READ & REVIEWED: Whispers in the Walls

One of my favorite tropes in horror films is the crazy room, a room bedecked and baubled with hundreds of sigils, signs, maps, plans, 100 faces of the murder victims with their eyes cut out – ideally all hidden in a space behind a fake wall or through a vent. It’s the physical manifestation of the cultist/mad scientist/murderer’s mind. It’s fundamentally wrong, it’s filmed in red light, or maybe in night vision.

It’s got an implicit threat to it – even if the person, or thing, that was here is no longer in the room with us. In movies, the walls often do a lot more talking than the people exploring them. Those people often spend their time making little surprised and disgusted noises as they understand the diving curtain is human flesh/there’s pictures of them as the rest of the investigators pinned to the walls/there’s a spooky devil statue.

Whispers In The Walls is a close to a DIY version of these ‘crazy rooms’ as you can get for $15. “Make your own madness in 15-60 minutes”, it may as well say on the cover of the book. It’s a slim 40ish pages of perfectly pitched horror. There’s a surprise in every prompt, and you might even be able to creep yourself out in the dark before your first session is over.

Whispers In The Walls is about a room where the departed still has a little something to say. You play a private investigator who is a specialist at these weird, haunted and unusual situations. We don’t actually dwell very long on who it is that’s asked you to visit, or why you’ve got the knack for this – and it’s all for the better. What we do know is that you’re good at listening to the walls – and while you may be Spooky Colombo, it’s the walls who are turning to you to say ‘and just one more thing…’

And those things are mostly horrible, creepy, and cosmic experiences.

This is a solo journaling game with a tight, replayable set-up and an extremely simple loop. You construct a deck of nine cards, three from a Hollows deck (read: really weird stuff, visitors, and the grumpy undead) and six from the Whispers deck. The Whispers deck focuses on objects and items – clues really – that you find in the space you’re investigating. You’ll set aside everything else, knowing that those horrors won’t be in this game.

Because it a very ‘artefact-led’ experience your key activity is finding significance and linking two objects in sequence. It can feel like just being handed items from a haunted version of the UK game show, The Generation Game, which had a central stunt at the end of the game where prizes would be conveyed in front of a player in the final round. Any they could name in 60 seconds would be theirs. In this case, it’s less blenders and microwaves and instead: “here’s a wasps-nest in the shape of an important object that crumbles in your hand, here’s the stars in the shape of another, here’s something dredged from the bottom of HP Lovecraft’s bath. Here’s a cuddly toy…” 

Making those connections is easily enough done, but it does also sometimes feel like you’ve being handed just too much to carry to create a sound narrative. You can feel like you’re just experiencing the moment – rather than controlling a story. Which is true, and you’ll quickly realize this is the point. You’re here to experience first, solve later. You wouldn’t want to try and find the killer before you’ve got all the clues, would you?

When it works, these repeated and interesting images lend a cinematic speed to the game. In one session I had three different ‘floor’ cards that manipulated the room like a brick-based blender, nearly drowned me, and finally dragged me out into the outer reaches of the cosmos. Each pointed me to a new bit of symbolism, and object, that I could later connect back to the truth of the story. 

In this case all these events and things all stitched together cleanly, as a kaleidoscopic experience that felt like a rollercoaster of imagery. These three cards produced shorter, faster entries, they created a rush of experience through the way they juxtaposed with one another so quickly. 

And this is important because the game doesn’t ask you to be in control of the story. In other solo journaling games, such as the recently reviewed Project ECCO your role is more like that of an architect, that of someone who is ‘in charge’. Here you’re an agent looking to experience a place and then, once you’re finished listening, pick the truth out from between your teeth at the other end.

As this universe’s number one Wall Therapist, you’ll be presented with a chance to offer your diagnosis at the end of the session. Each ending prompt is subtly different, but with some form of baked-in finality to your situation. You are encouraged to take stock of your notes, return to what you’ve written, and consider it in a new light. And you’re as often answering ‘what happened here?’ as you are ‘are the spirits satisfied?’. A few endings offer an opportunity for a debrief with what’s in the walls, or even a confrontation. It’s so good to have a game that wants you to go back and consider what you’ve actually written down as part of the game – rather than treating it all like an act of spirit writing.

Of course you’ll end up asking yourself a question that not explicitly stated in these end prompts: did you win? And while this isn’t really a game about winning – it’s about exploring what has been left behind, dragging your senses through a game and putting it together afterward – there’s a satisfying sense of completion at the end of every session. You’re entering the situation as an expert, and you’ll likely leave it as one. I certainly felt like I had won.

All of this and a session can be blissfully short. Whispers in the Walls suggests a lower time range of 15 minutes, and it’s one of the few times I’ve seen a lower gameplay estimate and thought “I can believe it.” 

