Developer and Publisher: Night Light Interactive
Platforms: Ouya, Microsoft Windows (reviewed), Linux, OS-X
Release date: July 9, 2014
Genre: Puzzle, Adventure, Horror
Price: $15 [divider]
Intro
After a successful Kickstarter Night Light Interactive, a Los Angeles based independent game studio released their first game, Whispering Willows. This is a 2D side-scrolling horror/adventure game. This chapter based titled first featured on the Ouya console and is together as one package on Steam.
Driven by its quality of narrative and puzzle design, Whispering Willows asks you to spend time with it and allow the personal struggles of Elena Elkhorn become your own. While trying to locate her father who went missing while caretaking for a manor, she is introduced to a world of spirits as she learns about the unique amulet which allows her to astral project her spirit into a ghostly-realm and communicate with the dead.[divider]
Story
You complete the manor’s puzzles, unlocking more rooms with more spirits and notes that construct the story piece by piece. The dialog and voice acting is average at best with an uninspired story and simple wordplay but the collectable notes are well written. They are plenty to pick up and interesting to read, detailing from the event that conspired to the relations of the various characters. This provides a good context to the places you visit, however this is all optional and never required to finish the game. The game will clock around 4-5 hrs.[divider]
Gameplay
The major mechanic of the game relies on using Elena’s spirit. This is used for both talk to spirits and to access areas that were otherwise unreachable, such as opening locked doors, that involves picking up a nearby key or flipping a switch tunneling through gaps in the wall in spirit form. Often you will collect items that maybe used much later, also unlike most point and click games you need not try every item with every object, rather possessing it in your inventory is enough.
The gameplay focuses strictly on exploration and completing puzzles that comes down to finding items. The gameplay focus on this single concept but the immersion would have been greater by throwing in a few apt mini-games to break the familiar. The game definitely tease, with a combination door lock and a couple running sequences thrown inbut never fully embraces it. They are just too few and too far apart. The puzzles are a mixed bad sometimes being tough when there is no clear indication to what to do next and sometimes literally highlighting the solution in the text of your diary.
Being an open-ended game you are free to traverse back and forth unlocked rooms, however since who would be walking long corridors and parameters of the mansion the slow pace at which you walk leads to frustration. The game follows a slow pace and without any map or directions forces you to learn the paths of the building you are in. This means you may have to manually make a cheat sheet of the map in case you are often lost. Here the slow pace of the game reveals its full face and may be off-putting to impatient gamers. Also what is puzzling is the lack of controller support forcing me to use joy to key, for a game that originated on a console this is just inexcusable.[divider]
Graphics and Audio
The game uses a mix of hand-drawn 2D characters with pseudo 2D-3D environments. The good art design make the two different styles come together to provide a visually pleasing aesthetic as well as an immersive environment. The various levels look well with much detail and colorful art although there are clear areas where the skimmed, like the gardens. There are some comic styled animated cutscenes presented at a few occasions. The characters are however excellent, with disfigured ghost designs to the flowing hair of Elena’s own spirit.
The sound design is also a mixed bag. The soundtrack is good with creepy tones that does give off the uneasy feeling like a haunted mansion should and good sound effects for footsteps and opening a door adding to the ambiance. There are also frustrating sound effects too, the ones that are repeated far too often that they start to become annoying. For example, there is a pianist who is looking for his music sheet, however once he gets it he starts to play a constant 3 second loop of the most annoying music that just forced me to mute in the section when I had to revisit it while stuck on another puzzle.[divider]
Conclusion
Filled with potential that never surmounts and uneven production this slow pace puzzle game may not be inviting to those not interested in the genre, but there is plenty of enjoyment to be had here for the enthusiast. Standing on good art and an interesting plot and a slightly dark tone, this is one enjoyable tale.
What’s iLL
Interesting premise, Art design and atmosphere, Open world.
What’s not
Lack of puzzle variety, uneven production, no controller support.[divider]
Disclaimer: Review copy provided by Night Light Interactive.
This game was reviewed on a GTX 780 provided by NVIDIA.
