Introduction
The Whispered World is a tricky point & click adventure of a sad joister called Sadwick. He is accompanied by his pet catapillar Spot and tries to save the world, while the prophecy says he will destroy it instead.

Gameplay & Story: 6/10
The story is quite simple at the start and gets a bit more tricky a the end, but nothing too serious though. Every quest in this game is connected to progressing the story, so you basically gather all the needed items, combine them and place them on the right spots to progress in the game. Some side quests are more intersting to fulfill, while others feel a bit repetative especially when you have to get to one place, just to get an item that you needed in your first place anyway. The end has a sweet touch to it, to actually bring some sence into the game, but nothing you shuld be shedding a tear about.

Combat & Challenge : 7/10
There is no real combat in this game, whole process is made only by either using and combining items, or solving puzzles, of which you will find enough in this game. I rarely play point & click adventures, so the puzzles encountered in this game were quite tricky. Some of them took some minutes thinking, others took some time figuring out by try & error principle, but in both cases were not too long and still enjoyable. It made the game besides walking between places far more fun and challenging.

Graphic & Interface : 7/10
The graphics in this game are lovely and received a lot of detail from the developers. Every scenery has a nice touch to it and both the characters and landscapes fit really well together. The colours are nice to watch for the eyes and between the chapter transitions you will see nicely animated cut scenes. The interface is simple and immersive, the bag could have been slightly bigger so you dont have to scroll for items in longer chapters.

Progress & Mini-Games : 6/10
The progress in The Whispered World sometimes feel nice and quick, especially when you have challenges that you immerse yourself into, while some chapters feel insanely slow because you have to walk a lot (and the character is not the quickest) and try tons of possible items on possible solutions. The progress gets nice and quick though if you get a walkthrough or a guide, that would help you figure out steps you've been spending too much time on.

Audio & Immersion : 6/10
I really enjoyed the music and the sounds in this game. Even though some sound effects feel a bit kinky or kiddy, it kind of fits the game, so it only supported the immersion created by the graphic and the story. The music was chosen well for this game, sometimes its more a classical tune, other times it sounds more gipsy-like, but is definetely supporting the game well.

Side-Notes

• This game is single player only.
  
• This game contains steam achievements.
  
• This game offers minimal replayability, especially if you create the saves for achievements.
  
• This game is fairly short - it took me 8 hours to complete it (looked up some puzzles in a guide) and got almost all achievements.

Summary
The Whispered World is a nice point and click adventure, that you will quickly get through, but if you enjoy figuring out some puzzles and dont mind having a bit clumsy and kiddy progatonist, you will surely enjoy solving the puzzles and figuring out items the game provided.


I hope this review helps you making the decision if its worth buying this game. Rate and leave a comment if you enjoyed reading it.
~ForestWolf

A Point & Click Adventure where you can't click! How novel!

Seriously, this game has been broken since launch (going on a year) and still has not been fixed and it appears the Developers never plan to fix it. If I hadn't gotten a free upgrade from the Classic version I would have demanded my money back!

The only way this game is playable is to download the Source Code for the Open Source Simple DirectMedia Layer, make the change listed at http://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/rev/e3a80970cf0b and recompile into a .dll and save it in your game directory. Why the Devs can't do this for those who aren't familiar with modifying third-party code and compiling from source is beyond me. Is it just laziness, apathy, or a simple case of "Doesn't matter, already got your money"? Apparently Daedalic Entertainment thinks they are Ubisoft.

0/10 in it's current state.

I found this to be a very charming point-and-click adventure game. The focus of the story is on a depressive child clown by the name of Sadwick, who departs from his family circus to avert the end of the world from coming to pass.

The story is more of a whimsical one, but the game is not a comedy and does take itself seriously. You get a nice amount of character growth from Sadwick and the course of the story has you meet new and interesting characters in each scene along the way. The amount of depth to each character you meet was pleasantly surprising, and at least a few really made for some happy smile-inducing moments and the German voice acting is quite expressive (see my note below) . The environments are very beautifully drawn and in-game animations are very good too. There are some cutscenes which have less polish, looking maybe more like a 90's cartoon but overall did not detract from the experience for me. The music is quite good, even if some of the tracks are re-used a few too many times.

