This is a fun, imaginative adventure. Beautiful graphics. None of the slash and smash of the newer games, we need more like this.

Corny. That's my one word review. I was lured into this game by the nice illustrations and music which it has, but while playing it, I can't help becoming annoyed by the corny long drawn out dialogues. The puzzles are not too intuitive. The interface is also slow, buggy and too old school. The native resolution is also fairly low so can't cover entire screen without interpolation. Maybe I am just too old for the game, maybe a younger person would see it differently.

/This review contains no plot spoilers/ The Whispered World is a modern "old-school style" point-and-click adventure story, along much the same lines as last summer's excellent remake of Monkey Island. How does The Whispered World measure up to such a gaming classic? Very well, so far. Despite some reviewers complaining about the voice-acting for the main character, I found his voice to be no problem at all. Perhaps its just Americans it grates on (I'm a Brit). His quirky voice conveys character well, and it quickly became endearing. So far, the other voice-acting (all British so far) is also very good. The lip-sync is very poor, but that's to be expected since the game was originally in the German language. The translation of the script appears to be excellent, although so far I've noticed a few annoying Americanisms (especially the "whatever!" - which should have no place in a fantasy-world game). I've found sections filled with consistently laugh-out-load funny lines - even more so than the famous Monkey Island which is fresh in my mind because I played it through last Summer. Whatever the German humour was like in the game, it seems to have been satisfactorily translated or replaced by the British translators. The writers also understand that strong comedy can come from the characters' glumness and feeling trapped. The detail of this game world is rich from the start, and yet there's also a nice looseness to how your knowledge of the world is built up - enough that your imagination is forced to fill in the gaps. Which adds to the immersion in the world, and the music helps this along. The animation is not at the Disney or Miyazaki level, but seems perfectly serviceable and it appears to be completely hand-drawn 2D. Older kids spoiled by a staple diet of polished 3D animation may be a little taken aback by the 2D look of the game, but the consistent richness and charm of the artwork should more than compensate. Younger children should be thoroughly charmed, but may need to consult an adult to solve some of the puzzles. One major drawback is that this game is not in widescreen, and so it will "auto-stretch" to fit a 1920 x 1200 24" monitor. This caused me a little pixellation of the hero's avatar and slightly reduced some of the crispness of the lush hand-painted backdrops. But I found that playing the game like this preferable to running the game at its puny native windowed resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels (the game was developed ages before widescreen became standard on PCs). It should be perfect if you have a good gaming laptop that runs at 1024 x 768, though. You play the game with a mouse but the game controls are blissfully simple and very easy to master. There is no three-step in-game hint system, regrettably. Which means that (unless you're a puzzle-ninja) you should print out a walkthrough to avoid having to exit the game when you get stuck. But you can tap the space-bar to highlight all the click-able hot-spots in each scene, which saves having to play "hunt the pixel". The game is apparently quite long, and should take around 20 hours for an experienced puzzle-adventure gamer to complete. I suspect that normal mortals might take about 25 hours, unless they're resorting to the walkthrough too much.