The Whispered World (2009)

There is a game genre I keep coming back to even though my success rate is abysmally low, and that is the point-and-click puzzle genre. The amount of PoC games I have legitimately cleared compared to the amount of games I have tried is a pretty sad read, but I just can't let it be. A good PoC adventure will stay with you for a long time and a good PoC adventure is one I am the most likely to want to replay. I've replayed Broken Sword and The Dig several times and I am currently replaying Secret of Monkey Island.

The Whispered World was released in 2009 by German company Daedalic who are now probably mostly (in)famous for their terrible Gollum game which was released last year (2023), which in fact was so poorly received Daedalic decided not to develop any games anymore and instead focus entirely on being publishers. Before that they made games like the Deponia series, which I've only tried for a bit, and The Pillars of the Earth, which I completed.

The Whispered World was one of the very first games Daedalic released and maybe it was a sign of what was to come. It seems like Daedalic was always stronger in ideas than they were in programming and realization of those ideas.

The game centers around the circus clown Sadwick. He tours the world with his brother and grandpa, and a larva named Spot which is also used as a tool for some puzzles in the game in a Deus Ex Machina way. True to his name, Sadwick is ironic and some times cynical about himself and the world around him and quite likable. The writing is decent, I especially enjoyed the fact that most combinations you end up clicking seemed to have its own unique line of dialogue attached to it, which is a nice change from the umpteen "I can't do that" you often get to hear in PoC games. I couldn't stand the voice acting however and it's a blessing that the option to turn it off existed. 

The game is almost exclusively controlled with the mouse, with which you move Sadwick around and make him interact with the world. This works fine and I don't particularly miss the old verb-boards where you had to guess your way through "pull", "push" and "pick up". Though I guess you could argue it added to the puzzle element. Either way, I always find that I am bad judge for the quality of puzzle designs, since even the simplest puzzles can stump me. In Whispered World there are certainly a few head scratchers that feel like the way to get there is to start combining a bit of everything. There is a point where you have to scare your brother, and to do that you have to build a scary figurine from odd things you've picked up. I doubt anyone would figure out exactly what pieces fit together, this is a matter of trying everything with everything. There is also a few points where you have to give the correct dialogue options to NPC's and I never could get the hints as to what was the right thing to say. 

The story of Whispered World starts with Sadwick having a bad dream. The animation is very of its time, I got instant flashbacks to homebrew flash animations that were floating around the internet around then. The world is going to end somehow, and Sadwick involuntarily ends up being both the only way to save it and the possible cause of it. It never bothered me that it doesn't make much sense, the world is a cozy fantasy world full of odd creatures and is fun to explore. Things are random, but they make sense within the setting of The Whispered World.

The game was good enough to keep me interested and when I was about to give up because I got stuck I enlisted my kids to help me out. It became something for us to try to solve together, and progress was a lot easier with three heads (albeit some young ones) at it than just my own. Too bad then about the programming.

It started already pretty early in the game, where something that was required to happen to progress just didn't. Fortunately a restart of the game solved it then, but about half way through it happened again. I needed a certain object (hay from a pile of hay) to continue the game, but trying to pick it up Sadwick just kept telling us he already had it. Googling around it seems that game breaking bugs were not uncommon in this game and after having tried for a while without success we decided to give up. Even though the game was ok, none of us were interested in replaying two hours to get to where we were, only to perhaps end up getting the same bug again.

If you're starved for some PoC gaming and haven't come across this one yet I would say it could be worth checking out. Unfortunately this game requires you to be careful for the wrong reasons so don't repeat our mistake and make sure to keep several save spots going.

BEANO the Board Game - Board Game Review

Have you heard of Dennis the Menace? No, not that Dennis. The other Dennis. Yeah, they're two, and if you're from the UK you most likely know what I am talking about. Through some freak coincidence, two Dennis the Menace were created and debuted on the same day back in 1951. You can't make that stuff up. They're also still both ongoing.

What else do they have in common you ask? Well, they're both about mischievous little boys (hence the name one would guess) with a pet dog. While US Dennis is well meaning but gets into trouble, the UK Dennis is definitely more of a cunning prankster. In fact, the UK Dennis has had to have a bit of a clean-up recently as he could have been considered something of a bully for most of his existence.

I had never heard of the UK Dennis before I met my SO from England, who introduced me to Dennis' magazine The Beano. The Beano sports a plethora of characters with similarly witty names and dubious personalities, like Minnie the Minx, Roger the Dodger, Bash Street Kids, Les Pretend and Ivy the Terrible. Some of the more cheeky characters have had to move over for kids with other skills, like Dangerous Dan, Ruby and Betty (with her Yeti), presumably because a magazine focused entirely on being naughty doesn't fly so well anymore.

As you can imagine The Beano characters are also available in various kinds of merchandise, of which my children already own most - thanks to an enthusiastic Beano-fan, their father. They have mugs, t-shirts, jumpers, bed sheets, back packs, lunch boxes and hats, to mention a few. Then we also have Beano themed "Who's There?", "Top Trumps" and "Clue" board games.

And we also own the board game I intend to talk a little about here, the BEANO Board Game, which is its own original idea giving the players the opportunity to try to be the one who does more pranks than the other players.

To do this the player needs to collect sets of two cards. One card represents the prank object, like a wiggly worm, a whoopee cushion or a stink bomb. The other card represents the idea of what kind of prank to do with the item, like throwing a water balloon at the Cinema or throwing a stink bomb at the Lighthouse. Once you have a set of cards (water balloon and Cinema) you need to get to the Cinema on the board to collect your point.

Sounds easy enough. Of course there are plenty of things that can go wrong along the way. Other players can "nab" your idea and certain areas on the board forces you to trade your prank items with each other. There is a lot of opportunity to ruin your co-players plans and you often have to act as quickly and as secretly as possible. Your ideas are open for anyone to see, but your prank items are hidden. Until you have to trade them off that is...

For better or worse, there is a good amount of luck required to be the winner in this game, since you both need to collect "the right" pranks and ideas, but also land on squares on the board that are beneficial to you. The tactical element lies in which path to take and which prank to try to achieve, since each roll with the die often gives you several different options. I think the board makes a decent job at trying to level out some of the luck - if you don't get the right cards, you might be able to steal them from other players instead. Rolling the die and ending up on a white square is probably the worst that can happen in this game, an entire round of not really achieving anything.

You can play the game two players, but I'd recommend being at least three. The more you are, the more happens each round, the less safe you feel and the more chaos will ensue. That is when this game is at its best. Be prepared to make some enemies because this game allows you to be very cruel. 

Overall  I think the game does a good job at being fun while also staying true to the BEANO soul - running around trying to do as many pranks as possible is entirely in the right vein of the BEANO comic. If you want something cerebral and deep, this is definitely not the game for you. But if you're a fan of the BEANO comic and want an evening of aggravating your co-players, you could definitely do worse.