Whispers of a Machine

Still at the very beginning of the game, and I already love where the story is heading.

Nice tightly written detective game with an interesting lead character, the nice ability to play in different ways (for both replayability and a more personalized experience). A couple quite tricky puzzles that make sense once you figure them out. Quite an enjoyable game that isn't that long at all (half my time is having it open in the background doing something else), but has some surprising choices and decisions and great writing and arc for the character in the path I chose. Highly reccomend for fans of detective games.

Very good. Small and fun game.

playing the game fully was great fun
game looks great and not spoiling the plot theres enough to work out with very little landholding
just look for info talk to NPC etc
Vera can be played as empathetic, analytical, or assertive bossy style which is cool
dialogue determines this ...
the world looks great and the point and click mechanics work really well
I decided to play this on the steam deck and worked very well
first time too
so for a agent of the Central Bureau working in a future world your busy working out stuff
and your choices matter I can highly recommend this game to point and click fans like myself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wBZeS76o9U

It's a superb point-and-click adventure title. It's lamentably rare in games like these to find a game that's crafted so that you can just naturally follow where clues and evidence lead you and solve puzzles organically, instead of trying to work out the abstruse and often-cutesy reasoning of the dev. The highest praise I can offer Whispers is that I almost never had to resort to pixel-hunting and random combine-this-with-that exercises, and on the rare occasions I did the frustration was short-lived. The game flowed smoothly, obstacles were neither too easy nor game-breakingly difficult: overall it was a solid seven or so hours of play.

I like the setting and the basic concept here. I like the characters and the ideas -- classically cyberpunk -- I was impressed by the voice acting, and I enjoyed piecing together the mystery and all its twists and turns. The augments are a really nice idea: part of what saves the gameplay so often from the old point-and-clickisms is the options your augment gives you to get around problems in creative ways. The story was not mind-blowing, I'll grant you, but it was very satisfying, and the setting is tantalizing. I would love to see more of it someday, if this game ever gets a follow-up.

Loved it. Very good story and pacing. I was upset when work/adulting cut into my gametime because I really didn't want to put it down. Applause. Now please make more.

I've been getting back into point-and-click adventure games in a big way lately and this one stands out. The music and the art design just really nail this mood that's melancholy without being depressing. The puzzles made sense (eventually) and I rarely felt stuck for more than a few minutes. The story isn't groundbreaking but it absolutely suits the overall vibe of the game, which is a greater accomplishment in my opinion. Every piece just works well as part of the whole. Definitely worth checking out, even at full price.

Great adventure game, good writing. My one issue is the norse gods aspect that seems both to be central to the society while also completely ignored. I feel like there was an intention to do more with it, but it was axed and now it just doesn't serve much of a purpose. Maybe it can be delved into more in a sequel.

Great point and click adventure but I wish they had delved deeper into AI and the post AI world they live in. Pleasantly surprised with the voice acting in this game. The pixel art is beautiful.

A very excelente adventure game. The story is intriguing and the puzzles are amazing. Can´t recommend it enought,

Nice cyberpunk story

I really enjoyed the voice over work and the overall atmosphere set in the game. I'm not particularly familiar with Northern European folklore but I know enough to understand where it comes from. I enjoyed the tightness of the world it created along with the exposure and explanation of the universe it's set in without being too in your face. I liked the rural aspect of it as well that adds to what I just mentioned. I liked the characters and voice acting. I did feel as if certain things were not totally polished in terms of dubbing, since I guess it was created in some European language that's not English. I enjoyed the moral dilemmas and how the choices affected the course of certain actions. The puzzles were quite entertaining and challenging. I found myself stuck at least a few times even thought some answers were much simpler than what I expected. The NPCs were quite interesting and it was nice to be able to have them all offer information about each other. I enjoyed the retro point and click adventure look, polished just enough, along with the steampunk feeling of the technology.

There's a ton to like and that I did like here. It presents itself as a more modern take on the genre with associated QoL features and design sensibilities, but it's all skin deep. Underneath it still does all the same old BS the golden age games did lol. The atmosphere is moody and cool, voice acting is largely solid and the script is good. It has a really strong start gameflow-wise, but then the "exploration" and "puzzles" start and that "old school point and click" stuff rears its ugly head and before you know it you're just clicking on anything and using anything on anything so ANYTHING will happen at all and you'll forget what the heck the point of it even was when you started. But hey, some people like that kinda thing so power to 'em I guess.

