Mini-review: The Whispered World

A couple of weeks back, I bought The Whispered World (WW) mostly based on its graphic style. I like the hand-drawn look, in fact the game I'm currently playing is Valkyria Chronicles on the PS3.

The game is presented as being "In classic point and click tradition" which is actually an understatement. It's exactly like an old point and click game like King's Quest and not at all like an old game like The Dig. The difference between those games are in my own opinion mostly that in one of them the puzzles mostly make sense and in the other they require you to spend hours in your inventory using item X with item Y and seeing if it will work.

There is a difference between doing something in the style of old games, ie. hand-drawn backgrounds and doing something just like old games and unfortunately WW falls into the wrong category.

While I'm talking about a lot of weak points there are some positives as well. The best one is Spot, your weird worm companion. He follows you around and as the game progresses you'll be able to transform him into different forms, using him to solve puzzles. While this acts as another thing to try to rub against everything, he's also really cute and it's an interesting mechanic that shows it's learned something from the 20+ years of adventure games.

Another thing is the space bar button that highlights all the items on the screen that you can interact with. The reason why this is not entirely a good thing is that you can't actually find out that there is such a button because there is no "controls" tab in the and there is no game manual. I only found it out by accidentally hitting it. Turning the controls into a mini-game of "press every key hoping it does something" is not quite good game design.

I want to like the game, I really do. It's just a bit too much pretty graphics and annoying voice acting. Having a couple of guys working in the design department that actually wants to do something about usability would probably help the game a lot. I can't believe some of the puzzles actually got through the testing phase unchanged. I ran into a couple of spots where using one item on another made Sadwick say "That's a great idea" (or something like it) and still not doing anything because it was missing some component. If it's a great idea, I want you to do it, otherwise I want feedback telling me why it doesn't work.

While WW is a nice game that will take a few hours and has some nice puzzles, I'd still recommend you getting a Sam & Max pack instead. It's around the same price and you'll get 24 episodes with 2-3 hours of play time with puzzles that make more sense. If you want an old game that is excellent and cheap, get The Dig.