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.
