Many Nights a Whisper

I can imagine that there’s a lot that comes with organising a big festival on Steam. When this review drops, we are in the middle of LudoNarracon, an event organised by Australian publisher Fellow Traveller that celebrates narrative games in all shapes and forms. The reason I bring this up is that I don’t really understand why Many Nights a Whisper, the first game co-developed by Selkie Harbour and deconstructeam, isn’t a part of that festival, as it is a triumph in videogame storytelling. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you take a look at the previous games by these developers, but with it releasing on the eve of the festival kicking off, it just surprises me that there was no connection made.

Does it really matter, though? Because Many Nights a Whisper is just so striking that it should find its audience all by itself. It’s a rather short experience—coming in at just below 90 minutes—but it packs a big punch within its runtime. You are the dreamer, a girl who was chosen as a child and has spent the last ten years preparing for an ancient ritual that will determine the fate of an entire generation: with just a single shot, the dreamer needs to hit an impossibly distant target. Succeed, and everyone’s wishes will come true. Fail, and ten years of calamity will follow. I say ‘everyone’s wishes,’ but that’s not entirely true. You see, gameplay is divided into three distinct phases. You start your day by talking to your mentor, the one who has been guiding you towards this ultimate moment and also the only person you’ve talked to for the past ten years. After your conversation, you can practice your archery skills, which come in handy when your slingshot gets stronger and you can aim for targets further away. In the evenings, you get to select whose wishes will be fulfilled if you hit that target.

The townsfolk have grown and braided their hair and offer their braid through a hole in the Confession Wall. They will tell you of their wish—and while you cannot respond—if you want to help their wish to come true, you need to cut off the braid before the wisher finishes the dreamer’s poem. Some of these wishes will be straightforward; some of them… not so much. They range from very personal things to more substantial wishes that will affect all humans. And you have to choose which of them you want to accept and which to reject.

There’s a lot of pressure that comes with being the dreamer. Being tasked, as a teenager, with the wishes of an entire generation of people is quite something. Who are you even, really, to decide who gets their wishes fulfilled and who doesn’t? All of these thoughts will cross your mind, but there is a gameplay element to consider here too. Because you need your slingshot to get stronger to make that final shot, and the only way to upgrade it is to collect braids from the wishers. Will that make you accept some wishes just so you can get more braids, or would you rather doom an entire people to calamity for an entire decade?

Many Nights a Whisper is a game about questions. They don’t just arise from the wishes that people will present to you but also from the conversations you have with your mentor. This mentor has already trained multiple dreamers, and you are their final one before they get to ‘retire.’ But rather than telling you what to do, their aim is to guide you, to give you the ability to think for yourself and make your own conclusions.

Even though you only spend your days within a small spot where you and your mentor live, the developers managed to pack a lot of history into this place. I was a bit surprised to find out that the game takes place in our modern day, as the game’s visuals don’t give that away. The setting kind of reminded me of Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island, this island where the Greek Gods had been abandoned. But I actually like that there’s this kind of mismatch, where tradition meets modern life. It once again offers questions about how we keep centuries-old religions alive, even though the world has moved on in so many ways.

Even the game’s achievements aid in bringing this world to life, talking of previous dreamers and mentors, about their successes and failures, about the choices they made or didn’t make. I found myself thinking of selflessness against egotistical behaviour, about the things that matter to us humans and the things that don’t. About how a single person can be someone’s world, and a whole world can be a burden to a single person. I don’t want to spoil any of that, as you should definitely experience this game for yourself, but yeah, I have so many thoughts now, and they’re sticking with me.

I haven’t even mentioned the pressure of making that final shot. Your training takes place during the day, with the weather being fine and visibility being excellent. But when the time comes to make that era-defining shot, it’s nighttime, and there’s an entire population wishing for you to make that shot. Once again, this had me thinking of the pressure people must feel when they spend so much of their life preparing for a single moment and of what happens to those people afterwards, whether they fail or succeed.

Like some of the best narrative games in recent years—I’m looking at you, Citizen Sleeper, 1000xRESIST, Spiritfarer, and Celeste— Many Nights a Whisper is ultimately a meditation on what it means to be human. Why we put ourselves under the stresses and burdens that we do and what ways we look for when it comes to finding ways to get away from those. And it succeeds in a magnificent way: not by telling us what to think but by making us question things we take for granted.