Earlier I mentioned the construction of the game deck. One thing that I enjoyed doing in my playthroughs was to set aside any cards used in previous outing (aside from the jokers, which are an integral part of the horror and threat). This turns Whispers in the Walls into a legacy game of sorts, ensuring you’ll never bump into the same prompt twice.

This replayability is one of the things that I admire most about this game. Many solo games offer a single playthrough across multiple sessions. They ask to be part of your life and weave their way into the day to day rituals you carry out. But not in this case. The variety and speed here means that while you might be ‘Psychic Colombo’ today, tomorrow you could well be ‘Clavoyant Kojak’, and later on, ‘Jessica Fletcher with a Ouija board’. I’m making light, and you might want to draw a thread between your sessions, but I enjoyed finding different characters or aspects based on the locations and set up of each of my misadventures.

The locations are the root of all of this excellent cosmic adventuring through the dark. Every solo game lives and dies on how well you catapult the player into their own imagination, how much grip you give to their tires, or indeed, in this case, how well the hand materializing out of the floor grips your ankle.

The first card you draw from your little deck will give you the location that you’ll be investigating.  Each is written solidly and forces you to make specific and crunchy additions to the initial setting. It makes it painfully simple to start bringing light to whatever lost souls or foul demons might be waiting behind the wallpaper – describe a vice, a practice, what was once grown, the last celebration’s decorations. It quickly helps you to the starting line of what kind of story you want to tell – let the first thing that comes to mind hit the page, and you’ll hit the ground running.

If you’re stuck there’s also a handy reference at the back of the book. This set of D66 tables offers you plenty of objects, sentiments and descriptions. While most of it simply isn’t needed, unless you’re really stuck, there is an amusing typo – or intentional joke – of including ‘puppet’ as an object twice (and a poppet). I used these spark tables a couple of times to find my way - even if I didn’t use the result directly.

It’s curious, as the rules for this game are simply ‘play the card, read the entry, journal about it’ across two pages (plus a content warning). These are paper thin instructions, and I did originally worry that this was going to be an experience of directionless floating. It could have been a vibes game without a guide.

But the way that each prompt really drives you toward another scene filled with specifics and allusions is impressive. There’s no wasted time here, no fat to trim, no ‘oh I don’t really know what is happening’ going on. It’s fast, crunchy and will bring the worst out of you easier than you’d like.

The tone of the writing is clever too. Nothing is belabored, things that happen which are decidedly weird – such as meeting the Cthulhu chap in a suddenly water-filled ninth floor apartment – don’t feel overwrought. 

Sometimes the walls are alive and feeling, or possessed and threatening, or aloof or fleeing, but they’re never just a wall of nothing. You’ll feel sympathy for the place, and then discover that you’re dealing with something that can’t comprehend your sympathy – or that something cosmic manifested as mundane and human pain. 

The range of horror is wild enough to keep you surprised by each card – and there’s not a single dud note. It’s quite common for solo game writers to try and account of lulls in the action through the prompts, and it probably works as intended half the time. Here it’s all killer, no filler. Except for when the walls are filled and pulsing with something horrific. And they’re not always trying to kill you.

Other prompts, which I read and played by candlelight at my dining table after the rest of my family were happily snoring away, were enough to creep me out. It’s the powerful ability of our own minds to mess ourselves up quickly brought to the fore. There’s a bit in The Ring (1998) where ‘the girl’ walks across a hallway or across a doorway. This has always, somehow, managed to give me the creeps. Maybe this is the idea that there’s some threat just beyond the partition, or that there’s confirmation that there's something there, but I don’t really know where exactly Whispers in the Walls brings out an impulse and tendency towards this kind of fear. The game is entirely focused on the experience of ‘try not to think about that scary bit from the film too hard before going to bed in the dark’ – by making you think about it. 

(It’s entirely possible that it’s only my brain that is this suggestable, but I think we can all relate to spooking ourselves.)

Additionally, if you’re playing in the dark, or by low-light such as candles, there’s an inherent ‘out of the corner of your eye’ aspect to the experience every time you look up from your journal. Obviously nothing moved near the fireplace, did it? Right?

Whispers in the Walls is a masterful piece of work. It’s written artfully, with the love and attention of the great horror writers who know how to get under your skin and make it itch. It is in turns wild and deeply serious. It plugs into the best of what a journaling game can be.

You owe it to yourself to give this game of lightweight exorcism a go. Grab a copy, light a candle and plan on everything getting a little bit creepy.

Christopher John Eggett is a writer, editor and game designer from the UK. He was previously the editor of the monthly print magazine Tabletop Gaming. Chris and his partner make small solo and tabletop roleplaying games as Ada Press (https://adapress.itch.io/). Find him on BlueSky at @cjeggett.co.uk (https://bsky.app/profile/cjeggett.co.uk) or on his personal site cjeggett.co.uk, he's always happy to talk.