Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

Some games are about winning. This one is about listening. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, developed by Dim Bulb Games and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment, released February 28, 2018, is an anthology adventure that casts the player as a skeletal drifter, stripped to the bone and set loose on a stylized 3D map of Depression-era America. The framing is pure Americana myth: the drifter loses a hand of poker to a wolf-headed trickster (voiced with silken menace by Sting), and the debt owed isn’t money. It’s stories. So the drifter walks.

The pitch is simple. Wander the continent collecting folk tales — some tall, some tragic, some barely a sentence long — and carry them to sixteen strangers scattered across the country. Each traveler met at a campfire wants a particular kind of tale: something funny, something frightening, something hopeful. Tell the right story and they crack open, offering a chapter of their own life. Do this enough and their full arc assembles — one of the finest pieces of episodic writing in games.

It’s important to understand what this isn’t. It’s not a walking simulator in the pejorative sense, and it’s not an RPG despite the map and the stats-adjacent story-matching. It sits in that rare, uncommercial category of games funded on the belief that literature belongs in the medium. The writers’ room reads like an indie-lit anthology, and it shows. The market positioning was always going to be brutal — this is a slow, melancholic, deeply anti-populist game arriving into a landscape that rewards dopamine loops. That it exists at all is remarkable. That it mostly works is the surprise.

• Stories as Living Currency: Tales collected mutate as they spread. Overhear a story, and later a bigger, wilder version of it echoes back across the map — a genuinely novel mechanic that models oral tradition instead of just referencing it.
• Sixteen Character Portraits: The heart of the game. Each traveler — the labor organizer, the runaway, the con artist — is a fully-voiced, novella-length character study unlocked by matching the right story to the right mood.
• An Acclaimed Americana Soundtrack: Composer Ryan Ike ranges across blues, folk, bluegrass, and gospel, giving every region of the map its own sonic identity. It’s the connective tissue that keeps the walking bearable.

The Gameplay Loop

Here is the central tension, and there’s no reviewing this game honestly without sitting in it. The loop is: collect stories out in the world, then spend them in conversation. The collecting half is where Where the Water Tastes Like Wine earns its reputation — and where it tests patience to the breaking point.

The player moves a giant skeleton across a continental map. On paper, evocative. In practice, traversal is the game’s original sin. The walking pace is glacial, the map is enormous, and the tools for moving faster — hitchhiking, hopping trains, the occasional card that boosts speed — are unreliable and slow to unlock. The design asks for real, uncompensated minutes holding a direction, watching a stylized wireframe drift by, waiting for the next glowing story node to appear. The game wants this to feel meditative, like the loneliness of the road. Sometimes that lands. Just as often it reads as a design that forgot the player’s time has value.

At each story, there’s a short vignette — a paragraph or two of gorgeous prose, a folk tale or a brush with the uncanny. These become cards in the player’s hand. The writing at this micro level is extraordinary: economical, strange, frequently unsettling. Collecting them is a genuine pleasure divorced entirely from the act of getting to them.

The Conversations

Then comes the campfire, and the game transforms. The sixteen character encounters are structured as multi-visit relationships. A traveler asks, implicitly, for a certain register of story — read the room, play a card from the collection, and if the tone fits, they reward it with a slice of their history. Get it wrong and they close up, and it’s back out to find better material.

This is where the game justifies its existence. These aren’t quests; they’re portraits of American desperation and resilience, and the voice acting sells every one. The problem is friction. Unlocking a full character requires the right stories in the right emotional key, which means backtracking across that hostile map to find and fetch specific tale-types. The best content in the game is gated behind its worst mechanic. The seams show — a brilliant conversation system tethered to a traversal system that keeps sending the player away from it.

Onboarding and Legibility

The game is also coy to a fault about its own rules. It doesn’t clearly explain how story-matching works, how stories evolve, or what the player is optimizing for. For a title this reliant on the player understanding its central metaphor, the onboarding is thin. Some will read the ambiguity as mystery. Others will read it as the game withholding the manual. Both are correct.

The art direction splits itself in two, and the split is telling. The hand-drawn 2D illustrations that accompany stories and character moments are stunning — woodcut-flavored, folkloric, drenched in the iconography of American myth. These are the images that will be remembered.

The 3D overworld is a harder sell. Stylized and moody, yes, but visually sparse and repetitive, and it’s the layer the player stares at most. The contrast is almost cruel: the game’s ugliest, most tedious surface is the one it forces on the player, while its beautiful art hides in menus and cutscenes. A 2D-illustrated game of this scope is light on hardware, but “stable tedium” is still tedium. Ike’s score does more heavy lifting than any soundtrack should reasonably be asked to — it is, frequently, the only thing standing between the overworld and a player’s patience running out.

On Steam, this is the definitive way to play. A mouse-and-keyboard or controller setup on a large screen lets the illustrations and typography breathe, and the campfire reading sequences — which are, functionally, an audiobook with pictures — reward a quiet room and good headphones.

The Nintendo Switch version is the more interesting proposition, because the game’s rhythms suit handheld, episodic play. This is a title to sip, not chug — twenty minutes on a couch, a chapter at a time. Portability flatters the pacing in a way the desktop version can’t. But the Switch also amplifies the map’s failings: the lower resolution makes the already-sparse overworld muddier, and the slow traversal feels even longer without the tactile immediacy of mouse control. The soundtrack, mercifully, survives the transition intact.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a game worth handing to a select few, with a warning stapled to it. What it does well, almost nothing else does at all: it treats storytelling not as flavor but as the entire mechanical and emotional engine, and it earns comparisons to literature that most games can’t survive. The sixteen character studies and the story-mutation system are the kind of ideas that push the medium forward.

But ambition doesn’t exempt a game from playing well, and this one asks players to endure genuine tedium as the price of its brilliance. The map is a wall between the player and everything good here. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on how much one values the destination over the journey — which is a bitterly ironic thing to say about a game about the road. For the patient and the literary-minded, it’s worth the trip. For everyone else, it’s a beautiful thing to admire from a distance — and at $19.99, a hard sell.