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Where the Water Tastes Like Wine - American folk tale adventure where you wander through the US

Don Peste

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||☆||
avtr_1a9becbdfcf331af1e022face158da6d_big.jpg


I don't know how much you believe in physiognomy, but here is a photo of the person behind this game.
He looks quite normal to me.
hqdefault.jpg
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
I, for the life of me, can't imagine the developer could have been so obtuse to not understand making a product nobody wanted in a cut-throat marketplace would have led to any outcome but the one in which he's found himself.
He thought his buddies in the "gaming press" would give him a supreme advantage and pull him out of the hole (like they're still doing by posting about his whiny ramblings on a Blog) and he hired and brown-nosed all the right people, unfortunately for him their time is nearly over.

https://www.wherethewatertasteslikewine.com/press/
Awards & Recognition
  • “Independent Games Festival ‘Excellence in Narrative’ Nominee”
  • “Independent Games Festival ‘Nuovo’ Honorable Mention”
  • “IndieCade 2017 Developer’s Choice Award”
  • “SXSW 2017 Gamer’s Voice Award Nominee”
  • “AMAZE Award Nominee”
  • “IndieCade 2017 Official Selection”
  • “Best of the MIX LA 2017”
  • “IGN Best of Show E3 2017 Nominee”
  • “RPGFan.com Best of Show E3 2017”
Press
“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.”
The ‘shining lie’ at the heart of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“This promises to be a surreal and interesting find…”
E3 2017’s Most Anticipated Games The Guardian

“Dim Bulb Games is looking to push the envelope even further with their collaboratively written, narrative game”
The Collaborative Storytelling Of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine Cliqist

“This wasn’t just my favorite game of the show, I have a feeling it will be one of my favorite games of all time.”
The Ten Best Games at E3 2017 Paste

“Between the music, the pace, and the stories, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine taps into the roots of America and its folklore in a natural and compelling way.”
The Most Awesome Indies of E3 2017 Mashable

“Thoughtful, melancholy, and filled with incredible writing, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is quite different from any game I’ve played before.”
The Best Indie Games Of E3 2017 Game Informer

“Delicious like a good wine.” (Translated)
Nos 10 meilleurs jeux vidéo de l’E3 2017 Le Monde

“The way stories morph and blend in these campfire exchanges is unlike any I’ve seen in a narrative video game.”
E3 2017’s brightest indie games, cataloged in words and video Ars Technica

“Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is a giant leap forward for video game storytelling”
9/10 – The Washington Post

“Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is a surprisingly beefy adventure game, offering over 20 hours of content and a treasure trove of stories that never cease to entertain. I laughed, reminisced about my own life, and enjoyed meeting the colorful cast of characters who opened up to me as time went on.”
9/10 – Game Informer

“There's nothing quite like it, and it's doubtful that there ever will be.”
8.5/10 – Destructoid
  • Original stories written by a wide selection of accomplished authors
  • Fully voiced characters from all walks of life brought to life by world-renowned voice acting talent, including Sting, Dave Fennoy (The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series), Cissy Jones (Firewatch), Kimberly Brooks (Mass Effect), Sarah Elmaleh (Gone Home), Melissa Hutchison (The Walking Dead: A Telltale Game Series), Elizabeth Maxwell (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild), and many more.

