Whispering Willows

Whispering Willows is a scary, scary game in a beautiful, beautiful world.

It’s a 2D adventure game that’s light on puzzles and heavy on reading, but I think it strikes an effective balance overall.

What Whispering Willows lacks in complicated hands-on gameplay, it makes up for in story and atmosphere.

Whispering Willows is an engaging horror-themed graphic adventure starring a likeable hero and a haunted mansion. Unfortunately, the great presentation is undone by a predictable story and simple puzzles. Elena's journey may be full of ghouls and ghosts, but it fails to scare up much excitement.

One of the surprising weaknesses of Whispering Willows is the fact it is so story focused.

While Whispering Willows is an interesting experience it is a short one at three hours.

Like some of the ghosts in The Sixth Sense, Elena's spectral aides are in desperate need of closure.

Whispering Willows was an enjoyable time, and for those that like a decent story, side scrolling exploration, and the idea of talking to ghosts, I’d recommend it.

If Loot Interactive and the developers at Night Light took away the hand-holding with puzzle solving and given us a speedier way to get around, Whispering Willows would've fared a lot better. As it stands, however, it's still a decent title for fans of the genre, mainly due to its effective presentation and unique abilities. It's not recommended to everyone, but if you're up for a ghost story, dig in.

Whispering Willows is a tale to tell around a campfire, and a good tale. Short, but intense, and interesting mix of graphic adventure and exploration.

It just didn’t quite hit the necessary benchmarks for execution and the ultimate realization of the main concept.

With a ten dollar price tag for PlayStation Plus members, don’t expect to get a ton of mileage out of Whispering Willows. Unless you get stuck looking for a way to cut through some vines or get lost in a maze of hedges, the horror puzzle game shouldn’t take more than five hours to complete.

Whispering Willows has you guiding a story along more than actually playing a game.

Whispering Willows offers up some interesting gameplay ideas behind its tale of a young girl communicating with spirits as she desperately searches for her father. It’s unfortunate, then, that Night Light Interactive wasn’t able to flesh out most of them, leaving its side-scrolling adventure feeling unfinished for most of the way through.

Immersive audio and impressive art-style isn't quite enough to prevent the gameplay of this intriguing ghost story from being quite banal.

If you like puzzle or adventure games, Whispering Willows won’t have anything new to offer you. Its lack of critical thinking puzzles, basic mechanics, and inability get you invested in the story from the beginning make it a game hard to recommend.

Despite some good ideas and cool design choices, Whispering Willows can't deliver a wholly fulfilling experience.

I’d be remiss if I recommended Whispering Willows to anyone without letting them know that, though it tells a nice little story, it comes up mightily short as an entertaining game.

Whispering Willows completely loses its way with a final banal emphasis of the father-daughter bond. This ending, like the last act's predictable build-up, trades complicated national identity for neat sentimentality.

A good effort by an indie studio as the art style drew me in from the moment I first saw it, but it lacks any sort of depth as its puzzles aren't difficult to figure out and it's story, as horrific as it turns out to be, didn't really entice me.

Whispering Willows seems like an idea that would work better as a film or cartoon, rather than a videogame.