Buy on Steam | GOG

It was all Elon Musk’s fault.

In the world of Whispers of a Machine, humanity lives on top of giant towering platforms surrounded by wilderness, while the cracked roads below are lined with crashed vehicles. Special Agent Vera Englund of the Central Bureau’s Violent Crime Unit has been dispatched from the city to one such rural settlement to investigate a murder. Vera isn’t just any detective. Her mind and body have been augmented with nanotechnology that enhances her strength and senses. But over the course of the investigation, she begins to see strange dreams of her late lover.

Whispers belongs to a new breed of point and click adventures, where the emphasis is not so much on the traditional formula of picking up everything that isn’t nailed down and accumulating a large inventory of items to manipulate. Instead, the player mainly relies on a set of tools and skills and applies them in different contexts, much like in another relatively recent cyberpunk-themed point and clicker, Technobabylon. Vera’s cyborg powers allow her to temporarily boost her strength, perform a remote polygraph test, and conduct a smart forensic scan of the environment. This last one is a clever spin on the ‘find hotspot’ aspect of point and clicks, since the player has to indicate the specific forensic analysis being applied before dragging the mouse over the background, putting more thought into what is usually a more mindless pixel hunt exercise elsewhere.

Whispers also belongs to that laudable group of adventures with multiple solutions to puzzles, like the old Sierra Quest for Glory games and the recent Unavowed from Wadjet Eye. Here, the player can shape Vera’s personality through her words and actions, steering her towards one of three tracks that unlock new cyborg powers. Empathy gets turbocharged into shapeshifting, while clinical distance manifests itself as cloaking. Each set of powers lends itself to different ways of getting past obstacles as well as different events that occur as a result. While the overall storyline is linear, the variety in the three tracks towards make for interesting replayability, though it feels like something of a missed opportunity that each track did not lead to a separate ending, which would have been thematically appropriate.

While Whispers may be more mechanically complex than average, its storyline is relatively simple, which was a surprise given the previous games of Faravid Interactive and Clifftop Games. Unlike Kathy Rain‘s (Clifftop) vague, cryptic dream sequences and its open ending that requires creative interpretation to make sense of, or Samaritan Paradox‘s (Faravid) parallel narrative structure and its audacious plot twist that flipped the entire game on its head, Whispers has a relatively straightforward plot, with plenty of both showing and telling. Characters offer expository dialog on the history and setting, while others debate the game’s transhumanist singularitarian themes. For example, while the apocalyptic Collapse is constantly alluded to but never actually described, the game goes to great lengths to show broken robots everywhere, while humans perform the manual labor instead, and the wilderness seems entirely devoid of wildlife. That almost nothing goes unexplained or unanswered feels almost like Cliffaravid have swung all the way to the other side of the writing pendulum, perhaps in response to the past confusion of players. It was actually kind of disappointing that the scope of the story is relatively small compared to its ambitious themes. I came into this expecting a Deus Ex style elaborate conspiracy reaching all the way to the heights of authority and an epic scale conflict between major powers.

This is perhaps a casualty of their branching design, which meant that Whispers is broad but shallow, having traded length for replayability. Instead of designing three different branches, perhaps Cliffaravid could have focused on having a single one with a distinct personality for Vera, giving more space for her to have an actual character arc as she struggles between emotion and reason. More time on screen for the someone that is literally in the title of the game to allow the player to become emotionally invested with. This isn’t something beyond Cliffaravid’s ability to do. They’ve done it before in Kathy Rain and Samaritan. If they are going to stick with this kind of design, they ought to follow Unavowed‘s example and have at least a few cases for Vera to solve before forcing the player to make the big decision.

In summary: Whispers of a Machine is outstanding in terms of adventure game design but far too short to leave a lasting impression.