Whispers of a Machine

You know a game is Good™ when you finish it and get overwhelmed with feelings of anger, sadness, emptiness and frustration that there is no more game to play. But than you remember that you can play it again and make different choices and all is well in the world. 5/5 Blue Vials.

Swedish science-fiction adventure in the cozy mode, as you send Inspector Vera snoopin' round the limited confines of a mushroom-topped tower town for one eventful week. It's the post-collapse and people are crawling around the carcass of the great silicon beast like latch key lice; yes, every scrap of technology driven by AI or CPU in the robotic glory days was slapped violently from humanity's hand nearly a century ago -- now the only folk with high tech are the tip-top ruling class, who juice their enforcers and detectives with nanomachine-rich goop called Blue.
Though there are maybe several puzzles of the classic adventure type, much of the work involves realistic logic, or perhaps the judicious application of your superpowers while following logical lines: going around Nordsund and talking the hardscrabble folk into spilling their beans, or sneaking into the right places to grab evidence are the primary things -- exactly what Phillip Marlowe or Paul Pine do much of the time (but instead of applying SF superpowers, those classic detectives are always doing things like taking lead saps without permanent brain damage and shooting guns out of the hands of dangerous dames). There are three styles of approach you can use for your Vera: A-hole force, womanly empathy, and cold calculation.
There is a personality pyramid in your inventory bar with Empathy, Force, and Logic at its points and a white dot showing your orientation on it, and how you solve puzzles and talk to people in the first half determines most of how you will have to play the second half -- how you'll talk to people later on, and impressively . . . the very powers your reactive AI goop gives to Vera! It's a pretty nice set-up and it makes sense too -- because if you've been playing the game all along as a jerk who uses her nanojuice to rip doors off their hinges (instead of puzzling or nicely wheedling them open), you shouldn't just up and be able to talk like a diffident little flower with a spark of investigatory determination flickering somewhere in her petals, or be able to cast a gentle techno-spell on people that makes them temporarily forget their troubles without springing a red leak from the nose.
I dig detective tales of the classic kind and I certainly enjoy science-fiction. This overcast, slowburn adventure took me in with its world building-in-a-box and do-it-yourself approach to its heroine. It's from the maker of the estimable Kathy Rain and feels Wadjet Eye as all get-out, if that has as much cachet with you as it does with me.
(Only thing that bugs me about the game is that you don't get to see what the ultimate results of your final choice are! I know there are hard limits in a production as small as this which already shows remarkable ambition, but I think an extra screen or two with minimal animation would have got the point across.)

Whispers of a Machine is a post-apocalyptic point and click adventure game with a well-crafted story. The puzzles are logical and not too hard. The background music is soothing. The game also has some unique mechanics that help with the investigation and they are very well-designed. I think fans of classic point and click adventure games will enjoy this game.
8/10

A serviceable 2D point and click detective game with well written dialog and solid world building. The cyber abilities are a nice touch.

I would give this game a horizontal thumb, it basically pales compared to the Wadjet Eyes games, because most of its good sides have their drawbacks;
- Pixel art isn't too "pixelated" so the scenes can be pretty detailed
BUT
The environment is never original or especially compelling, it's a very bland future.
- interesting detective story
BUT
in the end I never got truly invested and committed with the overall story and characters
- great idea to have different powers available at all times
BUT
You barely get to use them except on very special occasions which are dictated by the main quest.
- Game is Short
BUT
it still manages to feel incomplete, with many locations that you never get to explore
It never felt mysterious enough, I never felt a connection towards the characters, but you can't deny there is some lore behind it all, and I liked progressing through the story so....

Simple sci-fi story, kinda boring, but its not that bad, it is a disappointing one for sure. Same devs of Kathy Rain, reason you might have bought it, and you're probably finish wondering what happened here?
The World of Whispers of a a Machine is bland. That's it.
Personalities in the game will unlock augmentations who will help with puzzles, but this is just a gimmick to lock the endings and achievements, to force you to play again and again, since the autosave feature, do the youtube route if you dont care about achievements.
The game thrown a big decision in the end, but with the simple and lack of background and develepment of the story, its very hard to care about.

This is a fine and competent game for any adventure game fan especially old school ones. Everything here is serviceable so I would wait for a sale. A few things brings the enjoyment down for me:
-lack of mouth animations and animations in general but this is more of a minor annoyance
-didn't like the parts of the husband and the antagonist but not a deal breaker
-the fact that you can't really tell which are the empathic/assertive/aggresive responses...they should be color coded like in Mass Effect and it doesn't help that some actions also change your alignment unexpectedly sometimes even 3 times in a row
-This is all exacerbated by the fact that the game autosaves constantly so there's no going back, since there's no manual save so that means yes, you have to play the game 3 times to get all the cheevos and this sucks thanks to the last point