Where the Water Tastes Like Wine: Stories as Currency, and the Long Walk to Hear Them

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine came out in February 2018 for Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows, built by Dim Bulb Games and Serenity Forge and published by Good Shepherd Entertainment. It is a narrative adventure about crossing a Depression-era United States, collecting the stories strangers tell you, and passing them on. It is slow, strange, and often moving. It is also frequently tedious, and the tedium is not an accident — it is the design.

Trailer, via Good Shepherd Entertainment.

A Map You Cross on Foot

You play a wanderer moving across a 3D overworld map of the country, rendered in hand-drawn 2D illustrations. The game mixes those 2D visuals with the 3D map, and the contrast is the point: the land is plain, the people are drawn.

You travel at your own pace. You meet strangers. They have stories. You hear them, you keep them, and you carry them somewhere else.

Stories as Currency

The mechanic that holds Where the Water Tastes Like Wine together is simple. Stories are the money. You collect them from the people you meet, then re-tell them to other characters who need a particular kind of tale.

Pair the right story with the right need and the character opens up. Do it well and they hand you something better — their true story, the one that says something about their own life.

Get the pairing wrong and nothing happens. That is the whole loop, and it is a good one.

Hunger, Tiredness and the Cost of Moving

Travel costs you. The player buys goods to replenish hunger or tiredness, and money comes in and goes back out on those goods or on faster ways to get around.

You can walk. You can hitchhike. You can freighthop. Each is a different speed and a different texture, and the game never lets you forget that moving across this country in this era was work.

The Stories Grow as They Are Told

The best idea in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is that stories change. They take on a life of their own as they grow larger and transform each time they are told and re-told.

That is not a gimmick bolted onto a walking simulator. It is the argument of the game. Folklore is not a fixed text. It is a thing people carry and reshape, and the reshaping is the culture.

The game knows this. It builds its progression on it.

What the Loop Actually Feels Like

Here is the problem. Collecting stories means walking. A lot of walking. The overworld is large, the encounters are spread out, and the pace is deliberate to the point of punishment.

The writing is the reward, and the writing is good enough to justify a lot. The hand-drawn art carries the tone. The Depression setting is used with care rather than as wallpaper.

But a player who wants momentum will not find it here. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine asks for patience and then asks for more.

The Ports and the Physical Release

The original February 2018 launch covered Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows. In November 2019, Serenity Forge announced the game would also come to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

In August 2021, PM Studios published a physical version for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. The game is single player, first person and third person, and it sits across the puzzle, RPG, adventure and indie categories without fully belonging to any of them.

The Numbers Behind the Score

• Release: February 2018 (Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows)
• Developer: Dim Bulb Games, Serenity Forge
• Publisher: Good Shepherd Entertainment
• Later platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One (announced November 2019)
• Physical edition: PM Studios, August 2021 (Switch, PlayStation 4)
• Modes: Single player
• Genres: Puzzle, RPG, Adventure, Indie
• Critic aggregate: 7.0/10 across 9 outlets

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine Lands

Seven out of ten is the right number, and the reason is that this game’s strengths and its failures come from the same decision. Stories as currency is a genuinely smart system. It makes conversation into progression, and it makes the player a courier of other people’s lives rather than a hero.

The cost is that everything around that system is slow. The walking, the hunger meter, the tiredness meter, the search for the right pairing — these are not obstacles to the real game. They are the real game. Some players will find that meditative. Many will find it dull.

What matters most here is the transformation rule. A story that grows and changes each time it is passed along is a better model of how folklore actually works than most games bother to attempt, and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine commits to it fully.

That commitment is why the game is worth your time despite the grind. It is also why it will never be for everyone. The 7.0 is not a compromise between the two. It is the honest weight of a game that does one thing beautifully and asks you to walk a very long way to see it.

Dim Bulb Games · folklore · indie game review · narrative adventure · Serenity Forge · Where the Water Tastes Like Wine