Whispering Willows
Fair · Narrative · 2014
The verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $9.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 2.7h
- Value
- $3.70/hr
- Reviews
- 82% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, GeForce 7 Series/Radeon R7 Series, 2.3 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Interact with the spirits of the dead, solve the puzzles of the mysterious mansion and help Elena find her missing father in the horror/adventure puzzle game: Whispering Willows.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $0.99, set in October 2021. It has been discounted 85 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 18 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 69 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 74 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Oxenfree ($9.99, scores 72) beats it on value, while it beats Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP ($7.99, scores 44).
The press gave it 64; the people who bought it give it 82 percent. An 18-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 18 percent of players ever finish it. On a 2.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 423 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 1 comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 55 percent of the 165 reviews written there were positive, against 82 percent overall, and those are 13 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
41% start to 18% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
What players say
Recommended Playtime: ~2-3 hours Whispering Willows is a charming, atmospheric 2D adventure that leans much more into spooky aesthetics than actual horror. The core mechanic of switching into a spirit form to converse with ghosts, reach hidden areas, and solve puzzles is a neat concept. The hand-drawn art style is beautiful and the story is surprisingly engaging, though the gameplay itself is very simple. The...
It was very simplistic, and not quite a puzzle game. However, I like ghost stories, it was nice in that short play time.
I'm not gonna lie I could've beat this game a lot quicker than I actually did but I grew bored and fell asleep with this playing on my lap overnight. It's a pretty easy Point 'n' Click, and that's not to say I disliked it, I didn't, it was... alright. It's not that Story Rich, it's not that Atmospheric but it definitely is something.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Whispering Willows scores 51/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/288060/whispering-willowsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.