Reviewed on PC The DeadbeatsWailing Heights is a town inhabited by ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies, and other undead creatures. It sounds scary, but it’s actually a fairly friendly place, as long as you’re dead. Sadly for Frances Finklestein, former manager of rock band The Deadbeats, if you’re alive, you’re breaking one of Wailing Heights’ laws. This is an old-style point and click adventure game, with a body-swapping twist.Arrested at the start of the game for having too much of a pulse, Finklestein must escape his (or her, you get to decide) incarceration and get back to the land of the living. Luckily, a possession wheel quickly comes into your.
This is a device which lets you swap between bodies, but in order for it to work you need to know the person’s name, know something they hate, and know something they like. These vital pieces of info are then worked into a song, which allows you to take over the mind of your target.
Wailing Heights Review. Towards the late ‘90s, before Telltale revolutionised the graphic adventure game genre, I used to play a game called Hollywood Monsters.It was one of the point-and-click games following the Full Throttle or Monkey Island formula, with. A body-hopping, musical adventure game, set in with a horrific hamlet of modern monsters. After being invited to a gig in a town no one's ever heard of, Frances.
While normal adventure games have you scavenging for items to combine to solve puzzles, Wailing Heights has you asking the right questions to find out the right information.Back and forthThe challenge comes in possessing the right body to find out the correct information. For example, to reach the back room party of the Ruff Rider pub, you’ll need to be a werewolf.
But to find out the secret password, you’ll have to be a ghost and use your special ability to eavesdrop on the password when no one knows you’re listening. This is the core loop of the game, changing between various characters and experimenting until you get what you need. It’s a fairly novel way of doing things, but also highlights one of the game’s main flaws.In order to possess another character, you have to be within earshot of them. The game’s locations aren’t that far apart, but running back and forward only to find you don’t have the right character for the job is a tedious process. There were also instances where I had forgotten where I had left people, meaning even more time spent walking around instead of actually playing the game. Of course, having to physically be next to someone to body swap makes sense from a story perspective, but from a game perspective it’s too clunky.Not only is Wailing Heights a melting pot of different creatures of the night, it’s also apparently inhabited by people from all corners of the British Isles.
It’s not a very big town, but you’ll hear accents from Scotland, Ireland, North England, Southern England, and everywhere in between. Some of the voice acting is good, some of it’s not so good, and the same can be said of the writing. The humour is hit and miss, and often hinges on the delivery of the character. The large bulk of the actual narrative is told through a comic book style with a voiceover. This medium is also used to convey the backstory of each character you’ll possess throughout the course of the game.Music on my mindMusic is a big part of the game, and you’ll be hearing a lot of it. Again, the different songs have varying quality, ranging from cringe-worthy raps up to catchy rock n roll tunes. The songs you need to possess other characters will play every time you do it, and the short snippets will become boring pretty quickly.
Three main characters will be your bread and butter for a good chunk of the game, while others will become available towards the end. You have the aforementioned ghost, a lawyer with the handy ability to read people’s minds. There’s also the werewolf, who can turn into wolf form and track scents with his keen nose. There’s the vampire, who can turn into a bat and fly up to out of reach places. You’ll use their special abilities to find out new clues, but after a while I was just using them to move around quicker.Wailing Heights is a game with a unique idea that quickly falls into the same old adventure game traps. It doesn’t take long to fall into the gameplay loop of simply selecting all the dialogue options until something works, and the constant backtracking isn’t fun. The character design, and the hand-drawn artwork in general is good, and the game stands up on its variety.
There are better adventure games out there, but the music-focused nature of Wailing Heights and its British quirks might be enough to make it worth a look as an alternative.
Bizarre, occasionally obnoxious combinations are at the core of any classic point-and-click game, but Wailing Heights brings some sense to the nonsense by requiring you to write songs about its cast of daisy pushing personalities. Set in a kind of town centre for the dead, you play as Francis Finkelstein, the Scouse songwriter behind 60s sensation The Deadbeats’ hits. When the final living member bites the dust, you’re invited to the eponymous city – except the problem is you’re not supposed to enter if you're still alive.
This is a bizarre game, but it will feel familiar for fans of Tim Schafer romps of yore. While it doesn’t have anywhere near the same scale as a Day of the Tentacle, the similarities are there, as you wander around comic book-inspired settings, interacting with an increasingly kooky crop of characters. The key is that, with the right lyrics, you can possess different souls – and so the game becomes about learning the likes and dislikes of its cast, so that you can occupy them and progress the plot. It’s all rather silly, but it’s hard not to smile at rapping Scottish ghouls.
The problem is that you’ll spend a lot of time backtracking through the relatively small world. Once you’ve gained access to different characters, you can only toggle between them when they’re in close proximity, so you’ll find yourself completing a small portion of a puzzle, before returning to another soul, switching, and then travelling all the way back to finish it off. While the setting is, as we mentioned, miniscule, the cumbersome controls and often slow movement speed make it more of an irritation than it should be.
It’s clear that a lot of thought has been invested into the project, though. The cast is split across different horror archetypes, with the werewolves brought to life as rowdy Irish alcoholics, while the vampires are cell-phone obsessed hipsters who hang out in a trendy coffee shop whinging about the bands on stage. At times it’s laugh out loud funny, on other occasions it falls flat – but there’s an enormous amount of effort that’s gone into the artwork and the original soundtrack, which blend together nicely to create a cohesive presentation style.
Sadly, the release far too quickly runs out of ideas. Some of the puzzle solutions are as obscure as you’d expect them to be, but with the scale of the game quite small, you’ll stumble on the answers quite easily as there are only so many people you can meaningfully interact with. And while this does cut down on frustration, it can start to feel like you’re already solving puzzles before they’ve even been presented to you, meaning that you’ve merely got to grit your teeth through the tedium of actually implementing your conclusions, rather than thinking about what to do next.
Conclusion
Wailing Heights’ presentation is perfectly in-tune, but its gameplay is out of time. While it neatly repurposes some old point-and-click tropes, it doesn’t quite have enough quality to match the ambition of the classics it’s so clearly inspired by. There are some laugh out loud moments and some real ear-worm audio, but it’s not quite enough to demand front-row seats for The Deadbeats’ reunion tour.
Average5/10
Scoring Policy
Review copy provided by Outsider Games
Review copy provided by Outsider Games
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