Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a pretty bleak game, but it’s also really good! It’s set in Depression-era America, a time when many folks were having their assess kicked by the economy and manifest destiny. The game is about these people, specifically travellers and nomads who wander the country in search of answers. Migrant workers, preachers, poets, folk healers, Dustbowl refugees, and even men with wolf’s heads make up this cast, and it’s your job to meet these strangers and collect their stories.
]]>Dim Bulb's quiet and contemplative story tell 'em up Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is still out there, trudging down America's dusty depression-era roads, collecting and telling stories. Today, it has a few new ones to tell. Today's Gold Mountain Update adds an official Chinese localisation, produced by a crew of dedicated Chinese-speaking fans led by one Ryan Zhang. More importantly for English-speakers, it adds a new set of stories to the game, focused on the lives of Chinese Americans and their alchemized folklore as they became woven into America's fabric.
]]>Story-collectathon Where The Water Tastes Like Wine now has a free companion game, Fireside Chats, which falls somewhere between expansion and demo. The new release includes sixteen fresh stories, each told by one of the main characters that returning players will recognise, as well as the existing first chapter, so new players can get a feel for what to expect if they go on to purchase the main game.
]]>Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:
"You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able."
]]>The old quote is wrong: neither death nor taxes are, it seems to me, as terrifyingly certain as the Steam Summer Sale. Yes, once more we can add to the heap that is our backlog by buying games for, what, five quid, on average? But there are so many to choose from that it's easy to get flustered, so who better than the staff of RPS to hand-pick the best ones for your consideration (rhetorical question; do not answer)?
Check out the full list below for a mix of games that should suit all pockets and tastes.
]]>Story-collecting stroll 'em up Where The Water Tastes Like Wine has added more strange, delightful, and terrible tales to hear in a free update. Our dearly-departed Adam praised the original game's Americana stories, written by a wide team of writers, in his Where The Water Tastes Like Wine review and more are certainly welcome. The dead man wasn't so keen on the game around the stories, mind, but the developers are continuing to tweak that. This update also added an auto-walk button, see, to make your skellington stroll without you hold a key or button. The game is on sale now too.
]]>The blizzards of Siberia have gone on holiday to the United Kingdom this week. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, doesn’t do snow days. The pod squad have trekked hard through the whiteout (from their bedrooms to their computers) to gather on their respective microphones. To what end? Well, to talk about the weather. Blizzards, thunderclouds, sandstorms and, er, night-time? In videogames, it all counts.
]]>In Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, stories are currency. You walk the backroads and fields of the United States during the Great Depression, occasionally freighthopping or hitching a ride from one town to the next. Along the way, you meet many people and witness many events, most of them insignificant in the grand scheme of history and the land, but all contributing to a complex tapestry of a certain time and place.
Everything that you witness and every conversation you have becomes a tale in your repertoire, and in retelling these tales you learn about the characters you share them with, around campfires that are dotted around the map. It's at the campfires that stories become currency, and also where the game's combination of folktale and interactive systems becomes muddled.
]]>There are two things you should know about Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, the interactive fiction-ish anthology from Dim Bulb and Serenity Forge. One is that yer actual Sting is in it, supplying his dulcet tones to a hungry-looking wolfman who will narrate parts of the Americana odyssey. The second is that half of games journalism has written for it, including RPS escapees Cara Ellison and Leigh Alexander. Personally, Emily Short and Southern Monsters' Kevin Snow are the names that make me particularly intrigued to play this. There's a new trailer, seemingly narrated by Sting himself, which reveals WTWTLW's release date - and, huh, it's a lot sooner than I was expecting.
]]>The English actor Sting, famous for donning a cracking pair of pants as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in David Lynch's Dune as well as for his side-career in music, will lend his voice to a humanoid wolf in Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. That furry fella is one of the storytellers in the country-roaming Americana anthology, which is led by Gone Home co-creator Johnnemann Nordhagen at his new studio, Dim Bulb, and features tales from writers including former RPS contributors Cara Ellison, Emily Short, and Leigh Alexander. Here, meet Sting and some other voice actors in this new trailer:
]]>Where the Water Tastes Like Wine [official site] is a game about folk tales. It's an anthology of sorts and brings together different writers as they pen characters to inhabit a difficult land. There's this gloriously intense illustrated style which works alongside the soundtrack to give me chills every time I see the trailer or visit the website. I've included that trailer after the jump so you can see what I mean, but there's also a fabulism there – dark dreams and transformations are the game's hallmarks.
I played a tiny slice at GDC earlier this year with developer, Johnnemann Nordhagen, peeping over my shoulder. Nordhagen was a co-founder of Fullbright but he's now creating Where The Water Tastes Like Wine under the aegis of Dim Bulb Games. The aesthetic was so evocative and so unusual in a game setting that we've been exchanging emails to talk more about it. An art feature is coming but before we get to that we needed to talk about folklore, the myth of America and the way stories repeat and recombine.
]]>I do like a nice bit of Americana so I'm quite keen for Where the Water Tastes Like Wine [official site] to arrive later this year. It's a weird road story from Johnnemann Nordhagen, who previously worked on BioShock 2: Minerva's Den then Gone Home with fellow 2K splitters, and he's recently announced an interesting approach to writing the game. Each of the sixteen characters we meet on our travels will be handled by a different writer, and the lineup includes a fair few folks familiar to RPS readers.
]]>Is Bioshock 2 still the secret best Bioshock game or has the entire world come round to that way of thinking*? Either way, Johnnemann Nordhagen [as designers will, he goes by 'J. No' -ed.], one of the folks who worked on the game and went on to co-found Gone Home developer Fullbright, has released a trailer for his new venture. Where The Water Tastes Like Wine [official site] is "a bleak American folk tale about traveling, sharing stories, and surviving manifest destiny". It looks strange and gorgeous, like a collision between 80 Days, Van Gogh, and Kentucky Route Zero.
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