Where The Water Tastes Like Wine Rapid Review

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Fast Facts

Title: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine
Developer: Dim Bulb Games
Publisher: Serenity Forge
Website: http://www.wherethewatertasteslikewine.com/
Genre: Adventure, RPG, Puzzle
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Age Rating: PEGI 16
Release Date: 29/11/19
Price: £17.99 – Rapid Reviews was very kindly provided with a review code for this title.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, published by Serenity Forge, is billed as a “Narrative-Adventure game about travelling, sharing stories, and surviving manifest destiny…in the folkloric Depression-era United States.”

The game is voice acted, and I didn’t care for the voices I heard. It’ll be a long game if I have to listen to that same voice the whole time. Or perhaps I’ll play with sound off. We’ll see. The music, however, is quite nice – although it plays loudly in the background when there’s voice acting, which detracts from the experience. The music is still the clear winner between the voice acting, the graphics, and the music, though. I mean, it is well done. I don’t usually care for this genre of music. But wow!

Anyway, in the game, you start by gambling. You lose, and are told that you owe the winner a story; he says: “You see, this land is built on stories. It’s one big story, this country, woven of many small ones. Few of the small ones are strictly true, and the big story is mostly a lie.” And herein lies the premise of the game. Stories are your currency. You have to go and gather them for the man you lost to.

Apparently, there are 237 stories you can gather, so that’ll take some time! (That’s an awfully large task for losing one card game!) Your mission, should you choose to accept it (you kind of have to) is to “fulfil your obligation to the Wolf by finding all 16 characters scattered over the US, and trade stories with them until you earn their trust and finish their story.” (The person you lose to is a wolf, by the way. You play as a skeleton.)

I wish the text was larger. I have decent eyesight but had to bring the Switch closer to my face to read it. You look at the guide by pressing the up button. It’ll tell you how to get around faster. At first, I thought we’d be travelling across the US by walking, which would have been extremely slow. But you can speed things up by whistling, riding in boxcars, hitchhiking, etc. You can also ride passenger trains if you have the money. The whistling part is annoying, as you seem to have to press buttons to do it as you hold down another button, and you don’t seem to go much faster anyway. It takes a long time to get anywhere just by walking around the country. So use all methods of travel well.

I wish there were fewer stories to collect. Unfortunately, the game gets a bit tedious, and the stories tend to be a bit boring. They will change as you travel around and the stories spread, but they didn’t change enough for me to get interested. I liked the concept of the game, but it wasn’t executed in a manner that drew me in enough. The music is an excellent accompaniment to an otherwise dull game. You should definitely check it out. Ryan Ike composes it. I’d say the game overall may be right for some people, but it just wasn’t to my tastes.

Rapid Reviews Rating

You can purchase Where The Water Tastes Like Wine from the Nintendo eShop on the following link, https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Where-the-Water-Tastes-Like-Wine-1683974.html