Whispers of a Machine

BottomLine at the Top: As someone who has long held a fascination with futurism and the singularity this game was a must buy right away for me. Overall an excellent sci-fi P&C game with cool cyberpunk detective elements. Highly recommended!
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Pros
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-Again, I am a big fan of any sort of media that deals with the theme of the singularity and gets that concept into the public consciousness (especially cool to see it starting to crop up more and more in gaming!)
-Starts right up. No setup headaches/nonsense. Overall very stable game as well with no major bugs or crashing.
-Great overall design. Excellent art and animations. Creative sci-fi story.
-Vera is a cool character. Not sure if there will be any kind of sequel but I'd def love to see more of her and the world the developer has created here.
-Incorporates an interesting personality mechanic. Continues a trend I've been seeing in more modern P&C games to introduce replayability thru different moral choices (also recently seen in Unavowed, another great recent P&C game!)
-Good quality of life features (spacebar interactable activity/item highlight function, double click fast travel to next room/area)
-The cyberpunk detective mechanics were pretty cool what with the bioscanner/heart rate detector/notebook. Reminded me a lot of Heavy Rain.
-Decent voice acting (including a couple of your favs from the Wadjet Eye Games team!)
-Atmospheric Music. Melancholic Norse themes with a dash of cyberpunk.
-Relatively good game flow. At times it does border on too simplistic but overall gameplay and story keeps you hooked.
-Museum location reminds me a lot of Star Trek: Judgement Rites Ch.6: Museum Piece (a real classic!)
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Meh.
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-Sprite walking routines and notebook updates take a second or two longer than I'd like.
-The formality of how characters talk doesn't always fit the tone of the game. For instance, the Doctor is supposed to be this guy with a dark sense of humor, but his writing feels "stiff" at times. Also, the main character Vera vacillates between empathy and logical stoicism. The dialogue choices that are up to the player can’t sometimes clash with the tone of the default non-selectable dialogue.
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Cons
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-No manual save slots. The game has three autosave slots for different individual games, but it only saves to one slot per new game. This was an unusual choice. As for why the developers chose this, I can only assume it has something to do with replayability. If it was given save slots it would have been much easier to go thru the different moral path options versus having to essentially restarting a new game every time you want to try a new path. I absolutely appreciate the time and energy it takes to create a game with multiple action paths and endings, I typically am not big on replaying an entire game just to see all possible outcomes. Having a save feature to eliminate some of the backtracking is nice because that’s typically the only way ill see different outcomes. I could go on and on about this subject (check us out over at the Coalition of Point & Clickers for more commentary on modern P&C's and multipaths versus extended story!) but I’ll just say as someone who doesn’t have the time to spend replaying games a save feature would have been much appreciated!
Final Thoughts: Sometimes when you see a preview of a tv show/movie/game/book you know right away it’ll be something you enjoy. This game was very much like that for me and I was not disappointed! In the past I would have said that $15 for my 6 hours of game play would feel a little pricey. However, I have come to realize that some games, if they really speak to your interests, are well worth the price and honestly $15 is not going to break anyone’s bank. Adding the replayabilty, if your so inclined, will only increase the $ per hour ratio closer to 1:1. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, cyberpunk, and P&C games you can buy this game full price knowing you'll have a great time without being disappointed and be supporting a great developer as well. Highly recommended!!!

I was raised on quest-style adventure games, from typed commands to point and click, and this is one of those fantastic retro experiences that feels like what might have come next, rather than being content to almost imitate something that was great in its day. The fully voiced acting is a little stiff, but that's par for the genre. I like the innovative special abilities and personality valence, and storywise it blends more of my favourite types of TV shows (melancholy nordic cop drama, mundane cyberpunk dystopia, science emotions) than I can shake a stick at.
Plus the graphics feel true to the medium. It's not just pixels for pixels' sake, the aesthetic is thorough and it feels just right. The music is uncommonly good, I do sort of wonder how it would sound on an old AdLib or SoundBlaster.