Very nice and interesting! A bit short, but still good

This game is my favourite adventure! I liked the story a lot, and the main character. Liked the voice actors. I usually get bored quickly and skip dialogs, but here the game made me feel curious and care about the characters throughout the whole game. The gameplay was my favourite part, all the extra skills made exploration and pointing and clicking really fun. I felt like the game encouraged me to think and pay attention. It was very rewarding.

Excellent detective story. World is well built out, without being overwhelming. Characters are easy to care about. A lot of them are even realistically boring, while some of them are quirky and strange, and that balance actually makes it all work well. The history of the world is detailed just enough to make everything that you're doing in the present feel meaningful.

The only things that I will say are annoying about it are the fact that it often won't let you act until your character has a piece of information that you'd be able to guess, for instance leaving sections of the city that you probably deduced were important locked off until you have "reason" for going there. This makes things more manageable in some ways, but also more frustrating, especially when it comes down to figuring out where secret passages and such are likely to be, and you know that they exist. That's the only major issue with the puzzle design though, with a more minor issue being some of the puzzles requiring some pretty obtuse metaphorical interpretations of text based clues, but that's not a very big deal.

excellent game!

Great story and game! Different paths and multiple endings.

PS: Door puzzle really sucks :-)

I recommend this game to fans of Point & Click adventures. It has a good and interesting plot, the music is very well created for each of the scenarios, and I find very ingenious the different ways of solving similar situations depending on the different paths that are offered.

I really enjoyed this game. Mechanics differs a lot than the other point and click adventure games that I've played before. Whispers of a Machine has this quiet, moody atmosphere that pulled me in right away, and the choices you make as protagonist actually feel meaningful. I just really liked how the world looked. The art style fits perfectly with the tone of the game. It's a cool Nordic sci-fi mystery game with some emotional weight.

Love the cyberpunk setting. Great story that had me hooked in no time! Well worth your time for any point & click adventure game fan.

I played through the game in a single sesh and really enjoyed it! The story marries Scandinavian detectives with post-AI atmosphere, and was overall enjoyable to play. I found the settings and characters to be extremely well-designed. It's a point-and-click but there is not much of walking back and forth, so it was not boring. Vera's abilities, which allow for different ways to play through, as they depend on what choices you are making, were also pretty fun. I did not see the plot twists coming, too :)

Great story and oh boy that atmosphere, highly recommended

This game has probably one of the smoothest set of controls ever! I really enjoyed it and the music is beautiful too

This game was made for me. I love mysteries with cool worlds. And this world is really cool. I love the augmentations that allow you to play with AI. I think it is a really fun game

This game is symbolism laden and excellent for a source of high brow meta analysis.

Scandinavian post-cyberpunk is fascinating.

Excellent game

Excellent game

A short point-&-click adventure with an original post-apocalyptic setting, that breaks the immersion everywhere you click and fills the rest with overused clichés.

Whispers of a Machine has something going for it - the setting is a breath of fresh air, the artwork is decent, and it tries to explore some interesting questions regarding AI and identity.
But that's about it. As a game, it fails in everything else.

The dialogs are very robotic and self-serving, there isn't any personality coming through the text. Feels like the they were written by a 10 year old. The voiceovers are not helping here, the actors are simply not selling it, but the material they have to work with is probably the root cause. The characters are all just very shallow, one dimensional personas, sometimes caricatures of themselves.

Everything is breaking the immersion. The game takes place in a "city", but there's barely anyone around, there's only one doctor, one policeman, one shopkeeper... One token guy for everything. Was there a plague or something? The one doctor here is also a jack of all trades - performing autopsies in the morning, treating patients in the afternoon, and telling me conclusions regarding the murders that he is in no position to give (MO, number of perpetrators...), instead of letting me decide. "Look at me, I'm the detective now."
The environment is also hard to believe. Everything is just so conveniently placed together, i.e. your room is directly in the police building, and you're giving daily reports to someone on a balcony of all places, because it blatantly serves the storyline. Oh, and that someone isn't the chief of police - he is pretty much padding in this game. Instead, you are briefing a councilwoman. And nobody even stops to think about how weird this is.