Game ran just fine, but doesn't alt-tab too well. Saving, mouse controls, the GUI are all perfectly fine. The game has no failstates, and you can hold Spacebar to highlight interactables. This game does have a fair few number of puzzles that are not easy to intuit the solutions for, so you will likely have to resort to a guide more often than you'd like. This is par for the course in adventure games, although the par is a bit high in this game.


I also wanted to address a few complaints I saw a lot in other people's reviews.

Performance : Many users complained of the game failing to launch, launching to a black screen, or crashing. I never once had any such issue. I hope others who do are able to resolve theirs.

Sadwick's walking speed : Some users complained that Sadwick walks too slow. In most adventure games you can double-click on screen transitions to automatically trigger them. You can do that in this game too, so its possible those users did not know. Sadwick walks at a fine pace otherwise, no scene is especially large bar one and even then the transitions in that area are numerous.

Voice acting : I heard that the English dub VA for Sadwick is unbearable and whiny. Given his personality in the game I could see why this might be, so I used the original German voice acting and enjoyed it thoroughly. I have no problems with using the German VA.

Broken audio : Some users comment that audio seems to cut off abruptly at the end of some spoken lines. I cannot comment on the English audio, but this is sometimes noticeable in the German audio. I did not find it common enough nor disruptive enough to say it was any significant detriment, although the developers should fix it if so.

Controls : Some users complain the game fails to register mouse clicks. I never had this happen, but you do have to hold down the mouse button to open the small interaction menu.

Story : Some people just don't like the premise or character personality, or how the game ends. That's fine, its just down to taste. I enjoyed it, others will not.


All in all, I would recommend it. I very much enjoyed myself. About 10-12 hrs playtime.

"I should have fed him in time..."

The Whispered World is one of Daedalic Entertaintment's adventure titles, and promises a lot as it starts, yet fails to keep any of those promises throughout the game itself. I wasn't expecting an experience as grand as Memoria, but at least hoping for the kind of quality in story and display of beauty as we encountered in Chains of Satinav. What I encountered, was beautiful potential spent badly on a sad little clown.

The storybook opens and a worn-out narrator warns us that this will be the last story that he'll be telling ever. Then, we meet Sadwick: the sad little clown. He is a misanthropic, pessimistic and annoying little boy who runs a circus alongside his brother Ben and his grandfather. One morning, Sadwick jumps down from his bed, shaken and terrified of a nightmare that indicates the world is ending. Oh, wait! According to a messenger of the King that Sadwick will be meeting in the forest, the world IS ending for reasons that we are not aware yet. The messenger Bobby advices Sadwick to seek Shana, a mythical oracle that resides in the forest who can interpret Sadwick's dream. With a quest at hand, Sadwick's journey towards the unknown starts...

I'll start with my most basic complaint: the game doesn't work properly! There is an odd clicking bug that starts the minute you run the game, and keeps haunting you until the very end. You have to click on something 5-6 times for the game to acknowledge that you are clicking on it. It is hellishly annoying for a POINT AND CLICK adventure game. The puzzles themselves are obscure and random enough, and you never know whether you're trying the wrong item combination, or just game doesn't register your clicking. On that manner, it is impossible to finish the game without divine persistency and a walkthrough.

The background art and the interface music are pretty, as if taken from a German folktale. But characters and the style of art chosen to illustrate them are off putting. Animations are broken half the time, and the lip synch with the audio is non-existent. It takes forever for Sadwick to walk with the given animation. It seems all these issues are commonly known for the "Special Edition" and no solution has been offered for now.

As a character, our protagonist Sadwick is incredibly annoying and lacks personal depth. His voice is off putting - and drives you insane since we'll be with him only until the end of game. There is no logical correlation between story progression and any kind of visible personal growth either. Nothing justifies his choices, and nothing explains them either. There is also no observable reason to Sadwick's endless vailing or suffocating pessimism to begin with. Sadwick is a character which is impossible to empathize with. He is basically shallow.