Overall, this game was fun and very well-done for a modern point-and-click game in a "retro" style.
It had some issues: It really railroads you; A few puzzles required you to do things so counter-intuitive that I had to look up the solutions in walkthroughs, and when I did, I was convinced that had I not looked them up I would never have figured them out on my own; the save system implements "You need to live with your choices!" to a ridiculous degree.
I think the game's biggest failure is that last one. There are some choices right at the end of the game where it would have been cool to go back and see how it would have affected the ending to make different ones, but the game prevents it by immediately saving after you make the choice so you can't try another option. What's the benefit to the player of being forced to play through the WHOLE game just to flip the bit on the very last choice? That's just a jerk move on the developers' part. In fact, it would have been totally reasonable to allow the player to save before every major choice and return to them to explore all the branches, and I don't think it would have detracted from the game at all. The only logic for the choice they made is that it inflates the gameplay time slightly for people who do replay, which might be the reason, since the game only has about 8-9 hours of gameplay in it, and it's a bit spendy for that.
All of that said, I did enjoy it and and the story, and the voiceovers were exceptionally well done. If you're a big fan of classic point-and-click adventures, I'd say that you should definitely play it. If you're not, I wouldn't recommend this as your first, though.

Very, very, VERY well made! Bravo Developers. This is a wicked experience for a Point and Click guy like myself. I grew up on Monkey Islands and King's Quests and know a thing or two about what point-and-click should be. To me, you took the best of all worlds. This is A+ stuff and it would be a PRIVILEGE to play another one of your games. So please do us, your biggest fans, a favor and make a few more if you can. Charge more if you need to. Love, Bluujaize (This got really sappy towards the end but I just realized there are no point-and clicks this good in the marketplace. And it made me appreciate this a lot more).

I really want to like the game, because you get good value for your money, but i still think there is a lot of potential lost. Soundtrack, voice acting, the idea of the game and the unique gameplay elements are great. But NPCs lack a certain depth and so is the story. It feels a bit rushed and generic, without much love for the detail. It's very short (not more then 4-6 hours for your first playthrough) and the gameworld is just a bit too small, but that's what you might expect for that kind of money.
It really starts awesome, but just falls flat a bit at the end and there are no real suprises at a certain point anymore. The unique gameworld is just scratched at the surface and that's just sad. As i said, a lot of potetial unused. At least it have some replay value, because of your powers and because there isn't a manual save option you have to play it multiple times, if you want all archivements.
I still recommend it, if you like the genre, but there are way better adventures out there. Adventures with more depth, even with a nice sci-fi setting, if you prefer those.

This game is everything you want in a modern point-and-click adventure: a good story, good puzzles, replayability, and even some character customization. If you like point-and-click adventures, you owe it to yourself to get this one. Even if you don't, this would be a good place to start.

The Game:
Traditional point and click game set in a semi dystopian future. The game does not come out as bleak despite this. Its in "old school" 9 bit graphic, (think Kathy Rain and the Blackwell files) so if this is not your thing you will not enjoy the game. You can die in some scenes but you will quickly be transported back to the start of the scene. Some of the puzzles are sort of reaction based as you need to time them. It adds some frustration but they are not overly complex. The game is perhaps on the short side.
The Puzzles:
Most are logical and fit the story, some solutions depends on how you have developed the character. You gain augmentations based on character choices so dont turn off the tutorial. This is a clever twist and lifts the game in my opnion since you can use some of these features quite cleverly.
Like I said some of the "puzzles" are reaction based, not to glaring but depending on how you developed the character they can be a bit annoying. "restart" from save is super quick so thats at least something.
The game helps you by "locking" places you dont need and the talking does not feel tedious with its options. There is little no for combining tons of items and random pieces of scenerey a pixel wide. All points of interest are readily available by using the space key. Good design.
The Story:
Classic modern procedural detective story. Not very deep and while the game tries a bit to flesh out the NPCs the story is not long enough to make them more than "answering machines" There is ofcourse some plot twists but some are easier to foresee than others.
The world is hinted at and there is some thought to the backstory and the setting but it could have been utilized more other than to explain why you have cyber punk augmentations. The world is essential to the motivation for most of the important characters so a longer game would have been cool. As it stands the motivation seems a little 2d and predictable, but this is nit picking by me.
The Game takes place in a few locations inside the same city, so you will see the same locations several times.
Conclusion:
A short and solid point and click game that is entertaining if you enjoy them and is not put off by old school graphics. It has the feel of Beneath a Steel Sky. (as far as I remember, havent played it in perhaps 15 years.)
I admit I used a walktrough on some puzzles usually when you need to do stuff in a certain order or to help with the timing/raction based puzzles.