Whispering Death - Prologue (PC) Review

 

In the Prologue of Whispering Death you wake up in a twisted nightmare version of your own home and have to escape from there.

This is by no means a groundbreaking new concept, but the game has a few strengths. The atmosphere feels always threatening. You are never fully at ease, since you can both see a demon lurking around the corner and hear her talking to you. In the beginning this is great and immersive, but after a few minutes it wears off. The voice clips keep repeating too often and too frequent and you will come to discover, that you don’t get attacked by the demon, unless you enter a room with her inside.

The gameplay actually incorporates the nightmare setting quite nicely. Instead of respawning you will keep waking up each time you died, like a nightmare you can’t escape from. The difference is, that key items will be rearranged each time with procedural generation. On the one side it’s great, because it encourages really exploring your house each playthrough. On the other hand it can also make the game much more cumbersome, since objects sometimes get hidden in really obscure places or occasionally seem to disappear altogether.

The game also has a really annoying physics feature. Instead of just opening doors via a mouse click you have to open them via a mouse movement, which adds nothing but frustration. The mouse movement often doesn’t register or overshoots, which makes opening doors more convoluted than necessary. I get that the devs wanted to show off their fancy physics engine, but this is just a bad feature. The have apparently already got player feedback in that regard months ago, but neither fixed nor removed it.

The ending of the game is also quite disappointing. There is no ending cutscene, instead you just see a black screen with a dog barking in the background. This was very dissatisfying. Whispering Death has only 1 Ending and features 6 relatively easy Steam Achievements.

 

Result:

Whispering Death is both intriguing and disappointing. The nightmare setting is a good idea and procedural generation could in theory even enhance the experience by encouraging further exploration. So far however the feature is a bit too flawed and would require more polish. The physics engine also needs an overhaul for the release of the full game. Whispering Death so far does a competent job at initially creating an immersive Horror atmosphere, but it can’t keep it up for long till the flaws become apparent.

 

5.5/10