As for Spot's - Sadwick's victimized caterpillar - transformations and the way that Sadwick treats him, I found it to be disgusting. Poor little thing is literally tortured to even achieve given transformations! He is sliced, pressed and burned numerous times without even a single complain! He is even nailed to a rack as part of a puzzle nearing the end of the game. If I were to be Spot, I'd tell Sadwick: "♥♥♥♥ you! ♥♥♥♥ you for being a selfish and miserable fool! ♥♥♥♥ you for putting me through all these ordeals! You don't deserve neither my loyalty nor my affection! I'm done with you, Sadwick! Go play the part of the sadistic bastard on someone else! ♥♥♥♥ you!” Whew, sorry. I gotta get that off my chest.

I definitely don't recommend this game, for its broken controls, its annoying protagonist, its sick sense of humor, and definitely for its dramatized yet shallow ending. Sorry, guys and gals. I finished this game through sheer willpower and an obsession for completing a story that I started. I love the next Daedalic adventure just as you do, but this one doesn't worth it.

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The story has it charm and i feel good enough entertained for my playtime. The graphics could have sometimes more details (flowers or something) but most time they are really fine with charming and interesting creatures. Sound has positiv sides. The gameplay is good, with the many combination (see, speak, touch) items and places you can get/ find some funny dialogs. The game could be a bit longer but i think its good if you get 50 % discount. I give this game for his style 91 % for real Point and Click fans.

The Whispered World is a point & click adventure game made by Daedalic Entertainment. What most likely seemed like a good game on paper (a medieval fantasy setting and a basic mystery to build a story around, decent graphics, nice music and sound effects) turned out to be a sub par game due to its meager story, its lack of interesting characters, its awful voice acting and the fact that too many situations will have you searching for a walkthrough to look up the far-fetched or completely illogical solution.


You play as Sadwick, a child clown from a small family of travelling circus artists. Sadwick is plagued by ominous nightmares and he wants to find out more about them. So he's off to find an oracle who supposedly lives in the forest where the circus happened to make camp.

Sadwick is a whiner. Plain and simple. In every conversation he will talk about how he feels sad and worthless, and complain that nobody likes him. Even after statements that don't call for whining, he does it anyway. For example, when clicking on a statue and he says "The statue won't move", he adds "Pretty much like everything else in my life". Even after basic statements to tell the player "I can't do that" he sometimes adds things like "I'm too stupid/clumsy/weak/worthless". This gets old very soon.

The story and the dialogue aren't very captivating. Most of the conversations are repetitive and long-winded with little content. It didn't take long before I found myself skipping through most of it and just glimpsing the gist of the conversation from the subtitles that raced past.

A second reason to skip through the dialogue is the terrible voice acting. Sadwick's voice is forced and annoying. Most of the other character's voices are annoying, too. The remaining voice acting is mediocre at best.

The humour isn't funny at all. A senile grandpa who says 'compost' when he means 'compass'. Hilarious. Your character who misunderstands the messenger when he says 'the whispering stone' and repeats 'the blistering bone?' Side-splitting. If childish wordplay isn't your thing, don't worry. They included gags that require visualizing, too, for example:"That stone looks like a cow's behind"!

Not far into the game things seem to take a turn for the better when an interesting and mysterious element is added to the story when some sparking electrical conduits appear out of nowhere in this medieval world, in our protagonist's trailer no less! But Sadwick says, and I quote: "I've decided to just ignore them" and that's that. You can't talk to the other characters about them and you can't examine them further. Seriously? This is the equivalent of looking out the window into your backyard, seeing a space ship landing there and thinking to yourself: "Ah well, I'll close the curtains and have a look what's on TV tonight".

The ending is predictable and actually makes little sense when you think about it. But it's clear the developers didn't give the story a lot of thought so we shouldn't either, I guess.


The gameplay is a bit strange for a point & click game. A minor gripe is that you have to target stuff with the centre of a large mouse pointer. Even though it doesn't take long to get used to this, it keeps feeling clumsy throughout the whole game. More importantly, they turned The Whispered World into a 'point & hold game': a regular short mouse click only makes your character walk to an object, but to interact with it you need to hold the mouse button down for a second. The whole thing just feels counter-intuitive.