Credits
Johnnemann Nordhagen
Designer, Programmer


Kellan Jett
Concept art

Lauren Cason
3D look development

Chris Dwyer
Production

Serenity Forge
Art and Design

Ryan Ike
Music || Twitter

Felix Kramer
PR

Gita Jackson
Writing

Cara Ellison
Writing


Jordan Minor
Writing

Mari Landgrebe
Writing

Claris Cyarron and Silverstring Media
Writing


Leigh Alexander
Writing


Sydney Meeker
Writing

Anne Toole
Writing

Stuart Arias
Writing

Jolie Menzel
Writing

Austin Walker
Writing


Demian DinéYazhi’
Writing

Emily Short
Writing

Matthew S. Burns
Writing

Laura Michet
Writing

Duncan Fyfe
Writing

Nika Harper
Writing

Olivia Wood
Writing

George Lockett
Writing

Bruno Dias
Writing

Cat Manning
Writing

Kevin Snow
Writing

Elizabeth LaPensée
Writing

Anita Tung
Additional Vignette Art

Amanda Williams
Additional Vignette Art

Lysandra Nelson
Additional 3D and 2D art

Alex Munn
Additional 3D art

Jonathan Topf
Additional Technical Art

Mackenzie Shubert
Initial UI Concepts

Jackson Armstrong
Trailer art and animation

Nick Splendorr
Website Design

Kimberly Brooks
Voice of Althea

Mike MacRae
Voice of August

Cissy Jones
Voice of Bertha

Nicholas Saenz
Voice of Cassady

Melba Martinez
Voice of Dehaaya

Elizabeth Maxwell
Voice of Dupree

Laura Patalano
Voice of Fidelina

Arif S. Kinchen
Voice of Franklin

Calvin Hooper
Voice of Jimmy

Jason Liebrecht
Voice of Little Ben

Jacob Burgess
Voice of Mason

Melissa Hutchison
Voice of Quinn

David Jennison
Voice of Ray

Amparo Garcia-Crow
Voice of Rocio

Sarah Elmaleh
Voice of Rose

Dave Fennoy
Voice of Shaw

Keythe Farley
Narrator

It's like an All-Cancer All-Star project.
 

AwesomeButton

Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
“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.”
Chills don't pay the bills tho.
 

Belegarsson

Think about hairy dwarfs all the time ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Firewatch succeed because it got good press and trailers that presented its strength in dialogue well. It's a walking sim but I definitely wouldn't call it hipster trash like Fullbright's "games".
I bought Where The Water Tastes Like Wine back in March 5, still haven't played it because I'm more interested in the OST.
 

AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
I watched a "first five hours" LP of firewatch, and I actually liked it. It has more game in it than the other walking sims, and the mystery struck me as interesting, unlike Everyobody's gone to the rapture's.
 

Blaine

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
At least half of indie development seems to go pretty much like this:

  1. be vegan hipster faggot with delusions of grandeur
  2. use Daddy's credit card to hire an artist and a musician (alternatively, your Kickstarter/Indiegogo pitch is good enough to secure a few Gs)
  3. con a few basement-dwellers who're halfway-decent at things like scripting, crutch coding, and maybe basic circuit logic to work for peanuts
  4. license Unity because none of you possess genuine computer science expertise
  5. develop three-hour-long art game with no gameplay, has to be over two hours long to ward off Steam refunds
  6. beg for more funds to flesh it out; you and a few friends spent 90% of the initial wad on your $1,500 per month San Fran broom closets, living expenses, and celebratory lobster dinners
  7. release game as-is, it sells like shit
  8. write a butthurt, super-in-depth, thesaurus-vomit postmortem bemoaning how hard it is to develop indie games (AKA "pull a Jeff Vogel")

Note that although this is sort of an amalgam of several different types of indie developers, in my view it's a pretty fucking accurate litmus test of what these sorts of people are up to.
 

AwesomeButton

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Bonus points for coming up with a game title that sounds like a book title, to signal that you are a writer with much more to tell, but in your benevolence you've decided to take shot at producing a videogame, "as a side project", because you are too much in demand to let go of your "real work".
 
Last edited:

Blaine

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
There are two types of writers: Writers who are creative and imaginative and whose heads naturally fill up with ideas for worlds, characters, and complicated interactions thereof; and people who want to be writers, but who more specifically want to be profound and admired writers.

It's an oversimplification, but wanting to be a writer because you want to be a profound and admired writer is similar to wanting to join the military because you wanna be Rambo, wanting to join the police because you wanna be CHiPs, etc. These things only work out when when a person is genuinely interested in and good at the nitty gritty of what the job in question actually entails.
 

Rahdulan

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It's like an All-Cancer All-Star project.

With over 20 writers it's pretty clear that what Blaine suggests may very well be true - you had ton of "idea guys" who knew next to nothing about game development itself. Easy come, easy go.
 

Dayyālu

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Note that although this is sort of an amalgam of several different types of indie developers, in my view it's a pretty fucking accurate litmus test of what these sorts of people are up to.

Proving the Codex role as critical archive of such things, I give you one of the Ur examples of this madness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Tales_(company)

Those guys have been writing passive-aggressive postmortems on their games for almost 20 years now. The Ur-Hipster Dev.
 

Heretic

Cipher
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Dec 1, 2015
Messages
844
He lists 6 reasons why he thinks the game failed commercially, but he forgot the most important one: There is no gameplay. None.

Not only did he forget to design a core gameplay loop, he didn't even notice that he forgot about it!

I for one am glad that
after launch we got coverage and reviews by most major video game publications, and mainstream press as well — the Washington Post said “‘Where The Water Tastes Like Wine’ is a giant leap forward for video game storytelling”, which was very nice of them.
led to
Commercially, it’s a disaster.
Nobody trusts the game journos anymore, they can sing praise to intersectional diverse games as much as they want.
 

