Where the Water Tastes Like Wine defies any sort of comparison to other games. You're tasked with collecting stories and building up folklore across Dust Bowl America, wandering across the land and briefly involving yourself in other people's lives. You're collecting tales so that you can share them with other wanderers who are moving across the country and eventually appease an anthropomorphic Dire Wolf (played, amazingly, by Sting) who, in the game's opening cutscene, beats you in a card game and sets you to work collecting these folk stories as payment for the debt you now owe. It's a wholly unique premise for a game, but not necessarily one that reaches its full potential.
You guide a skeleton avatar around the map, moving between states by foot, by train, or by hitchhiking, and collect stories when you encounter them. These are folktales by and large: animals will talk to you, children will be all-knowing (and often touched by evil in some way), you'll meet ghosts and dying men and people capable of impossible feats. Some will stick with you, offering creepy imagery or neat twists, and others will fade from your memory soon after you hear them, but the hit-to-miss ratio of the 219 stories on offer is pretty high.
The tales you collect fit into one of four basic descriptors: hopeful, tragic, funny, or adventurous. These categories become important as you work your way through the game's main objective--uncovering the life stories of various fellow wanderers. Campfires around the map house other travelers who will exchange their own life stories for some of your collected tales. The characters cover a spectrum of gender, race, sexuality, and your goal is to visit each person as they move between campfires, telling them stories they like, and eventually encounter their "true" selves, having learned everything you can about them. The real reward isn't so much the folktales themselves as the artwork of these final encounters--seeing each figure twist into an artistic representation of their own character's struggles or values is a highlight.
Once you've spread your tales among these campfires, they start to mutate, and you'll begin to encounter retellings of your tales that add or change details as you travel. Telling someone who asks for a scary tale about a demon you met might end in you being chastised for telling a "cheerful" story, while a seemingly hopeful tale about a journalist who always sees the bright side is classified as funny, but as these stories evolve, they become more cheerful and funny, respectively. These versions will have a more significant impact on your future campfire visits and will make it easier to appease wanderers and unlock the next chapter in their story. It can also cause the tale's classification--which you have to decipher--clearer, which is helpful, because it's frequently hard to tell and remember.
After a few hours you get into a good rhythm of uncovering and sharing stories, and the way the game works eventually becomes clear (it's light on instruction). But there's a problem here--you soon realize that wandering the map, listening to stories, and slowly heading towards the next destination is really all there is to do, and with no satisfying overarching narrative to keep you going, the excitement of the process quickly begins to diminish. The game opens by spreading North America out in front of you to explore, and suddenly starts to look incredibly narrow as it becomes clear that you're going to spend the rest of the game just clicking through other people's stories and slowly trudging between campfires.
It doesn't help that getting around the map can be an extremely time-consuming process. Your avatar walks slowly--you can speed up by whistling a song, but this involves a "press direction keys in order" mini-game that ultimately feels like busywork. You can hitchhike, but roads only go one way, and the controls for hitching a ride are inconsistent--sometimes I could hail down a car, while other times my avatar refused to stick its thumb out. Rivers will slow you down, and using trains requires either money or hopping on one without paying. Doing the latter usually ends with you getting injured and dying, and although death isn't a big deal here, it will reset you to the last town you visited, which usually undoes the train ride's progress.
Once you've heard half the game's stories, you start to see where each tale is going from the first paragraph, and it's much easier to find and identify sad or scary stories than hopeful or adventurous ones. When you've had a few dozen tales retold and figure out which classification they fit into, you don't really need to worry about gathering more, either. You can rely on the same handful of tales, both because they're the easiest to remember the details of and because the game doesn't really incentivize diversifying your repertoire, especially since the stores you accumulate at campfires act as wildcards during future encounters. If you're asked for a tragic story, for instance, selecting any of the tales told by someone you encountered at another campfire will make you tell that story while "focusing on the tragic parts." I cleared almost every final encounter by just telling stories from other wanderers, and you don't get to experience this retelling--you just select the option from the menu and get a brief reaction in response.
Over time, even the best parts of the game start to grate. Ryan Ike's soundtrack, which mixes elements of jazz, bluegrass, and folk music, is excellent, and a great companion for the first few hours. But when you're engaged in yet another long trek across the plains, it's hard to resist switching over to your own music. By the end, I was rushing through the stories of the remaining campfires because I just wanted to see what happened when I'd collected them all, and I was skipping over new stories because it had become difficult to keep caring about them.
