Good stories, so-so gameplay
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine lets you wander continental America during the Great Depression. The main goal is to meet with other travelers and learn their stories, and share smaller stories that you collect in different regions. The regions also have their own soundtrack, which is excellent - the songs do end up repeating a lot, but didn't become unwelcome.
The smaller stories you collect do have small interactive moments, where you can guide where it goes, and they're definitely more interesting because of that. You share these stories with the characters you meet along the way. Sharing stories also lets them 'into the wild' where they might return to you in a different form.
The characters are well-written and tell a lot about the time you're in. Some of them are excellent. Some are just odd, and are completely out of place - for a game that works hard at evoking a time period, it was frankly annoying to hear a story from a completely different decade.
Others have commented on the travel, which does wear on you. I sunk the first eight or so hours just wandering, collecting stories, meeting people, and really enjoying myself. After a while, you have to 'finish up' by finding characters as they wander, but there's no easy way to do so. The routes are tedious, dangerous for no reason, and usually if I had a bug (there are a few) one of these shortcuts was involved.
And by the way! The character in the intro is another character you have to tell stories to - the ending seems to be different depending on how often you encounter him during the game and at the end. I only saw him at the end, didn't have any other chances to interact with him, and got a really basic ending ("Hope you enjoyed yourself!") that left me wondering what happened. You don't get to go back and work on a better ending - that's it.
So the stories told are excellent, but you'll need to go into it with some spoilers, and a lot of patience, to enjoy yourself.
34 gamers found this review helpful