Whirlight - No Time to Trip by developer imaginarylab and publisher Vsoo games - PC(Steam) review by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Well folks,
guess what time it is? Time to travel through time! A wacky adventure
point-and-click title by the same people that brought us Willy Morgan and the
Curse of Bone Town comes the newest title: Whirlight – No Time to Trip.
In
Whirlight we are introduced to genius (lol) inventor Hector May, who is
currently going through a bit of a slump. In the process of trying to overcome
his slump, he makes the invention of the century, time travel! Unfortunately
for him, as well as Margaret who he surprises upon his first time travel foray,
it turns out his newest discovery is a bit more unstable than desired, leaving
him trapped in the future. Together both Hector and Margaret work together to
not only put this new discovery to good use, but also to prevent a potentially horrendous
future from occurring.
Whirlight
is a point-and-click adventure game with a lot of gags and some pretty funny
interactions. You’ll explore the town of Verice Bay, as well as some other
interesting locales, in your quest for science! As a point-and-click title
gameplay is pretty basic, mostly involving walking around by clicking in an
area you want to move to, examining objects by clicking on them, and
interacting with items by combining them or using them on something. Thankfully
the developers have included a few quality of life aspects into this adventure.
First of all, in most areas comprised of a bunch of smaller screen sequences,
you are usually able to find a map that will allow you to fast travel around
the area, provided something hasn’t happened to keep you out of the area you
want to go to.
The next
really nice gameplay mechanic is that you can hold down right click to see
anything that’s interactable in the area. This is super useful for finding
those small spots you may have overlooked, or if something interactable is
close to something else and you didn’t notice it. The last handy mechanic is
the ability to double-click to either run to a location on screen, or if you
double-click a screen transition you fast move to the next area without having
to wait for your character to run all the way there. Combine that with an easy
to use inventory by using the scroll wheel up or down to bring the inventory up
or put it away and there are a lot of user friendly aspects to Whirlight.
While there
are a few puzzles to solve, both item interaction and more hands-on puzzles,
most of them are fairly reasonable. I will stress the most here. Some of
the interactions are…well, perhaps a little less intuitive than you would
expect. Oddly enough, I found the greatest issue of this in the first half of
the game, and the longer I played, the more intuitive I found the item
combinations or uses were. I’m not ashamed to admit there was one interaction I
actually had to go watch the game trailer to help me out with. With that in
mind, allow me to give you a few tips if you’re stuck. Tip one: try and combine
all your inventory items to see if any stick. Normally there are a few that you
may have forgotten a reference for or were kind of out there and you didn’t
realize. Tip two: exhaust character dialogue. If there’s a person to talk to,
usually all of the stuff they have to say is worth hearing. In fact, there’s
one required item that you can only get by continuing to talk to a character.
Final tip: don’t be scared to go through every possible item in your inventory
while interacting with something. Even items you can “lose”, you’ll still get
back by returning to where you got them from. For example, there are some
newspapers you can burn, and returning to the newspaper pile you get more. No
hassle no fuss.
Another
cool thing to make note of is that all of the interactions and controlled
character quips are all fully voiced. Yup, all of them. A really neat feature
you don’t see nearly often enough. Whirlight has some pretty colourful and
unique environments, with a cast of interesting characters. Add in a pretty
unique plotline and some solid music and you’ve got everything you need to make
a stellar point-and-click adventure! While there’s a lot to like here, there
are a few issues that pop up occasionally. From a gameplay perspective,
sometimes you can “use” an item, or attempt to use an “item”, and the game will
half tell you “there’s something to this” or “I need to do this right”, which
can be misleading sometimes. Case and point, the interaction I needed to watch
the trailer video to figure out was one of these. The second issue I’ve run
into is one where after talking to a character and getting them to perform an
action for me, they are stuck in a pose and I cannot interact with my inventory
unless I go talk to another character. There is also another character in the
area you can perform an action for but their reaction text speeds through and
you can’t read it in time. It doesn’t lock you out of anything, and I hope it’ll
be fixed by the full release, but it is there.
Overall Whirlight – No Time to Trip is a good bit of retro fun in a nice and funny package. With a memorable cast and some interesting adventures, I’m sure Whirlight will appeal to all you point-and-click fans out there.
Score: 8.5 / 10
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