While it may not indulge as much on its aesthetic to better hide the distinct lack of gameplay, Empathy: Path of Whispers can’t excuse itself for letting its eye go too far a stray from keeping its player both focused and interested in the tale being spun. Though it’s far from the actual narrative’s fault for the game’s all-round mediocre delivery, the insistency on following an established formula across a bulk of the game’s all-round length doesn’t excuse the choppy, blurred and fairly average quality of its visual design.
Empathy: Path of Whispers
Pixel Night · May 16, 2017
About
Empathy: Path of Whispers is an atmospheric and surreal adventure game where you explore a seemingly abandoned world through the emotions and memories of the people who once inhabited it, trying to restore the world’s lost balance by journeying through its past.
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Critic reviews
- Now for the two or three of you who follow my reviews on a regular basis (hi Mum!), you’ll know I’m pretty open-minded about games that try and wax philosophical. However, Empathy: Path of Whispers is just unforgivably boring and pretentious. Even putting the gamebreaking technical flaws, endless backtracking and continual mindless scanning aside, there’s no emotional meat in Empathy. You’re just listlessly listening to a series of distant hammy melodramas while some Nietzsche wannabe makes flat wisecracks about them inside your head. No wonder people in this world went crazy. Somewhere along this Path of Whispers, Empathy took a seriously wrong turn.
- 6.0The gaps in the narrative felt all the larger due to the enormous spaces of silence wherein I was just wandering back and forth, trying to figure out what I’d missed. If you consider yourself a narrative gaming connoisseur, you’ll find some real value here. If that genre doesn’t resonate with you, though, you may want to think twice before picking up Path of Whispers.
- 3.0I have no doubt that the makers of the game were trying to combine a few interesting aspects from other games and make their own unique twist to it. Bioshock’s story of a grand industrial city fallen from chaos and Dear Esther’s style of storytelling of past events with voice narrative are two that come to mind. Yet, the game fails in doing the most important thing and that’s keeping me engaged in the story and wanting to continue it. This is due to poor narrative design and limited gameplay which makes me give Empathy: Path of Whispers a 3 out of 10.
- 6.0Empathy: Path of Whispers cade un po' vittima del genere a cui appartiene e mostra il fianco a un immobilismo davvero poco perdonabile. Sebbene siano nobili le intenzioni di raccontare una storia per certi versi diversa dal solito, tutto il resto del contorno e il modo in cui viene veicolata, assieme a un gameplay sin troppo elementare, fanno del gioco un'occasione sprecata.
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