SpinTop Games
Escape Whisper Valley

SpinTop Games has established itself in the development of games aimed at casual gamers, and they often consist of subpar products of the gaming industry sold at unfair prices due to their lack of longevity and terribly repetitive mechanics that are mostly borrowed from titles twenty years ago. There are exceptions to this rule, such as the amusing Plants vs. Zombies or the Bookworm Adventure's saga.

Highly inadvisable, however, are SpinTop's Escape games which, besides being all the same, also prove impersonal and sterile. Escape Whisper Valley, for example, is practically identical to Escape Rosecliff Island, and the only thing that changes is the backgrounds.

These titles belong to the sad genre of Seek & Find: the aim is to locate objects scattered throughout locations by clicking on them with the mouse after spotting them. Essentially, you take one of the most tedious elements of Graphic Adventures (pixel hunting) and create a game entirely based on it.

Most of these games aren’t worth 10 cents, yet there are decent titles like the various Chronicles (Dream Chronicles, Ghost Chronicles, etc...) that at least benefit from a pseudo-story, have an atmosphere, and are also based on the use of items, rather than just offering a collection of completely pointless knick-knacks. Escape Whisper Valley does exactly the latter, the plot doesn’t exist, and even the initial two lines of text as an introduction are senseless. The only thing you need to do throughout the game is watch a nice background filled with a bunch of scattered items and click on those that appear written in the bar below.

After the first 10 minutes, any thinking human will start to get seriously bored, and those minimalistic puzzles seen and seen a thousand times won't save it from tedium. It’s a shame because the backgrounds are nice but utterly wasted, and after a while, you'd rather arm yourself with a pen and seek refuge in the pages of the weekly puzzle magazine.

I might be a little slow, but I don’t understand what pleasure, fun, satisfaction, and so on can possibly arise from looking at a background with the intent of finding a ballpoint pen, a bowling pin, a lollipop, a condom, your girlfriend’s bra, and a stranger’s underwear. Even spending hours counting sheep is more fun!

The game can be downloaded for an hour's trial, and the total longevity of Escape Whisper Valley is just over an hour, so even for those who want to lose themselves in the annihilation of cosmic emptiness, buying it would be madness.

You could argue about the pointlessness of this review of an equally pointless game, and you’d be right. My intention is to generally advise against the purchase of all these boring Seek & Finds because they are utterly miserable, a terribly stupid genre that should disappear from the face of the earth, and in fact, I don’t understand how they managed to proliferate. Perhaps because their development requires just a couple of graphic designers guided by an alcoholic programmer who doesn’t want to do a thing?