The Whispered World

You interact in the style of LucasArt's Full Throttle: hold down the mouse on something and move it slightly, and a menu pops up letting you choose from an eye, hand or mouth. Clearly the first two mostly translate to 'look at' and 'use' or 'pick up'. The third is more open to interpretation. On a person it will talk to them, on food it will eat it, on a candle it will blow it out. And for each there's a line of dialogue, often with a great joke.

Then comes the inventory. Inappropriately or incorrectly using objects on other objects in the world is so often met with a unique response. It's staggering how much effort has been put into this. Of course, this is somewhat spoilt by it all being said by Sadwick, but the feat remains.

Back to those darkness-into-light moments I mentioned at the start. The Whispered World is packed with them. Suddenly you've got a completely new room packed with interactive items (and you'll absolutely need to use the Spacebar to reveal them, or you'll be pixel hunting until the day you die), with loads to explore.

But so often, oh so very often, this moment of freedom is squished by once again having absolutely no idea what you should be doing next. In the first chapter a great number of areas open up at once, with almost nothing to do in any of them. It's like picking at a roll of Sellotape, trying to find the end and then gradually picking at it to let it unspool.

The lack of prompts is probably the greatest failing. You can even use the correct item on the correct object too early, but the game rarely gives you an "I should try that later" message - most of the time you're met with the implication that it was simply wrong. There's so little attempt to guide you that you often feel abandoned by the narrative, and with that comes disinterest. This only gets worse by the game's final chapter.

Of course, you don't put this much effort into unpicking what's wrong with a simply dreadful adventure game. With those you just laugh, and move on. The Whispered World gets as much right as it does wrong, and for that it becomes sad for the wrong reasons. It's so achingly pretty, and clearly so much love has gone into it. But the crappy puzzles and painful voices (not all are bad, most are dull, Sadwick's is agony) do a huge disservice to a lovely world and some splendid writing.