When
our story opens, little Sadwick, the reluctant clown in his family’s
traveling circus, is having a terrible nightmare in which he meets
a giant white blob with an even bigger mouth. What does it mean? What
is the blob trying to tell him? Brave but somewhat cranky Sadwick
scampers out of bed and sets out on a long, adventurous journey that
will give him the answers. He begins in his own autumnal forest world,
where he learns, to his horror, that his peculiar, inescapable destiny
is to be the destroyer of his world. Unable to accept that, he pushes
on, looking for more satisfactory answers, to two further, even stranger
worlds before finally ending up at the king’s castle in the
sky. However, before you can join Sadwick on his quest, you may have
an obstacle or two of your own to overcome, game-configuration-wise.

For
several years now I have glanced at the minimum recommended specs
of adventure games and shrugged. I’ve gotten most games up and
running despite my system being far below the recommendation. TWW,
however, is not so accommodating. I first installed it on a 64-bit
laptop that met the CPU requirement but fell far short of the graphics
card number. When I turned off the voices and the music I got the
game to run, but the cut scenes often crashed. I nursed the game all
the way to the fourth act when it finally refused to budge another
inch. I then luckily was able to move my saved games to a desktop
computer that had the required 256 megs of graphics memory and 90
percent of the CPU requirement. The game ran, but the voices, especially
in the cut scenes, still stuttered. I usually do get some sense of
satisfaction when I finish any full-length adventure, but this time
the exultation came mostly from outsmarting the game engine.

When
last we left little Sadwick (what kind of name is that, anyway? sounds
like a town in Connecticut), he was trying desperately not to fulfill
his destiny. Because no matter how much he moans and gripes about
his sad little lot in life, no matter how many annoying characters
he meets and difficulties he faces, the one thing he’s sure
about is that he doesn’t ever want to watch his story-book world
come to an end. Largely, this is due to his affection for his magical
pet caterpillar, Spot. Spot is far more than a boon companion, however.
He is much of the game play in TWW. Spot has an amazing
shape-changing ability and throughout the game he (or she?) will acquire
a number of “states” which will conveniently allow you,
and Sadwick, to get out of many a thorny jam.

One
of the best things about TWW, in fact, is the game
play and the puzzles. The game has the feel of a throwback to the
earlier, heartier days of puzzling, when not every single step was
spelled out for you. Not that TWW is especially difficult.
Most of its 20 to 30 hours of game play is pretty standard adventure
combining and picking-up and conversing, though there are several
clever, somewhat tricky puzzles scattered throughout. Any game that
does not come with a help system these days automatically gets a gold
star in my book. I am so goldarn sick of wrestling with the goldarn
help system instead of the game! TWW does have the
now almost standard press-spacebar-to-show-hotspots feature. On the
other hand, TWW does cut itself a shortcut by throwing
in not only a slider puzzle, but the old eight queens chess problem.
Wow, Sadwick really is wet behind the ears if he’s never encountered
either of these before.

TWW
is really a rather curious hodgepodge of things. While the basic story
has a children’s fairytale feel, the basic game play (as well
as the rich watercolorish graphics) is more like an old King’s
Quest or Monkey
Island title. Much of its “forest world” cosmology
sounds like reheated Tolkien,
too. In particular the Whispering Stone that Sadwick finds himself
escorting to the king’s castle and the Nazgul wannabe badguys who’re
trying to intercept him.

I
suspect the writers and game designers never could make up their minds
who they were making this game for. One minute Sadwick and the game
are all bunny rabbits and lemon drops sweet and innocent and the next
Sadwick is coming out with some stray existential line from a Sartre
play. Actually, TWW reminded me most of three old
favorite games of mine: Discworld, Fable
and Torin’s Passage. Discworld is the hilarious Terry Pratchett
romp, Fable is a lesser known but good medieval fantasy and Torin’s
Passage is the usually overlooked game in Al Lowe’s toy chest,
the sweet one he made while at Sierra when everyone was waiting for
the next, raunchier Leisure Suit Larry episode. Like TWW,
all three of these games take place in brightly cartooned medieval-ish
fantasy worlds. Torin’s Passage, however, also shares with TWW
the sweetness and the cute little Swiss Army knife sidekick.

Where
TWW does not shine is in its voice characterizations.
Sadwick himself being culprit number one. I didn’t at first
realize this because I had the voices turned off so that the game
would run. But what a shock when I finally got to hear Sadwick and
the others speak! Some of the voices are like those wan impressions
that guys making YouTube Star Trek parodies record. I did check the
credits and it looks like they hired professional actors, but these
voices sound decidedly amateurish. Perhaps, though, they were saving
money for the English version. Maybe if you sprechen sie deutsch the
voices are fab. The music, which I also had turned off until act IV,
is very nice late-Romantic stuff. The game controls are once again
borrowed from late LucasArts adventures, that is to say the “action
coin” begun with, I believe,
Curse of Monkey Island. The cut scenes themselves
are fairly well done, though a little on the gee-gosh side. Again,
it’s like two sets of people with drastically different story
interests were making different parts of the game.

The ending, on the other
hand, manages to be both genuinely poignant and surprising. The
Whispered World is about half a terrific game and half
a mess. But since the most important parts, the puzzling, graphics
and exploring, are all well done I’m going to ignore the stuff
I cared less for and award the game an overall grade of A minus.

System Requirements:

PC (Retail)

• MS Windows XP (min. SP2) or MS Windows Vista
• 2 GHz CPU
• 1 GB RAM
• 256 MB RAM GPU
• DirectX® Version 9.0c
• DVD-Drive
• Keyboard, Mouse

PC (The Adventure Shop
– Digital Download)

• OS: 2K/XP/Vista
• CPU: Pentium IV
• Memory: 512
• Video memory: 256
• HD: 2.5
• Audio: 16 bit stereo

PC (Steam – Digital
Download)

• OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000
• Processor: 2.0 GHz processor
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• 256 MB RAM GPU
• Graphics: 256 MB graphics card, DirectX 9.0 compatible
• DirectX®: DirectX 9.0
• Hard Drive: 3 GB free hard disc space

PC (D2D)

• Operating system: Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000
• Processor: 2.0 GHz processor
• Memory: 1 GM RAM
• Hard disk space: 3 GB free hard disc space
• Video: 256 MB graphics card DirectX 9.0 compatible