Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Are you
interested in a spooooky time? Do you love playing Phasmophobia but you aren’t
that great, can’t pick up the voice commands, and your party members aren’t
helpful? Well then, I may have a spooktacular title for you to enjoy!
Welcome to
Among the Whispers - Provocation, a game about investigating ghosts and
releasing them from this mortal coil. In Among the Whispers you have the
wonderful job of paranormal investigator. Your current job brings you to a four-story
mansion that has seen a number of unfortunate and violent deaths in the past
few generations. Unfortunately, it appears that some of the prior residents of
the mansion aren’t so “prior”. The ghosts of the deceased still roam the halls,
and rooms, of the massive mansion. It now falls to you to discover evidence of
their existence, discover who the ghost was in life, and then send them off on
their final journey.
Now, I
mentioned Phasmophobia in my intro, and I would like to summarize here before
going into the fine details. Basically, Among the Whispers is single player
Phasmophobia with less stakes. Basically, you don’t need to be so worried about
getting murdered by the ghosts here, although they can still present a danger.
Much akin to other ghost hunting games, your first goal will be to get some
info on your paranormal existence. In this case, you can check out your emails
and see whereabouts in the mansion the ghosts of interest appear.
Once you
know your spirit location, which you can upload to a portable tablet by
clicking on the room in the email, you can now find the room of interest. Don’t
worry about your gear, you carry a backpack around that has everything you’ll
need. Yup, no returning to a car and only carrying three items, including a
light. Which is also nice, because you have a headlamp you can turn on/off as
well as adjust to be either a spread or focal point. Once you’ve identified the
room your spirit is in and figured out how to get there, it’s time to find some
evidence. Cool fact about Among the Whispers: you can use both hands! You want
to break out a temperature sensor and an emf sensor? You can do both! One in
the left hand and one in the right. Some objects only work in the right hand,
so do be aware of that.
You can
access your backpack at any time you have enough space, and bring out the items
you need. You can then walk around using the objects to try and find evidence
of the paranormal. Cameras and recorders have limited space, but you can upload
files to your tablet as evidence, and then delete old files for more room. You
can also ask the ghost to do stuff for you, although it may or may not produce
results.
As you
collect ghost evidence, the ghost activity will get stronger. Once it reaches a
certain point, you can release the ghost from the house. To do that however,
you will need to figure out who the ghost actually is, find something relating
to the ghost’s earthly passions, and figure out how they died. You can do this
by “provoking” the ghost, which also has it’s own other uses. Before you can
release the ghost, provocations can be used to find out information from the
ghost or to get it to do things to help you accrue evidence. You can also ask
the ghost how it died, or what it liked in life. You can get it to try and act
out it’s death as well.
Once you
have this info, it’s time to head back to the base camp in the foyer and check
out your computer. You can check “Fallen Apple”, which lists out family members
and how they died, and what their interests are and where to find an item they
are interested in. For example, you may find a lady ghost loved hats, and you
will be told her hat collection is in a bedroom anteroom. Once you’ve collected
an item the ghost will appreciate, you go back to the haunting site, plop down
a specific mechanism, and then tell the ghost their name, hobby, and how they
died. If you are correct, voila! Ghost is released.
Now I’ve
somewhat glossed over this point a bit, but your nightly escapades aren’t
stress free. You only have so many hours during the night to release the
spirit, and you do have a sort of “health” gauge to pay attention to. As you
interact with the ghost, you will experience a greater strain on your nerves.
If the strain gets too much, you’ll pass out, so be careful! An interesting
choice on the developer’s part is that you can turn off the time limit and
nerves in the options menu. It’s really nice if you want a less stressful
experience.
The whole
thing isn’t that relaxed though. Sometimes the ghosts may startle you either
with sounds or their appearance. The mansion makes creepy “old home noises”,
and it’s so dark you can rarely see much as you’re walking around. It’s
definitely got the ambience nailed down pretty well. Another neat bonus is
about the audio evidence you can record. If you use a parabolic mic, what
actually gets recorded sounds much clearer than what you may hear. For example,
one ghost choked on food and died, so when I was gathering evidence I only
really heard a sort of gurgle. When I uploaded the evidence and listened to it,
I could make out a clear choking noise.
There are a
few issues I had about the game, and while most of those have been patched out
during the review process (I’ve rewritten this a few times now), there still are
a few… rough ends that could be smoothed out. Firstly, some of the tools at
your disposal can be a little awkward to either use or get good evidence from.
For the love of all that is good and holy, I still don’t really get what
qualifies as evidence for a few of the tools, but I mostly just wander around
until the character you play as says something, which usually works. At least
the audio and visual are a little easier, and the camcorder is pretty much
automatic. Finding your way around is a bit of an issue as well. While you can
access a map, it doesn’t indicate where you are, or the pathways that travel in
some areas. It isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but it could be a little clearer.
Lastly, knowing when you can release a ghost takes a bit of learning. There is
a clear tell when a ghost can be released, but if you’re unaware of it, you may
not realize what it is.
There is a bit of a performance issue as well, depending on what settings you're running and your computer specs. Making everything look like a blurry polygon makes the game run really smooth, but everything looks like a potato. Up the graphics quality too high and you'll be stuttering and staggering a lot if your PC can't handle it. For older PCs or those that aren't upgraded it might be a bit of a balancing game until you can find a compromise between graphic quality and how the game performs. Thankfully it isn't too awful, but it can be noticeable. The developers are also super on top of making fixes and patches, so I can only expect more from them in the future!
Overall,
Among the Whispers - Provocation is a quite enjoyable title that takes
inspiration from the popular ghost hunting games and turns it into a more
complete investigation through to spirit releasing process with a less deadly
pitch. If you like the ghost hunting style but are looking for something more
single player and a little calmer, I definitely suggest giving Among the
Whispers – Provocation a try. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get a
spirit out of my kitchen.
Score: 8.5 / 10
