The environments also give off a haunting feeling of foreboding, with candles and gas lamps casting eerie shadows across the derelict backgrounds. Coupled with the somber tones of the score, it does far more to put us on edge than the cartoonish visages of the various ghosts do. The sound design for each area of the estate is decidedly creepy, from Elena’s soft footfalls echoing off a creaking staircase to the rustling of leaves in the wind. Where Whispering Willows excels is in its aesthetic.

The longest puzzle is a hedge maze, and the challenge is less about opening the right door and finding the right item than it is just trying to remember how the hell you got here in the first place. While this idea is definitely present in many of the puzzles that require Elena to leave her body, more often than not my time was spent simply walking from one area to another and looking for an item that would unlock a new door, diminishing the importance of the out-of-body mechanic. The whole point of astral projection is to place yourself outside of your body and view the world from a new perspective, but Whispering Willows doesn’t seem to fully take advantage of that.

It makes me wonder why that promising mechanic is so underutilized. This allows her to speak to other ghosts, possess and manipulate objects, and reach areas that she can’t get to in her corporeal form. The best idea of Whispering Willows is that our heroine Elena is able to astral-project herself into the spirit realm.

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