I spent 12 hours working my way around the America of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, but after the first six hours I felt like I had gotten everything I wanted out of the game. Most of the rest of the time was spent checking the map to figure out where the next campfire was, holding W to move forward, and then clicking through dialog (all of it brilliantly voice-acted, but patience only stretches so far) until I was able to appease the Wolf.
If the basic premise of gathering folk stories across a version of 1930s America strongly appeals to you, then Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is worth a look, but it's probably not worth finishing. Perhaps one day I'll feel the urge to jump back in and encounter a few more tales, but Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, for all its interesting ideas and unique elements, outstays its welcome.
In 2012, Subset Games released FTL--a strategy roguelite whose best moments were when everything worked like a well-oiled machine, but also when you were frantically trying to adapt to dangerous, unexpected situations in the spur of the moment. Into The Breach, Subset's sophomore effort, again has you enacting carefully planned strategies. The difference is that when the going gets tough, Into The Breach's turn-based mechanics and tactical tools allow you to improvise precisely, and respond purposefully, with perfectly choreographed counters in an aggressive ballet that feels amazing to conduct again and again.
In a world where giant monsters called Vek threaten the earth, humanity has devised equally giant, human-operated mechs to combat them. Humanity has also invented time-travel technology to give pilots the opportunity to go back in time and start the whole conflict over, should the worst happen. You command a squad of three mech pilots whose purpose is to deter the advances of the Vek, one region at a time, through four different island stages with the ultimate goal of destroying their hive.
In each region, your primary objective is to stop Vek from causing collateral damage--each civilian building destroyed depletes part of the game's overall power grid meter, and if it hits zero, your game is over. However, Vek almost always outnumber your squad, with even more continually spawning in, which makes wiping them out entirely a difficult task. Into The Breach is a tactics game with an emphasis on deterrence and creatively mitigating damage with the limited tools at your disposal.
It's a daunting task, but there is one central feature that makes this process enjoyable and manageable: Every action the enemy will make in their next attack phase is clearly telegraphed through the UI during your turn. You can see which tile a particular Vek will hit and how much damage it will do, meaning you can assess your priorities and the response options you have available, then take direct steps to address the fated outcome. In the critical moments, just before a Vek flattens a hospital, you might dash in and tackle it out of range, and into the firing line of another Vek. Or, if your mech lacks close-combat abilities, you might move into harm's way to prevent the building from destruction. You might notice that more Vek will be spawning from the ground, and decide to throw a boulder on the tile to stop them from emerging, or shoot an off-the-mark missile, letting the explosion push another Vek on top of it.
Knowing the exact outcome of each action means that Into The Breach feels like a game of violent chess, in the best way possible. Each turn will have you pondering over possible moves and outcomes, threats you can feasibly attend to, and pieces you can afford to sacrifice--common characteristics found in any good turn-based tactics game. But because the possibility spaces of Into The Breach skirmishes are so confined (every battle takes place on an 8x8 grid, just like a chessboard, filled with impassable squares) decisions can be reached quickly, and momentum rarely comes to a standstill for long.
What also makes these decisions so entertaining to consider is not just the novelty of the way different components can interact in delightful ways, it's the certainty of how they will interact. Into The Breach is a tactical game that features a relative lack of probability, uncertainty, and risk. Attacks will always connect and do a distinct amount of damage, the grid-based scenarios mean units move and take actions in exact distances, and nothing ever occurs without at least some warning. The transparency and amount of information communicated provide great peace of mind, since every action you take will go as planned.
The only exception is that when a Vek attacks a building, there is a tiny chance that the building will withstand damage. The probability of this happening is related to your overall grid power and can be increased, but the percentage value is always so low that this rare occurrence feels more like a miracle when it happens, rather than a coin toss you can take a chance on.
The game's time-travel conceit also has a part to play here--you have the ability to undo unit movement, and each battle gives you a single opportunity to completely rewind and re-perform a turn. It's possible to execute your most optimal plan for each scenario every time, and the result is that turns in battle can feel like choreographed moves in an action movie, a confidently flawless dance of wind-ups, feints, counters, and turnabouts.
