The Whispered World: Special Edition

If you are like me you spent the early 90's enthralled playing games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and even the classic Dragon's Lair. The Whispered World is an adventure game told through a very rich and vibrant art style that feels as though you're watching a classic cartoon. Motions and things are fluid, characters are well animated. the game follows Sadwick, an appropriate name as he's quite a downer, a kind of "glass is half empty" person. He's thrust into an adventure and you follow him on the journey. The voice acting is quite good, at first Sadwicks voice may annoy you, but once you get into the game and get to know the character the voice becomes quite fitting to him. The game has quite a bit of humor to it, from characters and situations you find yoruself in. It's a lighthearted game but with mature elements in it's storyline and characters. If you enjoy classic adventures, and miss those classic cartoon style adventures, this is the game for you. I recommend trying the demo at least, it's what got me hooked into buying the game at release on steam.

I am a child of the point-and-click adventure and I just could not bring myself to like this game. I really wanted to. The art is fantastic - truly. The story is serviceable and definitely has it's moments of charm. The main character is unbearable, but I gather that's sort of the point. But as others here have mentioned, the puzzles are just ridiculous at times. There's a difference between challenging and illogical. The thing that killed adventure gaming (imo) was the trend of forcing the player to just keep combining random items until something happened, without anything in the game leading you to that answer. I can stomach being asked to trust that the banana peel must be tied to the rapier with length of cow intestine, but only if it's a conclusion of something explained in the game - not because randomly combining objects gives the devs a laugh. TWW is one you'll want to love, but I certainly couldn't. Good on you if you can.

Not much to say, also because I don't want to spoil anything ;-) Great story, great riddles (your head is going to hurt, but it is worth it), great atmosphere. Good interface, though it is style over functionality (luckily it's only point-and-click so it's not that bad). I can totally recommend it to anyone who is a point-and-click fan, especially Daedalic fans. For newcomers to point-and-clickers I maybe would recommend the Deponia series first (kickass story and better interface and a more linear difficulty progression).

The artwork immediately caught my attention when I first saw The Whispered World. The animation immediately reminded me of the fantasy cartoons of the 80s that I grew up with (so there is a bit of nostalgia). The backgrounds are beautiful. The characters are interesting. It's not laugh out loud humor through the whole game but the game is humorous and fun. The story is interesting. I like how you know from the beginning that the world is ending and it will be by your hand. The ending took me by surprise and had me a bit emotional (not to spoil anything but having kids probably affected this). I also loved the music throughout the whole game. It was well done and fit the mood of the 80s fantasy. The voice acting is slightly above average, as well. Now, on to the negatives. The puzzles frequently didn't make a lot of sense. There were several times I had to look at guides and thought that I would have never had guessed that. They are not always logical. There are some (true) puzzles that you can skip, which is appreciated (I find I often don't have the patience for sliding puzzles so this was a nice feature for that time). But, the PnC puzzles often didn't make sense. With the occasional look at a guide, however, I still found enjoyment with this game and would recommend it for PnC players.

I suspect that any judgement of The Whispered World will depend a lot on whether you enjoy the art, music, voices and story. Therefore, any rating is probably highly personal. For my part, I enjoyed the game a lot. Some voices are.. shaky, but that was not sufficient to turn me off. Aside from that, there are definite technical flaws in the game. For me, the game crashed a lot (using Windows XP) although thankfully it starts up rather quickly. It also had a tendency to start up with grainy graphics when playing the game in full-screen mode. That has a workaround, though: if you start the game with the 'options' launcher it will work just fine. Another annoyance was the fact that sound options sometimes reset. On the gameplay level: expect to use a walkthrough. Puzzles range from easily doable all the way to 'how on earth did they expect me to come up with this solution?' Those are some serious flaws, but I still enjoyed the Whispered World quite a lot. I didn't mind that the main character is depressed, for me it added flavour to the game. Just as I enjoyed a lot of the voice acting as appropriate for the characters. And the story is rather nice, too. But, as I said, that's probably highly subjective, so do try the demo before deciding on a purchase unless you're really into adventure games.