Whispers of a Machine
- DB
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
If you listen close enough, you can hear the whispers say 'meh'.
Here's what I've been watching and playing over the last seven days...
MOVIES
Like Brosnan, Daniel Craig started out excellently as James Bond and this is several levels better than Goldeneye for me, ranking as the second-best Bond film behind From Russia With Love.
More of an epilogue to Casino Royale than story deserving a full-length movie, and the weird pacing and characterisation from being made during a writers' strike don't help.
While I do like Skyfall a lot, I still don't think it's quite the great movie a lot of others do/did.
Spectre
It's only while writing this post that I realised that I haven't written about Spectre yet, so I'll do so next week and you'll find out then what I think about it.
I still really like this movie, even if its reputation seems to have diminished somewhat over the years since its release - Ana de Armas as Paloma stealing the movie out from underneath Daniel Craig is one of the big reasons why.
GAMES
Whispers of a Machine
Game summary: the story of Vera, a cybernetically augmented detective in a post-AI world, who investigates a string of murders and unravels a dark conflict over forbidden technology. (Steam)
I was quite looking forward to playing Whispers of a Machine as a sci-fi old-school point-and-click adventure game with a female lead seemed right up my street.
And there are things to like here, including the story and how it unfolds, with a fairly unique setting and art style too - I don't have any complaints about the fully-voiced cast or their work, even if it's nothing special.
The first big problem though, is that Whispers of a Machine is very tightly-scripted, which might well be done to prevent sequence-breaking but only makes it feel like the story is on rails.
As an example, a character is brought up as someone that immediately seems like someone you should speak to, but the game won't let you until certain events have happened.
The other big problem with Whispers of a Machine is possibly due to the developers becoming extremely familiar with the world they'd built and assumed the players would have the same level of familiarity.
90% of the game is fine, but there are multiple moments where I simply couldn't tell what I was supposed to do, so looked up the answer in a walkthrough and wondered how the hell I was supposed to figure that out!
If you do give this game a try, keep a walkthrough open - you won't need it most of the time, but it'll save you a lot of time when you get stuck because you're not a character living in the game's world.
Whispers of a Machine does have an intriguing premise, but has too many flaws - including assuming the player knows as much about this fictional world as the people living in it - to properly satisfy. [5/10]
TV
Okay, I still haven't started Star Wars: Resistance yet, but will definitely have watched at least a few episodes by this time next at the bare minimum!
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