You can unlock up to eight different premade squads, each comprised of three unique units, which focus on entirely different styles of combat. The diversity here is significant enough that each team calls for distinct strategic approaches. The default squad, Rift Walkers, focuses on straightforward, head-first, push-pull techniques. The Blitzkrieg crew works best when corralling Vek together in order to execute a lightning attack that courses through multiple enemies. The Flame Walkers focus on setting everything ablaze and knocking Vek into fire for damage-over-time en masse. Each different combination of mechs can completely change how you perceive a battlefield; things that are obstacles for one squad could be advantageous strategic assets for another.
But where the possibilities of Into The Breach really open up is in its custom and random squad options, and the imaginative experimentation that comes from putting together unique all-star teams with individual mechs from different squads, along with your choice of starting pilot--whom all possess an exclusive trait. You might have a team composed of a mech who shields buildings and units, one that freezes anything on the map into a massive block of ice, one whose sole ability is to push everything surrounding it away, and a pilot that can perform one additional action each turn if they don't move. Can you complete a run of the game with that custom squad of pacifists? The game's structure makes these unorthodox options enjoyable challenges that are legitimately interesting to explore.
Into The Breach maintains a roguelike structure of procedurally generated trials and permadeath, but when a campaign goes south not all is lost. If a mech is destroyed during a battle, it will return in the next, only without its pilot and their unique trait. Too much collateral damage is game over but means you have the chance to send one of your living pilots--experience points and bonus traits intact--back in time to captain a new squad, in a new campaign. The game is difficult, but starting over isn't tiresome because your actions so directly determine outcomes, and you always feel you can improve. And individual battles are so swift and satisfying that they become a craving that you'll want to keep feeding over and over.
The clean and understated surface elements of Into The Breach complement the precise nature of its mechanics. The simple presentation, as well as the sharp UI layout, is attractively utilitarian and serves as a crucial component of the game's readability. There is no explicit plot outside of the time-traveling conceit, but the flavor text--small snippets of dialogue for each mech pilot and island leader, whom you'll encounter again and again throughout multiple playthroughs--adds a modest but pleasant facet of character to contextualize the world and round out the overall tone.
There is so much strategic joy in seeing the potential destruction a swarm of giant monsters is about to unleash on a city, then quickly staging and executing elaborate counter maneuvers to ruin the party. Into The Breach's focus on foresight makes its turn-based encounters an action-packed, risk-free puzzle, and the remarkable diversity of playstyles afforded by unique units keeps each new run interesting. It's a pleasure to see what kind of life-threatening predicaments await for you to creatively resolve in every new turn, every new battle, and every new campaign. Into The Breach is a pristine and pragmatic tactical gem with dynamic conflicts that will inspire you to jump back in again, and again, and again.
Metal Gear Survive is emotionally and mentally exhausting. It stacks stiff, repetitive gameplay atop survival systems that are unforgiving and unrelenting, making the overall experience feel like trying to break out of a chokehold with one arm tied behind your back. The core loop of venturing out into the unknown in search of resources to make your existence just a little bit more bearable is gratifying, but it always feels like a desperate gasp of air before the fingers tighten again. Every once in a while its disparate ideas synergise for a thrilling set-piece where you're battling waves of enemies while frantically placing and maintaining defenses, but these only serve to highlight what Survive could have been, were it not so consistently choking the life out of you.
The game is set shortly after the attack on Mother Base in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. During this siege, a wormhole into a parallel world appears, sucking in a chunk of Mother Base, along with the members of Snake's Militaires Sans Frontières and the attacking XOF forces. Your character is sent by a U.N. scientist named Goodluck through the wormhole to Dite, a barren, drab-looking parallel world that's made up of recycled Metal Gear Solid V locales. There you're tasked with finding the cure to a parasite that has infected you, and also seek out what has become of your comrades. Survive's story is mostly uninteresting and plays out through text and voiceovers on static screens, similar to the iconic codec conversations of its forebears, minus any of the charm. Although it tries to bring in some of the political machinations and pseudoscience the series is famed for, each narrative beat is a thinly veiled excuse to repeatedly send the player out to retrieve memory boards for an AI companion, rescue survivors, or activate machinery. Despite some small hooks into the greater Metal Gear canon, the narrative is largely forgettable and keeps out of the way of the gameplay.
The urgency of Metal Gear Survive's exploration and resource gathering routine is dictated by health, hunger, and thirst. While the first of those can easily be managed by avoiding damage from enemies, the other two are an ever present doomsday clock, constantly counting down to your demise. They are the proverbial gun to your head and, unfortunately, they diminish every other gameplay opportunity Survive offers.
