Game EXP: Whispering Lane (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Whispering Lane through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Whispering Lane
Systems: Windows, macOS, Linux
Release Date: June 18, 2024
Publisher: Airem
Developer: Airem
Time Spent: 3 Hours, 12 Minutes

 Whispering Lane (currently titled "Whispering Lane: Horror" on Steam) is a first-person survival-horror indie game from Airem, which is a bit of a departure from some of their usual fare, although this isn't their first-person survival-horror.  It is currently 100% not rated for the Steam Deck and if you watch my prologue playthrough below, you'll see that nearly half of the time I spent messing around with the button settings on the Steam Deck side of things.  Admittedly some of the confusion on my part came from not saving the control settings in-game when I first inverted the y-axis, but there were also issues with the control button not always making the character crouch as it worked once with the Right Control but then stopped working and in Chapter 1, I remapped the Left Control and it worked there as well.  Eventually, everything ended up working out fine and I didn't have to return to the control settings (much).

Next, we need to discuss the text and AI voiceover.  While I don't inherently dislike using text-to-speech since Airem is a one-person developer and I don't think it necessarily takes away from the game, it feels like the speech was "recorded" with a slightly different script than what is in the game.  This might be just me, but when the voiceover diverges from the text on the screen, I find it a little off-putting.  Also having the text not fit onto the screen is a little distracting, but I'm not sure if that's a Steam Deck issue or something that needs to be fixed on the back end of things.  The second strange thing about the prologue sequence is the floating >> icons throughout the level which teleport the streamer Ghostseeker to the next zone, but there is some kind of invisible wall that teleports Ghostseeker back to the start of the current zone and repeats the dialogue if you try to go backward.  I understand the reason for having this in the game, because you can't have the player exploring a map that isn't meant to be explored narratively, but it feels clunky.  One possible fix would be to have Ghostseeker spawn behind a closed or locked door, so there's no chance for the player to attempt to backtrack.

Let's move now to Chapter 1:

Here, you take on the character of police officer Jackson Harrowfield, who is sent to investigate reports of noises and presumably Ghostseeker's incursion into the house on Whispering Lane, although there isn't anything mechanically that separates Ghostseeker from Jackson.  You start out in the same location as the prologue and explore the same areas, but this time, you can fully explore the whole time without any >> teleports.  This section plays like a walking sim in that there is nothing that can kill you, it's just environmental changes as you collect keys to unlock doors.

Once again, the translation is either a bit off, or there's a misplaced text file because when you pick up an errant backpack (which as expected increases the number of storage slots for things to carry), the game gives you a "You took the apple" notice.  Even the second backpack that you find later in the game, the game still tells you "You took the apple."  I have no explanation as to why a backpack is being called an apple, but I couldn't not bring that up.

The last thing I want to mention about this section is that I had to do a little figuring out the controls on the Steam Deck in regards to equipping the axe.  Having recently come from BAISU where I used the left touchpad like a secondary directional pad to use commands on your dog Bella, I probably should have realized that the 1-4 keys were already mapped to that left trackpad, which is what you need to use when equipping any of your weapons.  So that was in part why I died at the end of this chapter.

Now onto Chapter 2 (although during the following chapter, I discovered that this might still be considered Chapter 1 by the developer if we're only going by the load file names).

This is the chapter where the game changes from a walking sim to a first-person survival horror where you have melee and ranged weapons against monsters that take multiple hits to kill in a small confined area with no real indication as to how much ammo you're going to find while exploring.  In reality, though, the enemies in this section were relatively easy as you could attack while moving forward after the enemy attacks, then pull back before they either start or finish their attack animation.  Of course, it's easier to explain than in practice as I did get hit quite a few times.

So the white elephant in the room in this video is that I accidentally soft-locked the game because of what I didn't do in the previous chapter.  What I discovered/realized was that the mechanisms that operate the house in this chapter are directly connected to the previous chapter.  I came to this realization after watching a walkthrough to confirm my fears.  What happened was that there is a door on the second floor in the first chapter that is barred with wooden planks that you're supposed to remove to open the door, but you don't actually have to remove the boards since you can still exit the bathroom through the bedroom.  However, you need to remove these boards in order for this door to open in this chapter (Chapter 2), otherwise you cannot get through to the bedroom and gain the last brass plaque to access the basement, which is your goal for this section of the game.