You can press SPACE to highlight all the objects you can interact with. I read that a lot of people find this game hard because some of the puzzles are rather far-fetched, so I used this function a lot. I wanted to avoid 'pixel hunting' and getting stuck because I missed some small item in a corner somewhere. Sounds like a plan, right? Well, the first time I got stuck and looked up a walkthrough, it turned out I missed an item anyway. This item was hidden somewhere, in a corner so to speak, and it did not show when pressing SPACE. *Sigh* So use the highlight function, but don't count on it being foolproof.

And, by the way, those people were right: at least a dozen of the solutions to problems in this game are far-fetched or just don't make any sense. After a few of those moments I pretty much gave up on playing this game without a walkthrough next to me. Which is a shame, because that takes a lot of the fun out of playing an adventure game.

When you execute one of those impossible-to-guess solutions, Sadwick litterally says: "That's so crazy... I don't even know why I try." Seriously. No kidding.

The developers even created an achievement for using a walkthrough! You get an achievement called 'Walkthrough user' for solving a puzzle without performing any wrong action, which is indeed only possible if you're following a walkthrough to the letter. There's another achievement that requires you to do a whole segment of the game perfectly, without making any error, so that's pretty much the same thing.


The graphics are decent enough. The decors of this medieval fantasy world aren't breathtaking but they are easy on the eye. What I don't understand is why a 'special edition' release from the year 2014 has no widescreen support. Besides, the game was originally released in 2009 so it wasn't ancient to begin with. But unless you still have a 4:3 monitor, you will see a broad black bar on the left and right side of your screen. This isn't a matter of settings. Take a look at the screen shots on the store page: they have the black bars, too.

Often, you hear no music at all. But when there is music playing, it's quite beautiful and atmospheric. I especially liked the music in the second chapter. The sound effects and the ambient sounds are very nice, too.


There are a few minor bugs in the game. Sometimes you hear or read a completely different line than intended. A few objects still have their German names. Like I said: minor bugs but signs of sloppiness nevertheless. I also experienced a couple of CTD's (crash to desktop) so save regularly.


The Whispered World has 7 trading cards. You'll get 4 while running the game.

The Steam Achievements are uninspired. First, you have your classic, unmissable story-related achievements. Then there are a few missable achievements. I already talked about the two achievements that reward people who use a step-by-step walkthrough or at least a 100% achievement guide. Well, there is also an achievement for skipping all of the game's minigame puzzles. That's about the equivalent of giving a medal to wartime deserters, isn't it?

The other missable achievements usually boil down to 'perform an optional action 10 times'. Each of those 10 times you'll have to sit through an animation or even an entire cutscene, so they're pretty boring achievements that you'll only get when you use an achievements guide.

And then there is an achievement called 'Master of Disguise', which you get for clicking a few hundred times on some ingame buttons. Again. They already did the same thing in The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav with its 'Destroyer' and 'Healer' achievements.

Steam Achievements can be a great thing when they add optional extra 'quests', challenges and depth to a game. I'm seriously starting to have my doubts about Daedalic Entertainment. Apparently they are convinced that 'click some buttons 500 times' is a challenge that adds more fun to playing a game, and that people should be rewarded for using a walkthrough and for skipping puzzles. I still have a few more games from the 'Daedalic Bundle' to go, so wish me better luck on my next pick...

I have such mixed feelings about this game that I'm hard pressed on whether or not to recommend it.

To start off with, the artwork is absolutely GORGEOUS and features traditionally animated cutscenes. The music is quite nice as well, though the voice acting is hit and miss. The characters themselves are quite vibrant and full of personality - we follow the journey of our would-be hero Sadwick, a down-on-his-luck circus clown with clinical depression, who discovers that he has been fated to... destroy the world. As you can imagine he rejects this prophesy, determined to instead save his world from crumbling to dust. Initially I found Sadwick's character to be annoying with how whiney he was about everything, but as I followed him and got to know him, I started to relate to his depression more and saw much of myself reflected in him. He really just needs a hug. As for the puzzles, they're fairly difficult and often frustrating and illogical. More than once I had to look up a guide.