Weird is the word of the environment here. Everything is futuristic, yet the address records of citizens are kept in a drawer and the city is using American style wooden electrical poles like its 1958. How am I supposed to immerse myself in this world where every background object clashes with the theme?
To make matters worse, add in some clichés, like trauma from a dead lover that haunts your dreams that adds nothing to the story and you'll be rolling your eyes constantly.

Gameplay-wise it's also sad. WoaM has the usual QoL feature to highlight all interactive objects on the screen. But then immediately kills any time you save by introducing an environment scanner feature, where you have to drag a small window over every the entirety of every location only to check if there is anything hidden there... This completely defeats the point of the object highlighting and stops the game flow every time you enter a new location. It just replaces one boring pixel hunt with another. Ridiculous.

Great story and gameplay. I loved the multiple route options and the investigation mechanics. Really immersive detective feel for an adventure game. The puzzles were really good as well. I only got stumped a couple times, but the puzzles are challenging without being too obtuse. And if you pay attention the clues are there. Interesting sci-fi tale. Definitely check it out if you’re a point and click fan!

Another high quality adventure game studio point and clicker - deals with some powerful themes, and multiple ways to play depending on your choices. Highly recommended!

Definitely in the top echelon of relatively point and click adventure games.

Whoa. storyline was a gut punch, even if I occasionally got stuck on where to go next

Detective point&click game, set in rather unique vision of post-apocalyptic world.
✅

• Great story with some surprising twists.
  
  
• Unique post-apo scenario combined with great worldbuilding. Game provides enough information to easily get the background of events and find out what happened.
  
  
• Game adapts to how you play it.
  
  
• 3 different paths of development that can be mixed in-between.
  
  
• Great art-style. Modernized retro, similar to the point&click games from early 90’s.
  
  
• Puzzles are logical; you always have an access to proper tools to beat them.
  
  
• 3 vastly different endings.
  
  
• Achievements are plot-related and not very obvious (basically a reward for “licking” every wall).
  

• Backtracking. Because of the way it is animated, it gets tiring towards the end of the game.
  
  
• Augments can only be used in selected locations. Although I understand reason for such decision, it still leaves some disappointment.
  
  
[*] Not enough puzzles.

So I read a common warning among most steam reviews that this was a short game. I had Whispers of a Machine under my radar for a some time now, unfortunately I have to admit I was a bit hesitant to get it because of those reviews. The theme and its tone it was going for really intrigued me and because of that. I really wanted to sink into a long and gripping story.

Well, I'm glad I got to play the game anyway. I took my sweet ol' time to complete my first playthrough (with only checking a guide once) and I assure you, it's more than worth it.
With the length of the story aside, it was a very well rounded story with no loose ends, it answered all of the questions it asked throughout the playthrough; the voice acting is on point!; none of the lines are "cringe" (other than Valter/Nisse,... but I gotta keep in mind their role as "comic-relief); the augmentations (in-game mechanics I was unaware of prior to playing the game, which made for great surprises) are all pretty rad, though I wished some could've been explored more(?); the pixel-art and the backgrounds both do their job well but it's the characters' portraits and how their voices matched them so well (except the nurse) that stole the show for me.

Honestly, I'm really glad I finally played this game and off to another playthrough!

10/10 interesting and twisty plot. I was surprised with how the story went and the gameplay/puzzle solving is creative.

A neat point and click game with some added cyberpunk features and a smattering of branching paths/alternative solutions. Not as good as Beneath a Steel Sky but worth a play if you like adventure games for sure.

Intelligently written, full of atmosphere, philosophical and engaging, and you can play it with different 'personality' styles too! Gem of a game that should keep you occupied between 5 to 10 hours (close to 7 in my case).

Absolutely loved it!

fun short game

At £3, this game was an absolute steal! A fun game with great voice acting, puzzles that actually make sense and a really engaging story line.

This is such a good, old school point and click game! The story and mystery are both really good, followed by and excellent voice acting. My only criticism is in regards to art work, which is uneven - some backgrounds are simply lacking. Other than that I appreciate ideas creators had, augmentations are a really cool mechanic in such game.
Overall, a huge RECOMMEND!

This is a short, linear, point-and-click game with a taste of a "choices matter" ending. The story is subpar, in my opinion, due to how short the game is but endings you get here depends on your personality - how you select dialogues when prompted. The problem with that is you have to figure out which responses correspond to which personality. Colored backgrounds would have been nice. I wished they expanded more on this. The endings are cliffhangers so there's room for a potential sequel, I guess?

