUS| £17.99 | €19,99
Release Date: 29 November 2019

Review code used, with many thanks to Serenity Forge!

Gritty and Mythical

Are there any Harry Potter fans in the house? Do you remember in Goblet of Fire when Harry finally makes it to The Burrow and – for the first time – meets Ron’s other brothers Charlie and Bill?

Well, when Harry first sees Bill it goes down like this:

“However, Bill was – there was no other word for it – cool.”

That’s the kind of feeling I had when I played this game:

Where The Water Tastes Like Wine was – there was no other word for it – cool.”

This game is about as gritty as one could possibly ask for. After playing it, I almost felt like I was covered in road dirt, and had to spit dust and sand-like granules out from in between my teeth.

It also has this otherworldly quality, that I absolutely love to death, about it. It combines my love of stories and storytelling, with my love of fantasy and fiction, as well as my love of semi-occult stuff: namely tarot cards.

It is also one of those games that reaffirms my path in life (pretty strong feelings, eh?). But seriously! I am an actor and improviser, and I always have to remind myself that in improv I can literally do a scene anywhere about anything; most of the time we all end up doing scenes as people on Earth doing normal things, but I could easily be Glognak from the planet Burr on a mission to grow a rare plant called Kwepik that will cure my planet from dying of Macrovian Flu.

See?! Stories can be about anything, and that’s why I love them; and that’s why I love this game.

Water Into Wine

The game begins with your very gritty (I am going to use that word  a lot because I feel it very accurately describes the experience of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine) male voice narrating your every move and action.

It feels like walking around in an old-west movie. 

You stroll into a town, make your way to the local saloon, and spot a table of poker players. You sit down, and as the night progresses everyone but you and the mysterious stranger across from you fold. 

You check your hand and it is the best possible hand in the entire game of poker. Sadly, you don’t have enough to match your opponents “all in”. The stranger decides to call on the condition that if he wins, he gets a favour out of you. 

Glancing at your royal straight flush, spades, aces high one more time, you obviously accept this deal and pour some of your blood into the pot. 

When it comes time to show your hand, SURPRISE! You are holding a bunch of tarot cards, and the suddenly revealed Wolf-man shows the hand you previously thought you held.

The wolf tasks you with the job of storyteller. You must now trek across the country collecting and sharing stories. It’s a little vague, but you have to make sure that some thread of the truth remains in the grand story.

He strips you of your flesh, and sends you on your way. 

“I’m sorry, what did you just say? He strips you of your flesh?!” you ask, astonishment lacing the tone of your voice.

“Oh indeed.” I reply calmly. “You are then dropped smack down onto a literal map of the United States, a skeleton-person carrying a hobo-bindle. 

Hitchhiker’s Guide To America

Now that we’ve been dropped into the game, let’s talk a bit about controls and mechanics.

So your character is literally standing on a map – which is such a cool visual characteristic of the game. As you’re walking across the landscape, you will see the words pop up around cities and landmarks: Chicago, U.S.A./Canada border, Mississippi River, etc.

It could almost be a lesson in American geography – so if you want a game that you can say to your parents is also educational, I think you could get away with that with this game. Especially if you happen to be studying American geography. 

But I digress.

You can walk slowly around the map using the control stick. You can also hit the R button to auto-walk, holding down the R button will bring up a little mini-game where you can whistle to “keep your spirits up” while you walk, and essentially enable you to walk faster. 

It took me a while to figure out how to play it, but you use the A-B-X-Y buttons, hitting whichever one you need to to keep the tune going. If you mess up, then the whistling stops and your walking pace immediately slows. But it’s not a big deal, you can always just re-hit R and start up again. 

I found that to be really nice; sometimes I would get so focused on making sure I was hitting the whistling buttons properly that I forgot to be looking at all the cool stuff around me!

Anyway, that is the slowest way to travel. You can also hitchhike along roads if the cars are willing to stop and pick you up. As well, you can hop a ride on the railway: you can pay, ensuring a nice comfortable ride, OR you can sneak on and just hope you don’t get caught by the train-police, for if they do they’ll beat you and kick you off.

