Charming point-and-click adventures remind us of a more wholesome time in gaming – Whirlight: No Time to Trip has us longing for the good old days

Gaming used to be different. I know that’s a bit like saying all music today sounds the same (it does, by the way), but it did.

There was a wholesome period where gaming was just for fun. It was not there to constantly drain your bank account with microtransactions. Nobody cared when the third (yes, third) trailer came out for a game as much as the game coming out itself, and there were no “influencers” shouting about games they were shilling on TikTok.

We had magazines to give us news and reviews, and yes, I was part of that. A precursor to JackSepticEye, if you will. PaulNotVeryGoodEyes. A mainstay of gaming at that time was point-and-click adventures.

Beyond the obvious classics such as Monkey Island and Indiana Jones, we had so many quirky ones, too. The likes of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and Simon the Sorcerer, to which Harry Potter bears a lot of semblance.

The UK and Europe produced many great ones to compete with the light of LucasArts and Sierra Online. Revolution Software’s Broken Sword series has actually come back recently and Beneath a Steel Sky ranks as one of the most atmospheric games I have ever played.

Before this, and excuse the history lesson, the 8-bit computers started it all. Infocom classics such as Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos (yes, really), and smaller titles such as The Hobbit thrived. These were not point-and-clickers, though; these were text adventures, where you would type your instructions. These then gave way to multi-user versions called MUDS, which you can read about here.

The point being, since gaming has become mainstream, one of the few genres that has remained constantly by our side has been the adventure game. It may not be as prominent these days, but it has always been there and it has always maintained a following.

Step forward, then, Italian devs imaginarylab and their new game Whirlight: No Time to Trip, which came out on Steam last week to little fanfare, but is perhaps one of the best examples of the genre I have played in years.

It’s beautiful, it’s charmingly well-written, and it feels like it was born of the 1990s, but with such lovely graphics throughout, catches your eye immediately.

These days, it takes a certain mind to appreciate a good point-and-click adventure. Puzzles can seem obtuse, and the constant over-explaining of the voiceover can seem weird if you are new to the genre, but you soon get the hang of it.

While you might get completely stuck on the first screen of Whirlight if you have no experience with how these games work, half an hour later, you will be trying to combine items you come across to come up with crazy solutions to Whirlight’s zany puzzles.

An early example, once you have managed to escape from the first room (in itself a long way from blindingly obvious), you need to try to recover a lens on a ledge that is far out of reach. A quick check in your inventory reminds you that you have so far collected a long piece of ribbon and some wound-up dentures.

The ribbon is too light to snare the lens, but if you tie it to the dentures and see if it will grab the lens… you see where i am going here. That is classic, pure point and click puzzle solving at its best.

Plot-wise, the story follows Hector, an inventor whose latest experiment goes badly wrong and starts messing with time itself. Joining him is Margaret, who appears to spend most of the game trying to stop Hector from making an already terrible situation even worse.

Whirlight gives off heavy classic adventure game energy. Strange locations, oddball characters, lots of dialogue, and puzzles that will almost certainly end with players clicking on every object in the room out of desperation. I want to say it’s more like the great European adventure games of old, which makes sense given its Italian heritage, but the madness of classics such as Day of the Tentacle and Maniac Mansion are never far beneath the surface.

Visually, it does stand out. The game blends hand-drawn 2D characters with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, giving it a slightly old-school animated-movie feel. It looks more like a late-90s PC adventure game, but juiced up to 4K that somehow skipped the last 25 years rather than another pixel-art indie project.

Imaginarylab says there are more than 100 locations to explore across different timelines and eras, with the usual mix of puzzle-solving and story-driven exploration. In total, you can probably get through most of it in around 10 hours, but you will have had a good time while doing so.

One aspect I don’t like, and this is purely me coming from how these games used to play, is that if anything Whirllight – No Time to Trip holds your hand too tightly. A right-click shows everything on screen you should examine, and, as you can see above in the lower left of the screenshot, you are given clues as to which objects to try and put together. In the old days, the game would be like “fuck off and stay stuck”. It’s probably a necessary evil with a nod to how people don’t think for themselves while playing or watching TV anymore.

I remember in Sierra’s classic Police Quest game, if you gave your gun to somebody else, just to try it out, it would say, “Thanks, but now you’ll never get it back”, and that was it, effectively game over. Ah, a different time indeed.

Verdict

Whirlight: No Time to Trip is easy to recommend to fans of the genre. You should be downloading it in the background as you finish reading this. If you are new to point and click adventures, you will spend a little time wondering what’s going on, a little more wondering if it’s for you and then some time flicking back to YouTube for help on certain puzzles, but you will still finish it and still look back fondly on your time spent playing.

There’s not enough that can be said about how important the occasional stress-free gaming periods can be. Just sitting back, playing, and having fun. It’s how it used to be, kids, and there is more than just me who pines for it a little more after playing something like this.

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