#faravid interactive

[hackerwrench]

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Whispers of a Machine

Whispers of a Machine is the second game from Clifftop Games, whom you may remember for Kathy Rain. As a sophomore effort, it’s strange. It’s both a great improvement in many ways, but also feels oddly lesser. It has more Wadjet Eye talent behind it, with portrait art being done by the incredibly talented Ivan Ulyanov, plus Dave Gilbert and Shelly Smith-Shenoy handling casting and even doing some VA work once again. The mechanics are more complex and interesting, with ideas never quite matched up in a point and click space like this. The issue is that Whispers of a Machine is one of the most oddly humble games you’ll ever find from an established developer. 

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[99-47]

Whispers of a Machine is a Sci-Fi Nordic Noir that tells the story of Vera, a cybernetically augmented detective in a post-AI world, who investigates a string of murders and unravels a dark conflict over forbidden technology.

Coming Spring 2019

[adventurerooms]

[retronator]

I should have a category for (pixel art) games released by my favorite unpublisher Raw Fury. Oh wait, I soon will—redesign of Retronator is almost here. Then their awesomeness will be easy to follow. But I digress.

We have a lot of new point-and-click adventures coming our way, which makes me very happy. The developer of Raw Fury’s second signed title Kathy Rain (our Burra wrote a lovely guest post about it) is teaming up with the raw and the furious to release their second game Whispers of a Machine as well. Joel Staaf Hästö (a.k.a. Clifftop Games) is mainly involved as a coder this time, with story and art coming from Petter Ljungqvist (a.k.a. Faravid Interactive). Raw Fury completes the circle as an (un)publisher and I’m glad they did, because I haven’t even heard of the game yet, which is to say how vast the scene is out there (but really how much I suck at covering it).

As is the case with Unavowed (Dave Gilbert’s iron in the fire), Petter left the familiar confines of 320×240 for double the dimensions. The backgrounds in modern-wave indie adventures were rarely pixel art in any case—just low-res digital paintings—leaving the characters as the only parts with sharp pixels. It’s still got quite the charm to it, like old-school cartoons’ cel-shaded heroes overlaid on lush, painterly backgrounds.

The story is more alike Technobabylon (you really need to know your point-and-click references to read this post) and deals with the future where artificial intelligence is not only in our devices, but in humans themselves. Well, it was, until we got scared shitless and pulled the plug. Some aren’t too happy about this and seek to continue fusing with the code towards singularity, others are going hardcore off the grid. Amids all this you are conducting a murder investigation in the shoes of Vera, the homicide detective on the case.

Looks like we have a good sci-fi mystery on the horizon and a cold nordic rural world to explore. You can follow Petter on Twitter to get new glimpses of art every now and then.

[hackerwrench]

[niche-gamer]

Niche Spotlight - Whispers of a Machine https://nichegamer.com/2019/04/24/niche-spotlight-whispers-of-a-machine/

[emritcheson]

Whispers of a Machine: The Thoughtful Post-Apocalyptic Mystery

(Spoiler free!)

I am a big fan of Kathy Rain, the debut adventure from Clifftop Games released in 2016.  So when I learned the developer was working on a new project, I was very excited...albeit, less excited when I discovered that project was not a Kathy Rain sequel.  That project actually turned out to be Whispers of a Machine, co-developed with Faravid Interactive (which I know nothing about), and released just three days ago on April 17, 2019.  But I was already a fan of Clifftop’s work, and they once again recruited my man Dave Gilbert to direct voice acting (and subsequently bring in a troupe of Wadjet Eye regulars), so how could I say no?

First and foremost, the plot.  You play as Special Agent Vera Englund who is called to the small town of Nordsund in order to solve a series of murders.  In this future, all CPUs have been outlawed and most of the population is terrified of artificial intelligence.  However, police like Vera from the big city are augmented with a special nanotech serum called Blue, which gives them the ability to scan for forensic substances, monitor people’s heart rate (aka built in lie detector), and more.  After a little investigation, Vera finds connections between the murders and a group of radicals trying to bring artificial intelligence back.

There is also an attribute diagram that keeps track of certain responses - either logical, aggressive, or empathetic - to dialogue trees.  Upon first reading of the tutorial of this mechanic, I thought it was supposed to alter how other characters acted around Vera based on what attribute was stronger at any given time.  However, looking at this screenshot above I found, I now realize that what changes are the augmentations you receive as time goes on.  In addition to multiple endings, this definitely provides some replayability as the puzzles felt tailor-made for the augmentations I was given.

These mechanics that you work with are definitely the most unique aspect of this whole game for me.  They can feel a bit overwhelming when you’re still in the tutorial scene and you’re trying to use everything at once in case you missed something, but it gets easier once you get into the rhythm of the game.

Visually speaking, the game is absolutely gorgeous.  Particularly the backgrounds.  That scene above where you see the edge of the town and the disc it’s suspended on?  With no railing?  My stomach plummeted the first time I saw it.

Speaking of, instead of a travel screen with a handful of locations to hop to, you have to manually navigate your way through the town itself to get anything done.  The maps are beautiful and have great use of perspective, but like the augmentations can feel a bit overwhelming at first sight.  My advice is to just take a few minutes to explore and get used to the layout before you do any serious detective work.

The game’s setting is also unapologetically Scandinavian and I love it, even moreso knowing that Clifftop Games is based in Sweden.  There’s a special kind of heart woven into things when it’s set in the homeland of the writer (I’m still very confused and sad that the GameHouse Original Stories aren’t set in The Netherlands).  And as far as I can tell, post-disaster stories aren’t often set in a specific, real world place, so this is refreshing.  Yes, Nordsund is a fictional town, but it’s very easy to find its geographic neighborhood on a map.

There are, unfortunately, two kinda significant problems that I have with this game.  One is that I couldn’t get as emotionally invested as I would have liked to, or as I have gotten with similar games.  The worldbuilding is cool and thought-provoking, but the characters left me a tad underwhelmed (except for Valter, he’s perfect and I love him).  

I really couldn’t find myself getting attached to Vera at all.  And with other games, I can usually let that go, but Vera just nags at me because the rest of this game is so cool.  The writing and dialogue really tries to make her a sympathetic character in the “heavier” scenes, but doesn’t really follow through in the smaller interactions.  

In fact, the dialogue has a tendency of going...a bit too heavy handed at times?  Like the characters don’t leave enough to subtext.  Vera especially gets a little Shakespearean-monologue at times.  Kathy Rain faced a bit of that as well, but was able to balance it out with Kathy’s off-color sense of humor.  The humorous moments in Whispers are very few and far between.  (Like, Valter pretty much exists as a hole of humor to escape to for a little while.)

This leads into my other issue which is a lack of direction, particularly toward the middle of the game when you’re well into tracking down leads about the murders.  Not in that they just let you roam free with no direction at all, but your direction often comes in a long-winded explanation from one of your superiors in which a lot of other information is being thrown at you, and it’s difficult to know what your priorities are.

But in the end, what do I know?  Not every game needs to rip your heart out of your chest, and I could just be a dumb adventure gamer who needs a bit more hand holding.  I definitely think that the augmentation mechanic and the worldbuilding are this game’s biggest strengths, and I would happily recommend it based on them.

If I had to compare Whispers of a Machine to anything, tonally speaking, imagine if Technobabylon and Primordia had a love child.  The augmented cops with cool forensic tech mixed with the soft-spoken weirdness, longing, and religious overtones of a post-cataclysmic society.

This game took me about seven hours to complete, but I got stuck many times, so your playtime may vary.  Also, if you already own Kathy Rain, Whispers of a Machine comes at a 10% discount on Steam!