The Whispered World - 23 April

[Roderick]

Pfooo, I wouldn't know! Though I am the original Bad Brain Intern, I haven't really been involved with them since, like... 2006? Point being: I have no idea. I do know that I liked the original artwork better for the game, but for some reason the protagonist was changed from a cool imp being to a more human clown one.

It's still beyond all coolness that the game got made and was released, seeing how it was such a struggle. Props to them!

[syntheticgerbil]

Haha, well a search for the zip file that was hosted on the Bad Brain site doesn't seem to come up anywhere except old links to the same site. Too bad archive.org doesn't actually back up zip files as that would fix everything.

Did a lot of people at Bad Brains move to Daedelic or am I mistaken? Because otherwise I have no idea who worked on the original game outside of Marco Hullen who probably won't want to send me a zip file to his older version of the game.

I really would just like to have a copy of the demo for comparison sake and to see how much was changed or added on. So far I've just seen screenshots or faint gameplay footage.

[Roderick]

I have no idea who worked on The Whispered World, at the time it was only Marco. And I'd figure not a lot of people from BB 'moved' to Deadelic, since it was only ever Wolfgang who worked in the company, plus a genial fellow called Harry, and me the intern at the time

[syntheticgerbil]

Ah, I see well that's help enough though, thanks. So if I e-mail Marco Hullen and he says no, I'll know I've lost all chance of recovering the old demo for myself. I should probably finish the main game first though before I start bugging him.

On the bright side, I did find the first 2005 demo which is in German only with German voices right here:

http://www.demonews.de/Spiele/The-Whispered-World/Demos/

So maybe if anyone's interested in Sadwick's original look as well as some side characters and background differences, it's neat to see the evolution.

Doesn't help me much because I'm looking for the English one which I think is like this except no voices as well as it might have a few other screens... I am not absolutely clear on what it contained. I don't know why I didn't just download the demo in 2005 since I remember being interested in this game back then when it was called Whispered Word or "Wor[l]d," so I suppose it's my own fault.

[Roderick]

Just learn German, lazy bones!

[syntheticgerbil]

Haha, I'll get on that this instant!

I was actually considering entering dialogue into Google Translate while playing until I realized no subtitles exist in this demo.I probably would have given that up after a few minutes though, as I'm sure it would have ended up as a bunch of nonsense in English as is usual when I use Google Translate.

[syntheticgerbil]

Still not finished completely yet, but I should note a major problem I was having with this game. Apparently it was all being caused by SecuROM, which really sucks. I have installed games with SecuROM and Starforce before, and while I guess it's annoying that spyware or malware is being installed on my computer for copy protection reasons, I haven't been that bothered until now.

My computer specs are more than enough to nicely run this game. The load times (about five seconds) between screens is a little bit weird to me since it's all 2D images, but it could be the layered backgrounds, I don't know.

But either way, by the end of the second chapter, there was a longer cutscene playing where the voices ended way out of sync, which was incredibly bothersome. I tried replaying the cutscene from a different save after exiting the game and taking the time to close a bunch of Firefox windows and Photoshop among other things running, hoping the cutscene would not slow down so much compared to the audio, but still no dice.

I searched around the internet to see if anyone was having similar problems and on Daedelic's forums, it appears they confirm themselves that the problem is SecuROM running simultaneously on English releases of the game. Someone suggested getting a DVD crack for the game, which I guess Daedelic is not annoyed by, considering how upfront illegal that is and running the game. This person also reported the game ran about 20% faster.

So I gave in and found the crack on seedier websites so that a game I PURCHASED NEW would run correctly on my computer. So lo and behold, it works! The cutscene was completely in sync and running smoothly. The video did not stutter in any spots any more and I also noticed before the video was skipping frames.

I then went back and replayed the intro and also found it was skipping frames before. So while the cutscene team didn't make the best animation and the shading is blobby and the character design can get iffy, at least they put enough frames in there to make up for poor construction. SecuROM just tends to make the cutscenes painful apparently, or not play at all in some cases.

And just as the person on the Daedelic forum said, the game does run faster. Maybe 20% is a lot, but the walking and scrolling is noticeably smoother and less laggy as well as load times between screens halving.

I've never had to crack a game for performance reasons, but this is ridiculous. All of the English publishers of this game are doing the original company a disservice by adding on shitty spyware on your computer that hinders paying customers from enjoying the game as it's meant to be! That's just absolute garbage.

I would recommend anyone planning on playing this game to find the no DVD crack first so you can experience it as it's meant to be by the original designers. Sucks I got about halfway through the game until I realized what was going on. Argh.

[syntheticgerbil]

Alright so I finished this about a month ago. This game really could have used more polish in all areas except the art and animation. Even though, the animated cutscenes just looked like ass (They were farmed out to a different company). The frames were all jittery in those and there was a this awful shadow and highlight scheme on the cells.

The way the plot went was unexpected and I rather enjoyed that at least. I was kept guessing the whole game. The character development I was hoping for earlier sort of happened with Sadwick, but he was also kept as a downer and somewhat annoying even at the end of the game for jokes.

That said, most jokes in this game were not even near funny, so I'm not sure why so many dialogues and item combinations had to be drawn out for that purpose. It's different if the dialogue is snappy and witty, but every joke in Whispered World was drawn out and predictable. Maybe it all would have been handled nicely if they didn't make the grave mistake of picking such a terrible voice actor for the main character, but the best parts of this game were the more serious parts.

Also, I don't know if I've ever played an adventure this long or difficult in a long while. It starts out easy enough, but puzzles start to get brutal near the end, some reminding me of things in The Feeble Files. There were way too many illogical puzzles, mostly dealing with picking up animals and putting them in your inventory plus figuring out how to make Spot into new shapes was just sort of a crapshoot. Most of the game I was getting through because I was routinely using random unrelated things on other random unrelated things since so much dialogue was written for nearly every combination. Even then I'd still miss puzzles or useful items and get stuck.

Since many of the puzzles near the end of the game got increasingly illogical or dumb, I think the designers could have toned that down or just scrapped them altogether and the game would have flowed just fine. As it stands, most idiotic portions of the puzzles seem to have been added for the sole purpose to inflate difficulty rather than to add a clever element to the puzzle. Maybe Germans need this as they are all expert adventure players and they are not challenging enough at this point? Either way, extracting the Whispering Stone from Spot near the end was one of the most convoluted puzzles in the game. I can't believe they thought that was okay.

I really just wish the localization team had done a better job, since the music was nice. The voices just tended to be reused as if there were only four paid actors. Alongside that there were a lot of voice file errors throughout the game with the wrong characters voice being played or the original German still existing. Sometimes the dialogue did not match the subtitles at all. This actually interfered with a puzzle or two. Along with the flaws in the basic game, this kind of lack of polish made the game more frustrating than it should have been.

I sort of liked and disliked this game. What was achieved here as someone's original pet project is great. It's also intensely beautiful with a story that is good but could have been told better (and had more tension). I just sort of still have mixed feelings a month after finishing so I really still don't know what to think overall. Glad I played it though.