Whispers of a Machine (2019)

Extremely cool sci fi murder mystery about grief and AI cults. Puzzles are extremely well balanced and most have different solutions depending on whether you've been picking the smart dialogue, the nice dialogue, or the cop dialogue.

Wish the game were a little longer, some heavy stuff gets brought up that then has to be resolved a little prematurely. And I wish the world had more people in it and things to click on that weren't directly plot relevant, the world felt a little empty.

Other than that though, fantastic game with good puzzles and great character writing. Almost a masterpiece. And it's not that long or that expensive, so give it a look.

I finished Kathy Rain last week so decided to jump straight into this with it being the follow up from Joel Staaf Hästö. This was a much more polished point and click adventure. Again the game’s protagonist is a female character however this time around she’s a cybernetically augmented detective - as you can guess it’s no longer 1995 but the far future in the aftermath of some kind of event when Artificial Intelligence has gone awry. You play as the detective "Vera" who is sent off to a small town after a second dead body turns up and she is thrown straight into a sci-fi noir mystery.

The Good..

• Really good voice cast – a lot more consistent than Kathy Rain
• Excellent cybernetic augmentation system - there are multiple types of powers you can develop all depending on the dialogue choices you opt for - this creates multiple ways of tackling a puzzle or situation depending on what powers you have during that playthrough
• Multiple endings
• I love this cyberpunk / sci-fi noir setting. Art & music help create atmopshere.

The Not So Good..

• One or two puzzles that I felt are unclear; in Kathy Rain there was a puzzle in which you had to grab a thermometer in one location and use it to progress in another which I didn’t feel was hinted as being a thing to do. This time around there was a hidden room in a location I didn’t even know was there to find, the walkthrough I looked up mentioned as much too. As with any adventures puzzle and solutions can depend on the person, feel free to blame me playing these late at night before dozing off in bed missing the signposting but I do think I would have been stuck had this game been released back in the old pre-internet (remember the goat in Broken Sword?! I lost days stuck in Ireland)
• I couldn’t get this to even boot on the latest version of Android – I had to use an older device that had a prior Android OS to get it to run

Pretty good story (even if some twists were predictable) with some good characters but also a couple of not so good characters. The voice acting also varied in quality, fortunately the voice actor for the main character is great!

Nice art style, as a fellow Swede I liked the little nods to Sweden in some details.

I like how they tried to implement some new gameplay elements to the point and click genre but I feel they didn’t really live up to their potential.

Overall a good game, well worth playing if you have 5 hours to spare.