Game: The Whisperer in Darkness
Platform: PC
Genre: visual novel
Style: directly based on mythos
Verdict: Recommended
Buy: Steam | itch.io
The Whisperer in Darkness is a short visual novel adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s story of the same name. It’s largely a strict adaptation, with one big exception – it’s set in the modern day.
And so there are little modern touches like Wilmarth and Akeley communicating via email and similar things, but all of the major events happen just as they do in the original.
It’s a visual novel, and in fact a good portion of it is presented as simply Wilmarth’s words appearing on the page as he writes everything down (justified in-game as him writing a letter to Akeley’s daughter about what happened) or the email conversations. For important moments, the text appears alongside imagery to emphasize the scene, which does add a nice touch.
There are also a handful of sections in which you control a tiny pixelated Wilmarth, but these felt largely unnecessary to me.
Anyway, you won’t get a whole lot here that you couldn’t get from reading The Whisperer in Darkness, but if you want to revisit the story with some visuals and a modern touch, it’s a nice adaptation.