Where The Water Tastes Like Wine
The next great American folktale is written in the cards
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Our road trip across a huge, highway-stitched map of America is an unusual one, to say the least. We’re a giant perambulatory skeleton, bindle slung over the shoulder, advancing across the southern stretch of the country with unhurried resolve. We do have one thing in common with our fleshier nomadic predecessors: we are in search of a good story. Not necessarily a true one, mind. This is America, after all.
And what a fascinating protagonist for a videogame it is. “The United States has a mythology about itself,” creator Johnnemann Nordhagen tells us. “We tell ourselves we’re the greatest country in the world, we’re the freest country in the world – we’re the only free country in the world. All these various things that are just obviously, blatantly untrue. But they are such a founding part of what it means to be American, and what we tell ourselves about what it means to be American.”
Hence, the sole programmer of seminal narrative adventure Gone Home decided his next project had to be about his homeland, and storytelling. There are still characters: 16 of them, each handled by a different writer. But there is no beginning, middle and end to the anthological narrative. Its tale of tales is not concerned with the what, but the how.
Naturally, the player is at the centre of it. In a twist of fate lifted straight from the whisky-soaked yearning of a blues singer, a run-in with the devil has cursed you. You wander the land as a soulless shell, spreading stories. They’re collected in the form of tarot cards, which act as metaphorical reminders: the Fool for a tale that tickles the funnybone, for example, or the Wheel for one concerning
fate and fortune. Meeting strangers – like Althea, who is tuning her guitar by the flickering light of the campfire – means you’re prompted to spin a yarn fitting their emotional whims. When Althea requests a happy story, we produce the Fool: she responds warmly, opening up to us about her own life.
Our demo has our inventory pre-loaded, however, and so it feels like trial-and-error as we produce the same cards in response to the same questions. Farmer Franklin wants to hear a happy story, too, and a scary one. So does Quinn. We pick the same cards, but are sometimes caught off guard: the mysterious Quinn’s definition of a spine-chilling story, for instance, is not the same as Franklin’s. “It’s tricky, because certain subject matters lend themselves to different kinds of stories,” Nordhagen says. “So if you choose the Tower, about death and destruction, you might find a lot of scary or sad stories under that. But there are sometimes hopeful stories about death, sometimes even funny ones.” It’s reassuring that failing to produce the right one before the night’s end isn’t unduly punished: that particular character’s chapter simply won’t advance, and you’ll have to pay attention to where they say they’re headed next if you want to try again.
Each card is further coloured by the situations in which it’s found. Perhaps you’ll receive one from a strange travelling man, the vignette erring towards gently humorous as your conversation unfolds. “It would probably be about travel, but it’s got this fun mood to it,” says Nordhagen. “So it’s about remembering the adventures you’ve had, which ones feel funny or scary, or other things. We organise it into the categories for the player, but you have to remember how they felt when you first encounter that story, and try and pick it out.” And guessing ‘right’ every time isn’t always necessarily the goal. “As a storyteller, to dig out their story, you have to dance around a little bit, and sometimes tell them something that you want [them] to know rather than something they have asked for."
Storytelling is a complex, even morally dubious business, and Where The Water
Tastes Like Wine looks poised to explore it with subtlety. “The idea that our truth is built up out of the stories that we tell ourselves and each other, and how that truth can change when we change the stories that we tell each other, is the important part,” Nordhagen says. As we tuck away the tale of Louise Ames’ violin, our character’s thoughts encapsulate the something-from-nothing enterprise of the American Dream, a barbaric past spun legendary, and the era of ‘fake news’ all at once: ‘You’ll have to remember that, even if it’s not true. It’s a good story.’
“As a storyteller, to dig out their story, you have to dance around a little bit”