Living that travelling storyteller life.

Hitting X brings up the menu, and you can check your inventory, view all the different stories you’ve gathered, check your map, progress, and journey log.

The stories are – obviously – my favourite part of this game. There are sixteen different categories of story, and they’re separated by sixteen different tarot cards. There’s no real rhyme or reason to each tarot card; nothing in the game says “Stories under the card Death are always scary stories”, but rather it’s left somewhat ambiguous and up to your interpretation of each story.

This was another aspect I loved about the game.

I am not a big fan of excessive hand-holding in video games. I don’t like it when the game makes everything obvious, or treats the player like they couldn’t figure it out on their own.

With this game, it felt like once it told me the controls I was on my own. I love it! It’s like giving me a big sandbox to play in, and now it’s up to me to create something fun in the sand!

A big part of the game is finding the special story characters. You can see them on your map. When you find them, you spend a night with them around their campfire. They ask you to tell them certain kinds of stories; maybe they want something funny, or something happy, or something scary. 

You do your best to provide the stories they want, or maybe stories they didn’t even know they wanted! When dawn finally breaks, they move on and you can find them again down the road and swap more stories.

Then their stories are added to your story lists and you walk around like a living virus infecting everyone with stories.

The really cool part is that the stories that you tell to these special characters will also start spreading around the country, and changing! You’ll hear your stories told again, and they will grow each time. Perhaps not as honest as they were before.

It’s truly a unique gaming experience! 

A Living Drollery!

I was blown away by the visuals, sound, and writing in this game.

I don’t think I can give it enough praise. The music is amazing, and really sets the tone of the game – they are old western sounding tunes, and I loved strolling across America listening to them. I was also appreciative of the developers adding in the ability to skip the song with a simple press of the Right-Arrow button (or Right on the D-Pad for those with a Switch Lite).

I think they should put this game’s playlist on Spotify or iTunes, or whatever, just so that the amazing artists of the songs can get a little extra profit on such quality music.

The artistic design and artwork in general is stellar. I never got tired of seeing each individual picture representing each story. 

The writing, however, is obviously where this game hits all the right buttons. 

It is literally a game about finding and telling stories, so I would hope the writing would be the best; it will not disappoint.

There must be a special trick to writing very, very short stories. Micro-stories if you will. Each story is only a short paragraph long, since you are collecting so many different ones they have to be quick and fast. Despite that, the quality of each story isn’t diminished. 

Many stories were obvious with regards to theme. I could usually tell if a story was happy, or spooky, but sometimes it was a lot more ambiguous, and stories that I thought were scary would have the special characters saying “Pff, you tryin’ to scare me?”

Again, the ambiguity of it, and the fact that – like good stories – nothing is black and white, made this game exceptionally enjoyable.

And the beautiful and scrumptious icing on the delicious cake of this game: the voice actor. The super-human they hired to read through the stories is not only an amazing asset to this game, but a credit to the acting and voice-acting industry. 

I hope this game gets nominated for several awards, indie and/or otherwise, because it’s new, fun, unique, and the production quality goes above and beyond in every regard.

Final Verdict

I couldn’t think of any niggles I had with the game. There wasn’t anything about this game that I personally didn’t like. I love reading, I love stories, I love good art, writing, and voice acting. Honestly, I couldn’t think of any reason not to give it the best score I am able to give on this website!

A whole lot of gritty, fun content for an extremely reasonable price. 

A soundtrack that will make you want to go square dance, ho-down, two-step, and/or just smile. 

Writing that will fill your mind with many interesting stories. 

Characters that also have their own awesome, interesting, fun stories to share.

Tarot cards!

Voice acting that will blow your mind!

You honestly can’t go wrong with this game. I would highly recommend it!

Final verdict: Two Thumbs Up!

Two Thumbs Up Rating

 

One comment

  1. I really liked reading this article Ashromer, thanks!
    The art doesn’t immediately draw me in, but the stories and your enthusiasm make it a game to remember.
    I’m playing Pokemon Shield right now, and I’m really missing some mind blowing (or any) voice acting..
    Love your Harry Potter reference!

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