REVIEW – After a year of the initial release on the Ouya (!), Whispering Willows is now available on Sony’s console triumvirate. The game can be described with three words: visual, enjoyable… and sadly, short. If the game had more length than it received, then one of the best PlayStation 4 indie games would come from Night Light Interactive.

Whispering Willows steps through the borders of the human beings in a genial way, despite staying within the boundaries of a two-dimensional adventure game: although our heroine, Elena Elkhorn is just a harmless girl by herself, the amulet that she received by her father (the game’s… damsel in distress) will give her supernatural powers.

This is something essential to use in the first three chapters of the game (it’s something similar to Soul Reaver from the end of the nineties on the PS1), and you have to use this ability to talk to other spirits, take control of certain items (like a switch), and you can get to unreachable places as well.

The game helps you in several ways: first, your amulet will glow in light blue, and also, the game will give you a distinct audio cue too, when a spirit is nearby. If your amulet glows red, you are in danger, which means deadly spiders are nearby, which kill Elena instantly – however, your result isn’t lost in case you get hurt.

Death, everywhere

Although the mystery of the Willows mansion promises to be a horror game, it actually turns rather into solving a mystery, which really kicks in after leaving the catacombs, the first area of the game. Our task is mainly going to help spirits over to the otherworld. For example, Flying Hawk, the shaman will ask for our help in the early segment of the game. But getting stuck isn’t really going to be an issue: there’s the catacombs, the garden, the guest house, the observatorium and the mansion itself.

I’m not counting the well, that’s a one-time place you spend a minute at. It’s not a lot, but sometimes, it will need some thinking to figure out the next location to go to – it’s going to be really relevant in the garden, which is a place we get to in the second half of the second chapter. Lots of dead end, but several notes to read. It’s a good idea to check them out, because you will get the background story of the characters mainly from these, plus the – somewhat – lacking cutscenes won’t really show them or their present state.

The mistake of a killer

Wortham Willows is going to be the antagonist of the story, who locked down our father, John Elkhorn as well. In the final chapter, where our amulet is not going to work after meeting Wortham for the first time, we have to point out his – fatal – mistakes, while changing the history several times with our spirit. It turns out that Wortham was wrong all the time, but you have to get there to see how the story clicks together. (Watch out though, you might think those will be just cutscenes, but you actually have to perform certain actions.)

Loses its steam too quickly

The game has three big issues in my eyes. First off, the game is very short. As you can’t really get lost and stuck (dying isn’t a problem either), even with a slower pace – not being able to run in buildings, I think I just figured out why… – you can get through the game in three, or hell, two and a half hours. Second, the game almost entirely lacks replayability. The only reason to replay is get all the notes (around 50 in total, Wortham has the most unsurprisingly), but honestly, I got all of them, bar two… on my first run. The third thing is the complete lack of voice acting for cutscenes. Sure, there are sound effects (the dialogue continuing one might be annoying after a while), but voice acting, no – just subtitles! This can’t be corrected by the decent drone/ambient soundtrack, in fact, it just points out the lack of voice acting.

Only if it’s cheap

I don’t know why that spiderish-stealth segments are even in the game (no explanation for these enemies at all), plus even after opening the observatorium, the spirit still said the same thing, it kinda shows how Whispering Willows feels partially unfinished. While it has interesting graphics, don’t expect technically amazing things because of the Unity engine and the 2D perspective. Get it, but only if it’s cheap. This game is the prime example of being used only once and never again. However, I admit that Night Light’s game is interesting.

-V-

Publisher: LOOT Interactive, LLC

Developper: Night Light Interactive

Genres: Kaland

Publication: June 30, 2015