There isn't much of replayability apart from changes in dialogue and a few interactions - the story is the same. Voice acting is good and varied but nothing worth mentioning. Just like most games, this has an autosave feature but no visual indicator when it would happen. It randomly autosaves after making any small progress within the story. Could really use some visual cues.

I would recommend this for the achievement hunters and for those who doesn't want to play a game with more than 4 hours of story. I don't recommend this for anyone playing with large resolutions because it doesn't support 1080p in full screen (it's the size of opened windows whenever you install an application to your computer), and for me it's such a problem since I am distracted with the desktop instead of being focused in the game.

I'm pretty new to point & click games, but Whispers of a Machine is so far my favorite of the genre. The story sucked me in, the puzzles were the perfect level of challenging and some of the new mechanics they introduced worked really well. I'm super glad I gave the genre a go and I'm ecstatic to see that there are still devs breathing new life into an old genre. Playing this game just feels cozy.

I recommend it somewhat to players who are a fan of the point-and-click adventure game. This is a very well-written story, with twist and turns up along every corner to keep you hooked onto its plot. I love interacting with the characters and the environment, the devs put attention to the smallest details including updating your notebook clues after an important event has happened. It is also one of the few games I played that lets the endings change based on player's choices throughout the process, even the smallest change brings about special achievements that I find to be very detail-oriented.
The only thing i don't really like is that you have to replay alot to get the different endings, I know it is necessary due to the choice-based story, but it can get tedious for someone who prefers quicker solutions. I also think the plot could be elaborated more in terms of how the pre-Collapse world had been affected, but given the large mapping of choices, the story plot must have been kept short and simple. But again, it is still a great story to experience despite its small flaws. Have a try and experience its interesting mechanisms.

Really loved the consequences of actions and the concept of augmentations - it's really such an enhancement of the classic point-and-click adventure concept! Based on the set of augmentations you've unlocked you can solve some puzzles via different ways: The game has a lot of replayability potential as you want to explore all the different endings.

On the other side I really HATED the auto-save concept: There is no way to save the game and re-load to try out something different. If you do something wrong and want to change that you have to restart the whole game and start from the beginning! That's really fucked up!!!

In the end I tend to recommend this game conditionally if you are ok to do several playthroughs (if you want all achievements you need to do 3 playthroughs at minimum!) - so best to get it on discount.

This is a good game, although not quite great. I did enjoy my first time and will most likely play through it again to get the other endings.
The story/mystery is engaging, and the dialogue and VA is good. The world-building, art style and atmosphere are also great.
Sadly the gameplay drags the experience down somewhat. The augmentations were a very cool idea that I was excited to use, but sadly they're only used a handful of times - I wish they were implemented more!
The puzzles were a tad frustrating - often felt either too easy or too convoluted/obscure. There were a few too many fetch quests, often in sequence (go from one part of town to another, talk to someone to get some info, now go straight back to where you were before).
Despite these mild frustrations, it's still an overall enjoyable and memorable experience that I would recommend. I've only added this much criticism because I thought it was good, but could have been excellent.

"Postapocaliptic" world that gets rid of most of the (advanced) technology and has plenty of nordic references where you are sent to solve a murder case that gets more and more weird, complicated and gruesome on every step? Sign me in

Well written, full of info both on the case and the world itself, plenty of interactions with environment to further get to know this world. Everything is voice overed and even if they all sound like average nord (at times their voices have less emotions than google translate), it's great that you don't need to read everything yourself.

Puzzles are kinda scarce and they are either very simple or will require you to focus like you're trying to get a phd, which is kinda weird mix, but not the worst for sure. Choices while impactful, actually only really impact the augments we unlock and those unlock the few ways we can complete some parts of the game, which isn't a bad thing either, just wish there were more dialogues and scenes for all the paths, rather than 1-2 lines and looping back to the base dialogue. But I get why they wouldn't want to branch out that much and all the ways you can do augment puzzles make the game fresh enough even after few playthroughs.

Graphics and style are top notch, sound is there, voice acting is more like bunch of narrators who reherse the script and the setting is great, and I hope there will be way more games set in it.

Solid 9/10 as it could've been longer, both when it comes to actions we do each day. and few more days for the story to unfold would also feel nice

Big recommend. It's a nice and simple point and click adventure game. It does not stump you that often, and it's not difficult to know what can be clicked. I can not recommend this game enough.

The characters and story are good too.