Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

选择“推荐”是因为我不想给这个游戏打差评，因为我就是很吃这种画风，而且音乐做得实在是太好了，虽然游戏没有继续玩下去了但原声音轨我一直在听。但说实话我对它的真实评价是谨慎入手，因为在我看来这款游戏没有什么游戏性可言，互动比较简单，以剧情为主。但市面上优秀的剧情太多了，我说的不止是游戏，在这个赛道上书籍电影电视剧都算竞争者。而这款游戏的剧情比较碎片化，在这么短的篇幅内很难有惊艳的效果，所以它在我这里优先级不算很高。我的游戏时长背后真实的原因是把它当作英语学习读物在用（）

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine might best be summarized as a game that is vastly more than the sum of its parts; the travelling can often feel slow, the fatigue and health mechanics are often a little half baked and unclear, sometimes shifting between too much and too little in surprising succession. And yet for every slight gameplay frustration, this game always offers something fantastic around the corner; a perfectly thematically timed strum of an Appalachian banjo in the East or a beautiful spanish duet guiding me into the southwest of New Mexico and Arizona. The central premise of the game revolves around the repayment of a 'debt' incurred by losing a card game with the devil, collecting and spreading stories across America as you travel. Stories grow in the telling, and a suspiciously familiar story about a strong woodsman may turn into the legend of Paul Bunyan, or a story of a winged goat laying in the ruins of a New Jersey house becomes that of the Jersey Devil. The character's you meet are often 'elevated' archetypes, pastiches of American life out of time and place; cowboys, bonus army vets, coal miners, Harlem Hell-fighters and dustbowl refugees, in order to bring out their true stories, you need to swap the ones you've collected with them to get them to open up. Stronger, stranger stories work better, so the incentive is to roam the lands and absorb as much as you can; whether the stories are funny, sad, scary or thrilling and so on. In that sense, you don't so much explore the map to 'collect' as you do to create and spread the American myths and legends of the land. The conversations you share with your fellow travellers are essentially short stories told in sharp exchanges that are equally striking for what and what isn't said: Some are on the road by choice, others are forced out, they face conflicts with the lands, the contradictions external and internal, and they're all elevated by the fact each traveller often has a different writer, which lends more weight and authenticity to the intensely personal stories you'll hear. The writings are often political, personal and reflective treatises on how the country has changed for both the better and worse, delivered with the kind of confidence to come off thoughtful rather than preachy. Confidence is present throughout this game, particularly in the presentation, scrawled drawings, vivid fantastical and religious imagery all set to an *incredible* soundtrack that shifts to fit where you travel. All of it comes together to form a cohesive and compelling journey across America that scratches that 'roadtrip' itch for me in a way many conventional games simply wouldn't even think to do; a trip defined by memories and conversations, and not the mechanical act of moving itself, which is definitely fortunate as the travelling systems are far from ideal, and I will admit that I was using the fast travel items in the last third of the game, but your mileage may vary with how much this undermines your experience. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine really comes to life as a tale of humanity spread form coast to coast, from the fleeting half-glimpsed stories you don't complete, to the classic american legends, and the visions of its people that give the land their textures. This game will hinge on its narrative, not its systems; it is greater than the sum of its parts. Fortunately for this game, I found the writing to be superb through and through. This isn't a game that's going to reward you with ticking numbers and streams of achievements, in fact one is very deliberately unachievable in keeping with the themes of wanderlust and struggles to find contentment both external and internal, and much like the gold bars in New Vegas' Dead Money, everyone hates it and tries to break it apart. If that's the kind of gamer you are, then frankly this game isn't going to be for you, that's fine. If you're a strong advocate for games as art however, in the vein of experimental re-toolings such as Papers Please and Kentucky Route Zero, it might be worth a look, even if it isn't exactly everything you want, it's a testament to the plethora of forms video games can take.

I can't lie, I rolled my eyes and dug my heels in when I read that this was a "walking simulator". But 'Where the Water Tastes Like Wine' is brilliant, breezy, and easy to digest. The characters you meet along your journey are creative and captivating. I always find myself stuck between walking and wanting to hop a train just to see who I'll meet on the ride along the way. This game being mostly about the power of oral story-telling is fascinating in the way that I always want to discover more across the map (being the United States and its marred history) to find both new stories that I haven't heard of before, but also roaming around close to home to hear of local legends and see how they may transform in-game. I know I have a lot more game to play only being 3 hours in, but I'm fully locked in for the journey. It's 60 Seconds! meets Oregon Trail in ALL of the right ways. My brainworm is thoroughly itched.

音乐无敌了，题材有意思。但游戏模式太坐牢了

很复杂，你要说玩肯定不好玩，表现也遭，但是游戏整体的氛围确实一流

It is a walking simulator of a skeleton traveling over a poorly drawn USA map. The main goal is to collect stories and tell them to some NPC characters. The overall idea is rather nice and the game could be good. But for such setting the game is way too long and inconvenient. And bugs, of course. There's a feeling that devs have never played their own game. 1) The main game mechanic is to tell the NPC characters stories they want to hear (scary, funny, thrilling, etc.) There're more than 200 different stories and they can't be marked in any way. Neither you can reread a story once you closed it after encountering. That means you need to remember everything right off.Which is weird, inconvenient and unpleasant. Moreover, after the characters said whichever story they wanted to hear and the choosing menu opened, you can't check what they wanted if you forgot or missed it. 2) Traveling is tedious. You just walk. Slowly. The only thing you can do is "whistle" – that's another boring mini game of pressing arrows. Whistling speeds up you a little. If you hitchhike, you do nothing. Just move a little more faster. But usually not for a long... 3) The navigation is truly awful. You can try go by train or "teleport" using "artifacts". But there will only be mentioned the destination city. I am not an American, I have never been to USA. I don't know which city belongs to which state. City names don't even written on the map. I needed to use Google maps to understand where the train leads 4) Music strives to create some atmosphere of the past days. But I just didn't like it. It's primitive and quite disturbing 5) Stories... Well, for game about stories it is lame. The plot is faceless and meaningless. The atmosphere brought by them is uncomfortable and a bit depressing. 6) Ah, and the intentionally unachievable achievement The voice acting feels too good for this game. It is the only thing I really want to appreciate. Still, I guess, I will finish it someday. Sometimes when I don't know what game I'd like to play, I play some games like this one. Definitely do not recommend

This Trench was Dug for Me, and I love it here