From the moment you land in Dite, you're on the back foot. Survive wants you to know that success in this hellscape will come through struggling and pushing forward in the face of overwhelming adversity. The food and water so key to staying alive are scarce, and even the act of seeking them out expends resources in a way that will make you pause and really think about whether it's all worth it. It's a grueling grind where the material rewards offer just a fleeting respite.
And therein lies the problem: hunger and thirst deplete at such a rapid rate that micromanaging them becomes an all consuming task, particularly during the tedious first few hours of tutorials and story exposition. Their corrupting influence is pervasive, and because the economy of intake versus expenditure is weighted so heavily against you, the best course of action is often to limit engagement with the game's systems, be it exploration or combat.
Take material gathering, for example. This is done by running around Dite in search of dilapidated buildings to pillage materials used for crafting and general upkeep. However, movement is constrained by the thirst meter and the knock on effect it has. Sprinting consumes stamina and, as you become more thirsty, the maximum amount of time you can sprint for lowers. It can be topped up by drinking water, but that's in short supply. In the end, jogging, while considerably slower, doesn't drain the stamina meter and thus won't need you to drink water as frequently.
The result is that running around and exploring Dite is an arduous chore where you languidly run back and forth between your home base and an area of the map where you suspect there may be something useful. Movement is joyless, and it's compounded when you venture into Dust, an area of the map enveloped in a thick poisonous miasma.
The greatest rewards can be found scattered around Dust, but simply being there adds more demands. While in Dust, an oxygen meter appears and begins counting down, effectively limiting how long you can be out there before needing to return to a safe zone. Although the game's in-game currency, Kuban, can be converted into oxygen from within Dust, you can only do this a few times before it becomes prohibitively expensive. Each time the cost increases, so at a certain point you're losing more Kuban than you're gaining from harvesting enemies or the naturally growing Kuban in Dust. Visibility is also significantly reduced and the map becomes inoperational for large stretches of time. Although there's always a distant light in the sky to serve a beacon to safe ground, uneven terrain and rocky outcroppings also obscure vision, so it's easy to get disorientated and lose track of your objective. Because of all this, your time in Dust becomes brief and your spoils often feel paltry, hardly worth burning precious resources for.
By stacking the odds so heavily against you, successes--big or small--feel like an act of defiance
In your travels you'll inevitably encounter Wanderers, the game's main enemy force. These braindead creatures can't see very well but have a keen sense of hearing, so they'll investigate noises and attack if they sense you or any other source of sound nearby. But it's easy to find straggling Wanderers and pick them off by simply running behind them and using an instakill attack. Their movements are slow, their attacks telegraphed, and each one behaves exactly the same. If isolated, Wanderers provide no challenge and require no strategy to kill. Late in the game new enemy types are introduced, some which move quicker and pounce on you, others that will lob bombs from a distance, but they're more annoying than challenging.
Metal Gear Survive's combat is lacking in dynamism. On a basic level, it's functional. The act of raising and swinging a weapon, be it a spear, axe, or sledgehammer, is slow and deliberate, inviting you to think about how long it takes to execute an attack and time it so it hits the enemy without leaving you open. Connect, and you're met with the satisfying thud of thick steel meeting hard muscle, or a sharp tip piercing the flesh or the protruding crystallized weak point of a Wanderer. Ranged weapons provide a little more speed and freedom of movement, while allowing you to pick off enemies from a relatively safe distance. Unlocking abilities can add new attacks for different melee weapons, but they don't significantly change the way you play. As a whole, combat is also the victim of Survive's underpinning systems. This time, however, it's the game's protracted crafting and upgrade systems.
Both of these are reliant on Kuban energy, most readily sourced from Wanderers. A dead one will provide a small amount, while a downed one can be sucked through a mini wormhole and sent back to base for more, much like Metal Gear Solid V's Fulton Recovery mechanic. In order to actually craft new weapons and equipment, you also need to find the recipe for them, and these are usually in containers hidden around Dust. There isn't a way of locating containers outside of randomly stumbling upon them while exploring, and when you find them it's a crapshoot as to what you'll get. A light on the containers cuts through the thick fog in Dust, so you can spot one in the distance but this is also more likely to happen by chance. Were it possible to actually spend a decent amount of time exploring Dust, perhaps it'd be a little easier to stumble upon containers, but the thirst, hunger, and oxygen limitations prevent that from happening.