Then we come to Part 2 of Chapter 2:

I was thankfully able to load a previous autosave right before I finished Chapter 1 so I didn't have to start the game over from the beginning.  What I thought needed to be done worked.  I removed the final board and was able to open the bathroom door.  Also, what is up with hands raking across the from of the face?  This is the second time in just as many games where this effect has happened, although here it felt less effective than in BAISU.  Did this happen in a 

I probably should have noticed that something wasn't quite right on this playthrough since I was able to interact with items that seemed to have been leftovers from the first Chapter, like emptying the bathtub that wasn't full or picking up the lockpick in the basement.  Additionally, my quests seemed to have been duplicated, and the front door was again barred by boards.  The game then said that an objective was "Pre-Completed" when I unbarred it only to find that this exit was blocked by a portcullis-like gate; now it could be that this gate was purposefully there to force the player into the basement.

I then ran into another soft-lock when I was killed by the spikes in the hallway in the basement.  Upon dying, I respawned back where my load game had started.  I had a feeling something bad was happening when I was trying to manually save and there was no indication that the game was being saved.  Later, Airem released a hotfix to fix several bugs, this apparently being one of them, because, with version 1.04, this soft-lock was fixed.

This brings us to Chapter 2 Part 3:

I played separately without recording just so that I could get myself to where it soft-locked last time, at the entrance to the hallway with the swinging blades.  I also added the "Left Shift" keyboard key to the back L4 button for sprinting because pressing the left joystick button down for short sprints felt awkward and I knew that trying to walk through that hallway would be nearly impossible.  And let me tell you, that hallway went on too long and should have been half as long.  I get it, dying by one hit by a bladed post can be stressful, but since I can technically save after everyone, it takes a bit of the tension away.

And then there was the boss battle against the spider that, I admit, accidentally managed to find a safe spot behind whatever that tumbled piece of furniture was that put me out of range of its attacks.  Yes, I accidentally cheesed it, but I'm okay with it because it meant that I could continue the game.

Now, I don't know what those scorched-looking anthropomorphic spider-looking creatures were supposed to be after the boss battle, but holy damn do they move fast and hit hard!  I get that the game needs to introduce more difficulty but these ones feel inconsistent in how they hit.  It probably also doesn't help how the game overall shows Jackson taking damage feels almost nil, but because they move so fast and there's no noticeable "agghhh!" "oof!," or flashing on the screen when you get hit, that I immediately just assume that I've been hit when I encounter these things.

The last thing I want to touch on is the Shifty Man (because I don't know what this creature is referred to in-game yet.  It's an enemy that doesn't move all that quickly, but is still fast enough to be inconvenient when you're trying to keep away from it, and is designed to kill you in one hit regardless of your current HP.  During my first encounter with I treated it like any other monster thinking it could be killed, but then upon dying from it, quickly realized that you were supposed to stay away from it while scouring the darkened maze for the key to unlock the drawer which presumably has the key to unlock the door to exit this section.  Spending 15 minutes and being killed eight times (along with an 18-second loading screen) did not feel as productive as the same amount of time spent in a FromSoft game having figured out what I needed to do and I lost motivation around death number five.

And that is where my playthrough of Whispering Lane currently rests.  I don't currently have access to my Steam Deck (it's a few thousand miles away) but I will give this a go after I get back.  There are times when the game feels not quite polished enough which has nothing to do with its compatibility on the Steam Deck as I knew going in that I would likely need to tinker with the controls.  If I were debugging the game (which I don't interpret the purpose of keys from Keymailer to be) I would likely just play the first two chapters over until everything that I had issues with worked flawlessly.  There might need to be some modifications to level design in regards to getting soft-locked, and figuring out why objectives were duplicating.  There is a mostly playable game here, it just needs some additional QA work before I would consider it to be a viable game.  Again, reiterating that I haven't completed the game, I can only speak to how far I've made it, from the prologue up to the maze with Shifty Man (or whatever its name is).

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplanman/Jaconian
Eyes on the Camera