Blackthorne

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Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
This was definitely an interesting read. Adventure Games are a hard sell these days for anyone - often times you can begin to believe that if you have the right people making a game, the right press backing you, you can have a hit. There's always more factors than that, though. I know what it's like to make a game and see very minimal return on it, but - heh - I wasn't like blindsided and crying "WHATHAPPEND?" Also, I didn't design for a fucking gamepad, seriously, what the fuck kind of move is that? Anyway, there's always all kinds of coulda shoulda woulda's in situations like this, and you can post-mortem stuff to death, but most of the time the reason is it just didn't work. Who knows what kind of tail a game like this will have too... it might have one, it might not.

Personally, looking at the list of people who worked on this, I think it may have been a case of too many cooks spinning too many bitter herbs, but that's purely a personal observation. Maybe we are coming out of this period of gaming which has lasted for the last 4-5 years or so, and maybe merit and gameplay will come back to the forefront of what people like in games. It's true, though, about games journalism - it's a mess out there, filled with a bunch of bootlickers, backpatters and sycophants who have been endlessly circle jerking each other for too long. Let's hope the pendulum swings back toward a better center.


Bt
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
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California
Not really sure why all the hostile ratings on my post above. I'm not saying the game is good or that I'd ever play it*, but if some ultra-progressive guy wants to make an ultra-progressive game with his own money, so that it can be promoted by ultra-progressive judges and publications but ultimately not sell except to a tiny niche audience, why would the Codex be annoyed? Seems like the perfect use of his time and resources and of no harm to anything the Codex cares about. By contrast, having him hired by a narrative-centric company to help gin up favorable press coverage at the expense of a more practical narrative design seems likely to actually have an impact on games the Codex does care about.

(* I am a big fan of Emily Short, though, and she apparently did some work on it.)

Incidentally, I do think his surprise at the lack of commercial success is emblematic of the problem that when agenda overwhelms other things in reporting/reviewing, not only is the consuming public harmed, but creators are harmed as well because they are deluded as to what people actually want.
 

Heretic

Cipher
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I don't even think there was some kind of progressive agenda in the game, apart from all the virtue signalling about hiring "diverse voices".
But the game is simply not enticing enough as a game. Maybe for people who like VNs, but then Americana is probably not to their taste either.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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From Emily Short’s description, it sounds politically charged:
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a game about the shining lie of America: about the dream of freedom and justice and opportunity, and the darker, more tarnished truth.

...

The request [to write for the game] came when I was getting used to being an immigrant outside America, looking back with a mixture of homesickness and anger, sadness and relief. I live now in a country where I don’t fear being SWATted or shot, and where my health care is free. Meanwhile, UK citizens ask about the American health care system the way you might ask to be told a ghost story. Let us hear how you paid a thousand dollars for an unnecessary ambulance ride of one mile; let us shiver pleasantly and then relax knowing that we will not suffer the same fate. It gets darker when we get to “Also, I have friends who died of cancer because they couldn’t afford to see a doctor about their symptoms until it was Stage IV.” I choose how I tell the story of America on a daily basis.

It continues in a similar vein.

https://emshort.blog/2018/03/27/where-the-water-tastes-like-wine-2/amp/

Incidentally, I think Emily’s brilliant games (Metamorphoses is my favorite, but she has many excellent ones) pretty clearly refute the idea that progressive politics preclude excellent design and writing.
 

laclongquan

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Searching for my kidnapped sister
Artsy game that will kill itself by shitty writing and artsy arts. I see no hope there unless the writers really can surprise us the level of Black Isle Studios did with Planescape Torment.

If they think to make games like novels, well, do remember that book industry sell books by big marketing budgets done by very professional people who spare no tactic to lure the unsuspecting people into trying their products.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Well, as I said before, Emily Short is probably one of the finest interactive fiction writers -- an excellent prose stylist but also very good at weaving narrative and gameplay together. She's not a novelist turned deep lore expositionist, she developed her skills designing, coding, and writing interactive fiction with absurdly complex structures. Savoir Faire and Counterfeit Monkey are the most imaginative of them, but, as I mentioned, Metamorphoses is my favorite. You really should try her work out, if you can get past the ">" parser of interactive fiction.
 

Kyl Von Kull

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
People being turned off or pissed off by the tone/agenda feels like it would’ve been a high quality problem for this game. It was greeted with apathy, not outrage. Nobody is going to start frothing at the mouth over SJW themes in a property they don’t care about.

