4/18/2023 0 Comments Where the heart leads ps4Furthermore, this increased engagement also raises the likelihood that they will take one of your experiences and help orally build upon its legend by sharing with others. The more that they trust you, the more of their own personal backstory they divulge. For one, the fireside chats build a rapport between wanderers. The effects of these interactions with other travelers actually work twofold. Let’s just say that the developers didn’t seem to think that instructions were needed for a majority of the key mechanics. Much to my dismay, all of this has to be found out through making a huge batch of mistakes early on. However, it’s important to note that once a story has been told to a given traveler, that card is no longer available to be used in future encounters with the same person. Discerning the proper narratives eventually becomes second nature, which is a blessing to say the very least. It’s a glorified process of trial-and-error, but it doesn’t take long for each story’s thematic elements to make more sense. The dynamic of trying to find the right anecdote to satisfy this one specific individual seems slightly confusing at first. Using tarot cards to represent each story that has been uncovered over the course of the adventure, individual tales can be told, meeting the extremely specific needs of each particular audience. Initially, these fellow wanders start out bluntly asking for a scary or funny story and it’s up to the player to meet these requests. Each of these characters has their own handful of tales to tell as well, not to mention a rich backstory to explore. This is where expository exploration primarily comes into play. Numerous times throughout the campaign, players will get the chance to engage with other fellow vagrants in a bit of story swapping around a burning barrel or campfire. Each town has its own stories to consume, and it’s up to the player to explore every nook for the next undiscovered narrative nugget. It only takes a few minutes to trek across an entire state, but honestly, it’s simply a way to chain together disparately located points-of-interest. The player is represented by what appears to be a tremendously oversized vagrant, traversing the map at a painfully deliberate pace. Through witnessing these events firsthand, the player then acquires these tales to share with other travelers that are encountered while aimlessly wandering from the Great Plains to the Dust Bowl, and beyond.įor every frame of beautiful art style portrayed during the course of storytelling, it leans just as strongly in the opposite direction when exploring the map itself. These bursts of exposition also share an equally beautiful art style, further helping to flush out the narrative. It may seem a bit odd at first, but the game’s main mechanic revolves around consuming brilliantly written and performed stories that play out over the course of travel. In exchange for the player’s soul, the direwolf leaves players to wander the American countryside during the depression era in search of stories. It’s stories like this that effortlessly set the stage for the game’s core narrative conceit: exaggerated storytelling. You lost a hand of cards to a wilderness beast voiced by none other than legendary singer Sting. What better way to start a game than observing a hand of poker after going all-in? Only upon seeing the flop do two facts become obvious: 1) You lost the hand and 2) You lost to a wolf. Does it deliver a quest worth sharing, or is it just too unbelievable to be true? Betting It All Thankfully, Where The Water Tastes Like Wine explores this phenomenon in more depth through the lens of emergent gameplay, and almost two years after its original release, it’s now on PS4. But that was about where my interest in these more modern-day myths came to an abrupt end. Unlike other stories that were birthed thousands of years ago or had huge volumes dedicated to their analysis, the phenomenon of the “American Tall Tale” was a relatively new concept that grew out of the country’s rapid expansion. I remember when I was in grade school, learning about the tall tales of characters like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan and completely missing the point of these legends.
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