The soundtrack by Steve Goldshein was released on Januby video game music label Materia Collective. The game was translated into Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Ukrainian and Brazilian Portuguese. It was released on Ouya on May 27, 2014, and subsequently released for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and OS X on Steam on Jand on Nintendo Switch on September 27, 2018. Searching for her missing father was decent enough motivation for me to start guiding Elena on her journey through Wortham Willow’s crumbling mansion and the surrounding estate, but the lack of twists, turns, or interesting characters to encounter failed to keep me invested for even the three or four hours it took to complete Whispering Willows.Whispering Willows is an indie adventure horror video game developed by the independent developer Night Light Interactive, and published by Akupara Games. The character designs are interesting, and work well in the hand-drawn style - though the artwork loses its charm in the stiff motion-graphic-style cutscenes.Įlena’s story isn’t exactly breaking new ground, either. The environments also give off a haunting feeling of foreboding, with candles and gas lamps casting eerie shadows across the derelict backgrounds. Coupled with the somber tones of the score, it does far more to put us on edge than the cartoonish visages of the various ghosts do. The sound design for each area of the estate is decidedly creepy, from Elena’s soft footfalls echoing off a creaking staircase to the rustling of leaves in the wind. Where Whispering Willows excels is in its aesthetic. The longest puzzle is a hedge maze, and the challenge is less about opening the right door and finding the right item than it is just trying to remember how the hell you got here in the first place. While this idea is definitely present in many of the puzzles that require Elena to leave her body, more often than not my time was spent simply walking from one area to another and looking for an item that would unlock a new door, diminishing the importance of the out-of-body mechanic. The whole point of astral projection is to place yourself outside of your body and view the world from a new perspective, but Whispering Willows doesn’t seem to fully take advantage of that. It makes me wonder why that promising mechanic is so underutilized. This allows her to speak to other ghosts, possess and manipulate objects, and reach areas that she can’t get to in her corporeal form. The best idea of Whispering Willows is that our heroine Elena is able to astral-project herself into the spirit realm.

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