I just don’t think there’s much of an audience for illustrated short story collections masquerading as adventure games. And they were very up front about the fact that WTWTLW was an anthology of short stories. The developer overestimated the willingness of gamers to passively consume content.

He took a huge risk when he decided to make a game where the central narrative is little more than a collection of other narratives. You either need a story or you need gameplay. "It's a story about stories" is not the kind of thing that makes people want to devote twenty hours to a game. WTWTLW could've been the best written piece of fiction in history and my guess is it still would've flopped. Watching that skeleton walk across the overworld is agonizing. Maybe it might have worked better as a CYOA.

I suspect that people who consume media for a living are a lot more receptive to this format than people who want to play a video game; critics loved it, reviewers were fairly positive, gamers ignored it. This is also my pet theory about TTON: it was a very good short story collection that was light on gameplay, reviewers loved it, but beyond the kickstarter backers there wasn't much interest. Both seem partially driven by a fundamental misunderstanding about how people play video games.
 

aratuk

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Dec 13, 2013
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There has been great fiction from writers all over the political spectrum, but it takes exceptional talent to weave politics heavily into fiction and retain sympathy with (dispassionate) readers.

It's fascinating to see writers laboring over questions of their characters' agency, internality — the fairness of their representations — while taking for granted the quality of their craft. Mistaking those things for the quality of their craft.

All the lit crit, none of the lit. (Or the gameplay, apparently)
 

mastroego

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Italy
Bloated egos and bloated virtue signaling.
These folks imagine themselves as great writers, great critical thinkers, great beacons of morality, then one day decide to make a game and all that they inject into it are the two ingredients above.
The press follows the plan and praises the illustrious work.

Then, at the last stage, comes the paying gamer who - they really seem to ingenuously believe - is supposed to reward their self-indulgence with REAL WORLD money because they're so certifiably great, not to mention that if he didn't do it they'd be "scared".

The gamer, instead of being the center of the productive struggle from the beginning, is hardly even considered throughout the whole process if not for the money they intend to extract from him at the very last stage (incidentally, if they're so all-virtuous, why do they want his money so bad? Money is evil).
I'm sure they'll learn all the right lessons from this, they sure seem to be doing just that....
 

laclongquan

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Well, as I said before, Emily Short is probably one of the finest interactive fiction writers -- an excellent prose stylist but also very good at weaving narrative and gameplay together. She's not a novelist turned deep lore expositionist, she developed her skills designing, coding, and writing interactive fiction with absurdly complex structures. Savoir Faire and Counterfeit Monkey are the most imaginative of them, but, as I mentioned, Metamorphoses is my favorite. You really should try her work out, if you can get past the ">" parser of interactive fiction.

I read online amateur novels, I have pretty high tolerance for bad quality writing (IF I FEEL WORTH THE BOTHER). My criticisms, however, remain skyhigh as ever.

In short, I can read bad text the whole novel while totally aware that yes this is shit writings. The difficulty is in persuading me that this is not shit.

The problem of game writers is that a lot of bad novel writers migrate here thinking this scene is better than proper novel scene, and the bad taste of shit gamers convince them they are the very Tolkien of game writings.

They are not. Let's keep it at that.

ss_ad9dac8a62ec12123d23204e834a71ba1af77589.jpg

This is not a good sign.

The ideas and the moods are pretty good. But the problem of artsy arts is that it doesnt lend itself well to the games in general. As for the writings...
 

Blaine

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Well, as I said before, Emily Short is probably one of the finest interactive fiction writers -- an excellent prose stylist but also very good at weaving narrative and gameplay together. She's not a novelist turned deep lore expositionist, she developed her skills designing, coding, and writing interactive fiction with absurdly complex structures. Savoir Faire and Counterfeit Monkey are the most imaginative of them, but, as I mentioned, Metamorphoses is my favorite. You really should try her work out, if you can get past the ">" parser of interactive fiction.

Have you played Andrew Plotkin's games? Hadean Lands in particular might be the best IF/puzzle/adventure game I've ever played.

As to your other point, being a full-bore polarized progressive doesn't entirely preclude the ability to write and design computer games, but it's usually a bad sign. Those who can pull it off are the exceptions that prove the rule. Even if they're skilled and competent, they're still going to limit their audience if they shovel their ideology into the player's face.

Those who don't see the significance should try the shoe on the other foot and envision a full-bore polarized conservative shoveling their ideology into the player's face.
 

sser

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I'm surprised it cost so much or had that many people working on it. Looks like the issue is that it has no gameplay and an obscure setting (anybody want to discuss the over-purchasing and investing of farm equipment by American farmers in between 1900-1919??).
 

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