Whisper Of The House Review – I Don’t Think We’re Getting Paid Enough For This

I’m fairly new to the cozy genre. While I usually love a good horror game or RPG, I do often have the urge to sit down with a game that will soothe me rather than scare the heebie-jeebies out of me. My first dip into this genre was Witch Beam’s Unpacking, which I absolutely adored, not only because of its creative aspect, but also its unique way of telling a story through personal possessions. While I’ve been looking for a similar experience again, I’ve also been intrigued by cozy games that challenge the genre, such as Ivy Road’s Wanderstop which tells an emotional story about burnout under the guise of cozy gameplay. GD Studio’s Whisper of the House seemed like the perfect game to balance my love for creativity and organization with those darker tones beneath the surface.

We arrive in Whisper Town and start a business as a housekeeper, taking on odd jobs that mostly involve tidying people’s homes and businesses and unpacking their belongings. Each client has a story to tell, whether that’s the story they give you when you turn up, or the one that you uncover while going through their home – some of these stories take on a much darker, and sometimes scarier, tone than what would be expected from a cozy game. In fact, under its layers Whisper of the House has many mysteries to uncover, and I had a lot of fun searching for clues and hidden secrets. The mysterious museum in town has closed up and the number 42 has appeared above it, which is slowly creeping down, what could this mean? And why do the town’s NPCs seem to talk in riddles?

As we take on jobs and discover new pieces of furniture, we can then purchase these from local stores to decorate our own home with. Each job earns us vouchers which we can use for purchasing new furniture and decorations for one of the four currently available homes to unlock. Vouchers can also be earned by collecting trash, and also by building our status around town by completing jobs, tidying up and fixing things. 

The way the unpacking mechanic works is very similar to Unpacking. Our trusty robot, Mark, has a Mary Poppins-style endless box containing all of the items that we need to unpack and arrange in our client’s home or business. Sometimes, clients will want us to place items in specific locations, but most of the time we have creative freedom to style the place how we want.

I love how Whisper of the House gives us plenty of freedom to unleash our creativity. While we can’t redecorate client’s homes, we are able to redecorate our own as well as a selection of model homes that we can steadily unlock. There’s over 1,800 pieces of furniture to discover in the game, which allows plenty of options in terms of styles when designing each room.

That being said, the unpacking side of the game does feel a lot less satisfying than in Unpacking. My biggest problem with this mechanic is that a lot of furniture items can’t be rotated 360 degrees. This means that most of the furniture needs to be either facing us or turned to the side, which massively limits the room layouts that we can do. Most of the time it feels like the game wants the house to look a certain way and it’s just a case of trying to work out what it wants us to do with each piece of furniture. It can be quite a struggle to fit objects in where you like, as even though it looks like there’s a huge space on the wall, sometimes you still can’t hang the picture you would like there for whatever reason.

There were a few instances where it felt like Whisper of the House, while great as an overall package, did lack attention to detail in some places. Some of the room layouts don’t make a lot of sense as we need to put certain items in odd positions. For example, in one home, the only wall space in the bathroom to hang the bath towel was inside the shower. Another time I could fill one half of a freezer but not the other. This was evident the moment I walked into my first home because the size of the kitchen meant that I was unable to seamlessly line up the kitchen work tops, and ended up with gaps and overlaps. And when decorating the walls of my homes and model homes, while I could change the coloring of the crown moulding, I couldn’t do the same for the side panels, so would end up with two different wood colors. There are also some minor finishing touches that still need to be done, as I encountered quite a lot of text which is yet to be translated into English. 

This extends into bugs too, which Whisper of the House unfortunately has quite a big problem with at its current stage. My game froze on the loading screen several times, and crashed twice when trying to reboot it up again. Once I had unlocked the final, largest home currently available in the game, I couldn’t actually enter it because every time I tried to do so, the game would just get stuck on its loading screen. I’m unsure whether this is a bug or not, but for whatever reason I also couldn’t decorate the two largest homes in the game and was stuck with their default walls and floors, despite being told by the guy who handed over the keys for one of these homes that I could decorate it how I wanted. I also had some problems with the unpacking tasks that had us place items exactly where the client specified. For some reason, when unpacking the music store, even though I had placed these objects exactly where specified, they wouldn’t be marked off, and it took a lot of fiddling until I eventually got it right.

I also ended up soft locking myself a few times as there’s no cancel button when placing an item. I had accidentally left no space on the walls of one room to fit another item, and had pulled out another wall hanging from Mark’s box. I was unable to hang this up on the wall, and unable to cancel its placement so that I could make room, so was forced to exit and restart the game.

In terms of audio and visuals, Whisper of the House looks and sounds exactly as you would hope and expect from a cozy game. It uses a pixelated art style but still offers a lot of detail to the variety of furniture and items at your disposal. The soundtrack is upbeat, but can get quite repetitive after a while. That being said, one thing that really stood out to me was the audio design. Each item that you pick up and place has a little sound effect to go along with it and the variety of sounds is really impressive. It also makes placing items feel a lot more satisfying, especially when putting down multiple items in a row and hearing the pop of a bottle cap or the rustle of clothes. You can sometimes interact with certain items, such as turning on lamps and painting a quick picture on an easel, which I thought was a nice little touch.

While Whisper of the House gave me a good eight hours of gameplay, it feels very unfinished. There’s more content to be added, including a more satisfying ending as right now the game just abruptly stops providing tasks. Tasks are still being tweaked and there’s a lot to go in terms of bug fixing and finishing touches. Because of this, I can’t help but feel like this would have been better off launching into Early Access, as what’s currently available is really promising, but doesn’t offer a satisfying playthrough. That being said, the fact that I am itching for more is not a bad thing. Whisper of the House provides a really unique take on the cozy genre and it was exciting to peel back the layers of this town to see what I could discover underneath. I had a lot of fun exploring while also piecing together the various mysteries available, and would definitely recommend this to cozy game fans once it’s been patched more.

Jess reviewed Whisper of the House on PC with a provided review copy.