Dim Bulb’s quiet and contemplative story tell ’em up Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is still out there, trudging down America’s dusty depression-era roads, collecting and telling stories. Today, it has a few new ones to tell. Today’s Gold Mountain Update adds an official Chinese localisation, produced by a crew of dedicated Chinese-speaking fans led by one Ryan Zhang. More importantly for English-speakers, it adds a new set of stories to the game, focused on the lives of Chinese Americans and their alchemized folklore as they became woven into America’s fabric.

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Story-collectathon Where The Water Tastes Like Wine now has a free companion game, Fireside Chats, which falls somewhere between expansion and demo. The new release includes sixteen fresh stories, each told by one of the main characters that returning players will recognise, as well as the existing first chapter, so new players can get a feel for what to expect if they go on to purchase the main game.

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The old quote is wrong: neither death nor taxes are, it seems to me, as terrifyingly certain as the Steam Summer Sale. Yes, once more we can add to the heap that is our backlog by buying games for, what, five quid, on average? But there are so many to choose from that it’s easy to get flustered, so who better than the staff of RPS to hand-pick the best ones for your consideration (rhetorical question; do not answer)?

Check out the full list below for a mix of games that should suit all pockets and tastes.

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Story-collecting stroll ’em up Where The Water Tastes Like Wine has added more strange, delightful, and terrible tales to hear in a free update. Our dearly-departed Adam praised the original game’s Americana stories, written by a wide team of writers, in his Where The Water Tastes Like Wine review and more are certainly welcome. The dead man wasn’t so keen on the game around the stories, mind, but the developers are continuing to tweak that. This update also added an auto-walk button, see, to make your skellington stroll without you hold a key or button. The game is on sale now too. (more…)

The blizzards of Siberia have gone on holiday to the United Kingdom this week. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, doesn t do snow days. The pod squad have trekked hard through the whiteout (from their bedrooms to their computers) to gather on their respective microphones. To what end? Well, to talk about the weather. Blizzards, thunderclouds, sandstorms and, er, night-time? In videogames, it all counts.

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In Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, stories are currency. You walk the backroads and fields of the United States during the Great Depression, occasionally freighthopping or hitching a ride from one town to the next. Along the way, you meet many people and witness many events, most of them insignificant in the grand scheme of history and the land, but all contributing to a complex tapestry of a certain time and place.

Everything that you witness and every conversation you have becomes a tale in your repertoire, and in retelling these tales you learn about the characters you share them with, around campfires that are dotted around the map. It’s at the campfires that stories become currency, and also where the game’s combination of folktale and interactive systems becomes muddled.

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There are two things you should know about Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, the interactive fiction-ish anthology from Dim Bulb and Serenity Forge. One is that yer actual Sting is in it, supplying his dulcet tones to a hungry-looking wolfman who will narrate parts of the Americana odyssey. The second is that half of games journalism has written for it, including RPS escapees Cara Ellison and Leigh Alexander. Personally, Emily Short and Southern Monsters’ Kevin Snow are the names that make me particularly intrigued to play this. There’s a new trailer, seemingly narrated by Sting himself, which reveals WTWTLW’s release date – and, huh, it’s a lot sooner than I was expecting.

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The English actor Sting, famous for donning a cracking pair of pants as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in David Lynch’s Dune as well as for his side-career in music, will lend his voice to a humanoid wolf in Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. That furry fella is one of the storytellers in the country-roaming Americana anthology, which is led by Gone Home co-creator Johnnemann Nordhagen at his new studio, Dim Bulb, and features tales from writers including former RPS contributors Cara Ellison, Emily Short, and Leigh Alexander. Here, meet Sting and some other voice actors in this new trailer: (more…)