America is a land of duality. There’s the surface country where everyone trudges along planning their next phone upgrade and wondering what’s on TV. Beyond that, there’s the darker, wilder America that lurks at the edges of civilization. There’s a reason old colonial stories wind up in the woods where magic lurks and God-fearing pilgrims fear to tread.
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine
Developer: Dim Bulb Games
Price: $16.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam copy for review
Where The Water Tastes Like Wine takes us there, to the land of hoboes and stories, where a wandering skeleton talks to a chatty crow and struggling grifters trade stories around a campfire to pass your time. This is a game–and a story–about casting around for your next meal and next bit of cash, trying to make it off a freight train without getting caught, and about weaving together the story of the wild and magical America outside the borders of civilization. While it’s been applied in an insulting way, this could be fairly described as a “walking and talking” simulator. Hobo Simulator 2018 probably wouldn’t be as catchy, though.
The setting isn’t the Great Depression of sad-eyed children peering out of pictures in history books, but the collective story of the Great Depression we tell ourselves through stories like The Grapes of Wrath and the music of Woody Guthrie. A wandering hobo buys into a poker game and gets in over his head with a smooth-talking gambler. That’s reality.
But when the hobo loses on a royal flush and the gambler reveals the head of a wolf and the voice of String, that’s when we move into the dark magical land beneath the surface. You owe the wolf-headed man. He wants stories, and the spreading of stories, and there’s no getting out of this bargain.
So our skeletal hobo friend steps out into that magical America, with the surreal daytime coloration of a heat dream and a night that’s all blacks and purples. The road full of dreamers and hobos and broken souls calls and exploring this world and gathering their stories is the point of the game. It calls to mind the magical realism of Neil Gaiman’s work, unusual for a genre of media where “magical realism” is more likely going to be used to push video cards.
It’s engrossing and surprisingly intense watching your skeletal hobo traipse down the east coast with his thumb out, learning to whistle and wondering what stories wait in the next town, what bit of American weirdness will present itself the next time you poke at an empty house or old church. Because that’s all out there, too, and you may have brushed against it on your own travels.
Here’s one of mine: After three days on the road and a semi-restful night at a roadside hotel in Kansas, I sat down to eat breakfast. As caffeine lifted me to alertness, a man plopped down at the table and announced he was Buffalo Bill Cody and wanted to tell me all about this town in Kansas. You can understand my alarm at encountering a long dead gunfighter and Kansas enthusiast over breakfast. If nothing else, I’m not a morning person.
He didn’t much care that I was reduced to grunts. Instead, he held forth about the wonders of this particular part of Kansas until I’d finished and wandered away from my table. It was momentarily reassuring when I passed him in the parking lot and saw him climbing into his old Dodge. Of course, then I had to spend a day driving under a grey and threatening sky with nothing but cornfields, enormous windmills, and apocalyptic preachers on the radio.
And that, in essence, is Where The Water Tastes Like Wine: a hobo’s road trip through the stories of America, the wilderness of memories and events that tie the land together, be it getting turned into a nomadic skeleton by Sting or be it running into an old Confederate soldier that stabs you in the gut for being a Yankee.
The Final Word
It’s a hell of an artistic achievement.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 5 out of 5 – Excellent