If by some miracle you find the recipe for a new weapon, you'll need to have the relevant materials to craft them. Basic equipment such as spears, bows and arrows, and machetes can be crafted using wood, iron, copper, and other materials that are more readily available. The exciting stuff, however, is limited to rarer materials, which like everything else in the game, is hard to come by. If you really want, or need an item, your only option is to keep going back to Dust for short stints, aimlessly wandering around in hopes of finding what you need.
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Survive does make exploration a little easier using Wormhole Transporters, which serve as fast travel points in and out of Dust, as well as between each other. However, powering these up for the first time draws large groups of Wanderers to your location, at which point you must erect fortifications and fight off waves of enemies as they attempt to destroy your defenses and the teleporter. These moments are when Metal Gear Survive actually feels thrilling to play and, surprisingly, it's because of the limitations of the game's systems that they are.
Setting up before the ambush, you're acutely aware of how little you have to work with and the fact that if you fail, you'll also lose the resources collected and progress made since your last trip to base camp. This means being diligent about setting up fences, barbed wire barricades, and sandbags in choke points so you can control the flow of Wanderers. It requires you to spend the time beforehand ensuring you have enough arrows, bullets, molotov cocktails, and whatever else you can bring to fight, as well as the food, water, and healing items needed to sustain you through the onslaught. Once you activate the transporter and the Wanderers swarm, moving between choke points taking out enemies is tense, partly because of how inelegant movement and attacking feel. You need to be measured and precise; to put yourself in the best spot and make each swing count, all the while keeping an eye on your vitals, ammunition, and the state of your weapons. It's a delicate balancing act in which the stress comes from knowing how much you're committing to the battle, and the tension of how much you stand to lose.
Admittedly, there's an element of finding the good in something bad there, not to mention a fair bit of psychological manipulation. Perhaps it's Stockholm Syndrome at work, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that there is fulfillment to be gained from Metal Gear Survive's grind. Whether it's managing to hold off waves of Wanderers for main missions or collecting edible herbs, hunting animals for meat, or sourcing some dirty water to briefly stave off the thirst, each one provides a small nugget of satisfaction; the sweet release of endorphins that comes with completing an objective. And by stacking the odds so heavily against you, these successes--big or small--feel like an act of defiance. I'm the rat pushing a button for a food pellet, and sometimes that's the best you can ask for.
Base building is also a big part of Metal Gear Survive's gameplay, and there's enjoyment in spending time and resources transforming your ramshackle base into one outfitted with water tanks, areas to grow vegetables and rear livestock, cooking stations, and crafting benches. Over time you'll rescue people stranded in Dust and bring them home, where they'll potter around doing tasks assigned to them such as tending to crops. Growing your base is perhaps the most rewarding part of Metal Gear Survive, but the game doesn't make it easy. It barely explains mechanics such as resource sharing and creating exploration teams, and aspects such as crafting and building involve navigating a litany of menus. The game lays it on thick with information, and doesn't make an effort to show you what's relevant and why. Still though, it can all be intuited with a little bit of experimentation, and once you've done that it's easy to fall into a comfortable routine of returning home, upgrading your character, running maintenance on your defenses, and collecting produce. If there's any comfort to be found in Metal Gear Survive, it's here.
You can also play Survive in online multiplayer, during which you team up with friends in wave based survival missions. Since equipment and items are shared between campaign and multiplayer, playing online alleviates Survive's more overbearing stressers, as this mode is considerably more generous about doling out material rewards and bypasses the need to find recipes by giving you weapons to repair and use. Multiplayer is a salve for Metal Gear Survive's more egregious problems, but relying on a separate mode to make the campaign feel manageable feels like an obvious sign that the single-player experience isn't balanced properly. Since Survive is always connected, chances are most people will be in a position to play online, but for some people it's not their preference. Unfortunately, however, playing multiplayer to accrue resource and weapons to take back into campaign feels like the only real way to get some breathing room.
For the most part, Metal Gear Survive feels oppressive, demanding, and obtuse, and needlessly so. It's a shame because there's actually a good survival game in there, but the pressures it places on you make uncovering and enjoying that unappealing. Over time the ability to manage thirst and hunger becomes slightly more manageable, especially if you play the multiplayer, but the lead up to that is debilitating. There's some satisfaction to be had if you persevere and savor the small victories, but you'll quickly find yourself thinking about if your time would be better spent playing something else.
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