UNfortunately, despite how gorgeous this game is and how interesting I'd found the story, the direction the ending wound up taking I felt to be such a massive cop-out that I'm actually pretty angry. In retrospect it was pretty obvious, but it was such an extremely lazy and unimaginitive "plot twist" that it pretty much destroyed the rest of the game's magic. So, while everything else about the game is good and I would recommend it based off of that, the ending is just SO unsatisfying that I feel extremely conflicted to say yes.

If you truly want this game, wait and get it on sale. Don't waste your money paying full price just to be slapped by the ending.

I'd been hoping for the game to eventually get fixed, but by now it seems the devs have given up on trying to establish any solution for the matter.
The inventory works fine in the tutorial, but inexplicably, past that point, it refuses to open. The context menu is a massive frustration as well, being very challenging to use (due to related mouse input recognition issues).

To be clear, the game is literally unplayable, as I cannot progress past the opening area, due to being unable to access the key in my inventory.

Also, as far as what little gameplay I can actually critique:
The English voice acting for the main character is painfully poorly done- however, you do have access to several other language settings, and subtitle and vocal language settings are seperate (so you can still get English in the subtitles).
If you're opposed to utilizing a non-English language for the game sounds, you may want to take a quick glance at a Let's Play to see if the voice acting bothers you.

You can read more on the mouse issue in this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/268540/discussions/2/541906348043730288/

tl;dr: Some really fantastic artwork and an interesting world with fun secondary characters to explore. That aside, this game misses too many marks to be really good, and becomes almost a chore towards the end, mostly due to the old bane of point & clicks: illogical puzzles and rushed final chapters.

It's a mostly melancholic story with great moments of bleak humour, one that promises to be interesting but loses steam along the way. There is some fun writing to be found in it (I do love me some Talking Rocks and any and all quips they feel like making are fine by me), but the story becomes weirdly convoluted in the last chapter. The world building is fascinating nonetheless, and along with the gorgeous art they are clearly the highlights of the experience. As for the english voice over, it has some bad moments but it's mostly alright. The hero's voice may take some getting used to though.

For me the major let down is that too many of the puzzles are really unintuitive and illogical, and there is only that much drudgery I'm willing to accept in my play. I don't care if that was fine when Lucas Arts did it, it isn't fine now, especially not if you expect me to traverse multiple screens with a really slow character to try out totally random things that follow no internal logic whatsoever. It gets worse as the chapters progress, and by the last one you'll have too many moments of being hard pressed to figure out what to do next without immense patience or a walkthrough. Any guidance, even subtle indications, would have helped, but they are as lacking as any type of a hint system.

On a positive note, if you were worried about bugs the "Special Edition" seems to have taken care of most of the previous problems. Just bear in mind that this is an older game so there are limited resolutions offered - expect black bars if you have a wide screen. High DPI displays will also need to disable display scaling to be able to play in fullscreen.

So would I suggest it?
Probably not. I'm usually a sucker for projects of love even if they end up being lovable trainwrecks, and this game oozes love for its unlikely world-weary child hero and its odd world. But halfway through it just stopped being fun to actually play, there were one too many misses and not enough hits. While I don't regret the time I spent with it, I still can't recommend it and I'd suggest waiting for a steep discount if you decide to try it yourself.

I'm sad to say I can't really recommend this game. It is kind of buggy as other reviewers have pointed out but that wasn't my main problem with it. It's just so, so slow. The character walks everywhere at a snail's pace, the controls are awkward, and the puzzles are unintuitive.

I wanted to like it, the animations are very nice and charming, but the voice acting is terrible. The main character especially is very annoying when we're supposed to find him a lovable failure. Mostly the game is just boring, and I say that as a person who usually loves point and click adventure games. I got almost to the end when it became so tedious I had to quit. I thought I might go to youtube to watch the end but I found I couldn't even care enough to do that.