Empathy: Path of Whispers

This game is a mix of beauty and annoyance. In the end I'm giving it a thumbs up, but it's quite flawed.

What is good is the world. It's beautifully and imaginatively crafted in Unreal Engine, and the exploration-based gameplay will ensure that you discover every little nook and cranny of it. The screenshots and video captures don't do it justice: I experienced several breathtaking moments.

What is bad, and very bad indeed, is the storytelling. The overall narrative is intriguing, but the way it's revealed to you is via disembodied voices and documents read aloud along the way. The writing is terrible, moving between pretentiously poetic and mundanely trivial moods without reason. The voice acting might be even worse, but it's hard to blame the actors when they were given such awful scripts.

The bad writing could have been forgiven if these inane bits of prose were woven into something bigger and immersive. But instead the tapestry comprises more than a dozen dissociated narrative threads about characters who you will never meet. The order is entirely arbitrary, depending on when you find them. Very quickly I lost track of who was who. Worse, I stopped caring. I tend to love finding documents in games, but not in this one. Oh, and there are a lot of them.

Some reviewers called the story "great." All I can say is that it has potential, but this potential is not realized. I almost wish this were a silent "walking simulator" game, with the incredible environment itself telling an understated story.

Finally, I encountered a really frustrating bug that didn't seem like a bug. I spent an hour wandering around trying to find a solution to the "puzzle." Finally, I found out in a discussion forum that I should reload from a previous save game slot and try again. Hopefully the dev will fix this.