Although you won’t see everything, you can finish Many Nights A Whisper in under an hour. Each day you’ll train with your fiery sling, lighting braziers and honing your aim for a looming ceremony where you’ll try to hit a distant ritual chalice with a single shot. At night, you’ll sit at a confession wall. People will tell you their wishes, and you’ll decide which ones will be granted if the ceremony is a success.
The whole game takes place on a single large balcony, overlooking the sea. Tradition forbids you from speaking back to the wishful folk that come at night, feeding their braids through a statue for you to cut in acceptance, or else ignore. The only other person you’ll actually see is your mentor, a likeable septuagenarian who’s presided over these rituals for decades. You train, eat, listen to wishes, and sleep. After a few days of this, it’s time for the ceremony. As I say, takes about an hour.
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You’d be forgiven for worrying, then, that any review that talked about the game in any real detail would risk spoiling the whole thing. But Many Nights A Whisper isn’t really about revelations as much as it is contemplation; a game that encouraged me to spend as much time in my head as I spent on that balcony. Basically, I can’t spoil it for you, because I can’t play it for you.
Still, it’s the price of a coffee at Actually Very Reasonably Priced Coffee & Sons. It made me cry a bit and laugh a bit and think quite a bit in the space of that hour. So perhaps you’d like to pick it up anyway, if that sounds appealing and you don’t want to know anything else. Fair warning, because I’d like to talk about it in some detail.
So – some of these wishes are difficult, which meant I spent a lot of time contemplating how I am actually a very inconsistent human, full of contradictions and strange reasonings. That I’d probably feel more settled in myself if I had any sort of fixed, coherent system of values, even if that system proved inflexible and stifling. The world keeps doing weird new stuff and I keep learning things. Am I supposed to decide how I’m going to feel about these things before they happen? Does sound nice though. Gods. It is 11am, game. Here are some nice descriptions of your evenings in Many Nights A Whisper.
The second person to come to me with a wish wants to bring back a beautiful, extinct flower. I think about the importance of accepting impermanence, and then worry if maybe there’s a specific genus of squirrel liable to give themselves the death shits by gorging on strange new flowers unceremoniously reintroduced into the ecosystem, get a bit stressed about the lack of information (this happens more than once), then opt for cowardice and ignore the wish.
There’s a poem that each person recites after they’ve made their request, and if you want to deny their wish you just don’t cut their braid by the time they finish. In terms of gamefeel, there’s a tangible, electric current of import to the act of holding down a button to ready your blade, then releasing it to cut. Destruction as hopeful creation. They grow these braids for years, then come to you wishing you’ll sever them in seconds.
The next person to visit is losing their hair. They could barely grow a braid to offer, they tell me. They were going to ask for beautiful hair, but they’ve changed their mind. “We’ve heard too many tales about beautiful long hair. Let’s give this world a legend about a spectacular cranium”. They want artists to stop in the street to paint them. My Dorian Gray senses start tingling and I get nervous, but this is soon replaced by an uglier conviction, apparent common sense about the value of humility that starts to feel more patriarchal and sneering the more I examine it.
I’ll have similar thoughts later. When asked to make someone immune to heartbreak, I’m reminded of the received wisdom about the character-building value of suffering. It’s the kind of thinking that can get you through hell but also serves power that demands you stay gracious as you wipe spit from your eye. Don’t have the grit to reframe your exploitation as self-mythology? Sounds like a you problem. Structural inequality? No! It’s a personal growth journey. And surely living in bliss and beauty would get tiresome. Wouldn’t I be denying them that ecstatic sense of triumph that only really comes from having well and truly made it through the shit? It’s always felt a little grim to me to consider joy as desirable only because it signals a cessation of pain, but there’s something in that, still. And what about self-acceptance?
It is 11:15am, game. Can’t say no to beautiful shining dome, though. G’wan then.
There is no crosshair, only crossed hairs. Ahem. Aiming your sling takes a lot of practise. No help from any sort of UI element, the drop-off is considerable, and it feels counterintuitive and actually just not right at first. But you get used to it. Then you get good at it. And it takes me a couple of days to notice (maybe I zoned out an earlier explanation) but to reach the distant braziers and eventually the ritual chalice, you’ll need to grant enough wishes to make your sling powerful. There’s no upgrade system – this happens automatically – but the idea is that the braids from the wishes you do grant get tied to your sling.
And it’s somewhere between the person who wishes to become a rockstar and the person who wants me to remove the souls from animals so they don’t have to feel guilty about eating bacon that I realise the game isn’t going to let up. The wishes are going to keep getting weirder and harder. Someone else just asked me to cure their cancer so they can get healthy enough to murder the bastard who stole their life’s work. If I don’t grant some of these wishes I feel strange about, I’m not going to have the strength to make the shot anyway. Every wish will go unanswered.
A small child wants a pink cat but the cat also has to be invisible to everyone else because her parents won’t let her have one. Again, I need information! I imagine two allergic parents sneezing themselves into an early grave. I can’t do it.
I let a child become a hero. He wants to help people wherever he goes. More good sounds good I think, cutting the braid. He promises he’ll finish school first but I’m half convinced I’ve unleashed an eight year old Don Quixote on the world.
I agree to make two parents stop arguing. I initially evoke the Robin Williams’ Genie defence. I can’t make anyone fall in love, nor back in love. But the way it’s phrased, “make them coexist in harmony, focus on the things they love about each other”, feels hard to say no to. I agree. I don’t feel entirely good about it. My mentor asks me to think about changing free will, but it’s a nudge, not a lecture. The music sounds a bit like Hateno Village from Breath Of The Wild, so that chills me out a bit.
Things get a bit murky later. There is one revelation, casually dropped by your mentor about two third of the way through, about the state of the world and the people in it after the wishes are granted, that removes some tension and significance from what you’ve been doing the whole time, and I think I could have done without it. It’s a real “well, you could have told me that from the start” moment, and while it encourages you to replay the game with fresh eyes, I think it undermines some of its power. Still, only some.
Make tobacco cheap and healthy? Fuck, go on then. Although, absent its miniature act of self-destruction, smoking won’t be as cool any more. No easy answers. None at all.
There is a theme running through the game, besides the wishes, of the value of mastery. Even the tutorials take on a tense significance, knowing how important it is to make that final chalice shot with only a single chance. The day before the ceremony, I practise hitting the chalice. When I find the correct angle, I take a screenshot so I can recreate the position when needed. When the time comes, I nail the shot. I am elated, though not surprised. After all, I’d removed the guesswork. You’ll learn to listen to what your body is telling you, said my mentor. Thing is, right, I’ve got this screenshot button.
Of every choice I made in Many Nights A Whisper, I am open to learning what this says about me the least. I really wanted to nail that shot, and what kind of selfish fool ignores such an obvious advantage with so much riding on success? This isn’t about me, I reason. Of course, it’s actually been about me the whole time.
This review is based on a review key provided the publisher. Jay Castello, who freelances for RPS, worked on Many Nights A Whisper as a text editor. Brendy has also worked with developers Deconstructeam