Ever since the release of Phasmophobia in 2020, there has been a rise in games in the ghost-hunting genre. Games like Devour and even a Ghostbusters game came out riding off the success that the cooperative-driven. Combine this with single-player horror games like Silent Hill 2 and Mouthwashing, and it’s hard to ignore we are in the golden ages of horror still. Among The Whispers: Provocation attempts to bring the same energy of Phasmophobia into the single-player experience with some interesting results. 

You play as a ghost investigator sent to haunted buildings to free the ghosts that haunt it. The problem is that there’s an incredibly long line (suspiciously long if you ask me) of murders and accidental deaths that haunt the giant estate. Your job is simple; explore the manor grounds to uncover the ghosts that are still haunting the place and help them move on to the afterlife. It’s a simple concept that is just compelling enough to get you invested. 

Where Phasmophobia is about yourself and up to three other idiots running around a haunted house, yelling at each other to try and identify a ghost before making it too angry. Among the Whispers takes the ghost-hunting genre in a different direction, with a single-player focus and a story that progresses through multiple hunts. Your job here isn’t to identify the ghost, but to uncover their identities, such as who they were before, what their passions were, and how they died, to help them move on to the afterlife. This in itself would be an excellent idea for a more detective-based horror title; however, the ideas feel half-baked.

If you’ve played Phasmophobia, you roughly know what to expect. You explore a house, picking up clues and using a variety of tools to help identify a ghost’s locations. Once you’ve found a room the ghost resides in, you can begin the investigation. A relatively brief tutorial clues you in to all the tools you’ll be using, but doesn’t make things overly clear outside of that. You’ll be taking pictures and various readings around the place to locate the ghosts haunting the locations. 

Using EMF readings to gather paranormal activity. A Parabolic Microphone combined with a recorder can also pick up ghostly voices. Combine those with the titular provocation system that allows the character to ask questions for a response. Among The Whispers does a great job with this aspect. Where it starts to differ is using your clues to really delve into the history. With deep family trees, you will need to figure out the cause of death to find out who actually died.

Once you’ve gathered enough evidence to understand who died, you can use your knowledge to help them move on. You can find an essential item for them. It’s an interesting system, but the large map means you will often need to aimlessly trek through multiple rooms to pick up a single item to finish a hunt.

It’s a compelling enough gameplay hook. However, there are plenty of issues that really hold the game back. The map just feels overly large and uninspiring with  I found that provocations would occasionally just not work after repeated attempts or rapid draining of the sanity system even when nothing is really happening.  Eventually, after a few hours, it feels like you’ve seen everything Among the Whispers has to offer, and the repetitive gameplay loops become tedious. You’ll be doing the same tasks 

Among the Whispers is built by a single developer, and as such, you can see the rough edges. The lighting is harsh and often overly dark, making the game dark doesn’t make it scary and I would like to see a bit more restraint here. The flashlight is also a mixed bag. However, the two modes you can use can alleviate this a little bit. The manor itself is decently well detailed and feels believable enough, with unique ghost models each time and animations. Don’t be expecting a high level of polish, but for a solo dev, there’s clearly a lot of love that went into it. 

Sound design is also reasonably good. Whilst the voice acting isn’t very special, especially as the voice processing tries to include the ghost’s name, feeling a little awkward, it does the job well enough. Where the sound design does shine, though, is in the ghost voices that add a little more subtlety to the world. You will hear whispers that might be hard to understand at first; however, using the recorder and boosting the volume will clue you into the mystery. Sound is integral to the progression, and it does a great job immersing you into the world. 

Despite some good ideas that could have made Among The Whispers: Provocation a compelling addition to the ghost hunting horror subgenre, there are a lot of messy elements scattered throughout all of its corners. It does have a solid foundation, and being single-player does differentiate it from its sources of inspiration, but at the end of the day, the source of inspiration is still a better experience. It does lack variety and becomes tedious very quickly.

Among The Whispers: Provocation is available now on PC. 

Reviewed on PC with an RTX 4070, Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 32GB RAM. 

A copy ofAmong The Whispers: Provocation was provided by the publisher.