Casting Whispers | PC Review

When our partners offer a review code for a horror game, you can almost always count me in. Casting Whispers looked like a pretty run-of-the-mill walking simulator with horror vibes, but it also offered a hook. Closing your eyes would enhance your hearing sense. I am a fan of sound and audio. Not nearly as much as I am a horror fan, but if you offer something horror AND sound related, it is an offer that I cannot pass up. What resulted was an uneven experience that drifted from the trailer’s implication, but still delivered plenty of effective creepiness.

Hallucinations and Mystery

You play as a research assistant for a professor at a university. It’s the 1960s and you are helping him discover the use of drugs and their effectiveness in unlocking Extra Sensory Perception and other psychic abilities. Ah yes, the 60s.

After arriving at work, ordering supplies, and completing a few small tasks to learn the controls, the professor summons you to his apartment because he is unable to come in. There is a storm arriving, so you head over to the apartment in the rain. This small urban setting is already creepy with the darkness and the rain. Most of the buildings are old and poorly lit, and you are warned not to walk through this area. It sets the right tone. Most of the area has already closed up due to the weather, too.

There is nobody around. I find the building where the professor lives and, thankfully, the pawn shop on the ground floor of the apartment building is still open. The clerk is kind enough to let me into the apartment area. But something about this place feels wrong. You can feel it right off the bat.

The first step is to locate the building superintendent, Jay. She knows everyone and everything about the building. She sends you to the basement, worried that the heavy rain will flood it and put out the furnace’s pilot light, filling the building with explosive gas. You must shut off the gas valve! Thus begins a 4 hour journey into confusion, hallucination (or is it real?), and fright. More about the basement in a later section.

A Promising Mechanic That Fades

In the trailer, it is implied that the core mechanic for Casting Whispers is related to sound. You close your eyes to enhance your hearing and decipher what comes next. This is supported early in the game before you leave for the apartment. You are trying to find out which centrifuge is malfunctioning. You must stand in front of each of them and close your eyes to hear the mechanics of each centrifuge and discover which one isn’t running properly. As you walk to the apartment, you pass a theater. The rain is too heavy, so you close your eyes to focus on your hearing. You hear theater employees talking to each other about the weather and the dangers of leaving in the dark. The same for another apartment you walk past. A couple is bickering. Everything points toward sound-driven gameplay.

Once you arrive at the apartment, though, the concept is largely disregarded. Instead, closing your eyes is used as a means to progress the environment. A couple of times, you are stuck in a (presumed) hallucinated loop. Closing your eyes and opening them again reveals a new door that you can use. Another time, you are trying to escape the basement because the (presumed) hallucinations have caused you to believe that you need to shut the gas valve off again. But the flooding begins overtaking you. Closing your eyes and opening them again makes the flood go away. It’s still a nifty mechanic, without question, but not the sound enriching experience that I was hoping for.

Lost in the Hallways

Casting Whispers is a walking simulator through and through. Walking throughout the 5 total floors, including the basement and the rooftop, is the main objective. There are a few characters central to the story within the apartment who give you a new objective. Let’s be clear, though: Nothing really makes any sense. You tell the police officer who lives there that the phones are dead, including the pawn shop phone, and he tells you to go try the pawn shop phone. I wouldn’t say this is a bug, just another cog in the confusion machine trying to trick you into wondering what is real and what isn’t.

Besides walking (or jogging at times), closing your eyes, and knocking on doors, there isn’t much else to the gameplay. When the story beats hit, though, it’s a true horror pleasure! I enjoyed the Jaws-esque trope of keeping the ghost/monster/whatever-it-is largely hidden to enhance the dread. Sometimes, the unseen is creepier than the obvious.

A Building Designed to Unsettle

Let’s get this out of the way: The game has hardly any music. As you walk through the apartment, it’s all about the sounds that you hear along the way: Your footsteps, the massive storm going on outside, water dripping from the ceiling, spooky sounds from the apartment. Are there monsters here? Is it all my imagination? The sound design is impeccable, I just wish that closing-your-eyes-for-listening mechanic played a larger role.

The design of the apartment is stellar. The standard floor hallways are full of twists and turns. My first walk through each floor made me wish I drew out a map. The staircases to each floor don’t make logical sense, shame on the building planner. There’s a purpose to this, it’s all part of the unease. Every design decision is meant to disorient the player (and, for that matter, the character within the game). Since I spent roughly ninety percent of the game walking around the building, I learned the layout pretty quickly. It is still disorienting because the floors don’t make sense if this were the real world, but I began remembering which turns were wrong and where the staircases were pretty quickly.

Then there is the basement. Whoo Nelly. Those dreadful walls that just scream at you to get out! The walls are filled with cracks, pockmarks, dirt, grime, and just look evil. It’s dark and dingy, I don’t want to spend any more time there than I have to. As someone who grew up afraid of the basement, this was nightmare fuel and I loved every single moment and every goose bump. Furthermore, the basement is filled with even more illogical twists and turns. Thankfully, each door is identified by a sequential letter. At least I knew I was heading in the right direction and could easily find my way back out. 

Final Verdict – Casting Whispers

By the second half of the game, and realizing that the hearing and sound aspect was not utilized in the way that I had hoped, I began to feel the slog of walking through the halls again and again. The hallucinations which would take you walking through the building only to close your eyes and wind up back in the room where you started the objective started to wear thin on me. The four hour runtime makes me admit that this isn’t that big of a deal. The dread and creepiness was steady throughout even if I found myself saying, out loud, “I get it! This might not really be happening!”

The payoff was cool on paper but it didn’t connect with me. The endgame undermines a lot of the earlier story in a way I found disappointing. This is not to say that other players will not find it spectacular. In a horror sense, sometimes we need endings like this. And it certainly kept with the disorienting aspect. 

In short, Casting Whispers excels at what it does well. Its repetitive objectives and unclear direction kept it from delivering a satisfying journey from point A to point Z, but its atmosphere and tension will absolutely resonate with the right audience.

To hear me talk more about Casting Whispers, be sure to listen to the November 11, 2025 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast around the 38:25 time stamp.

This review is based on a PC copy of Casting Whispers provided by Mark Allen PR for coverage purposes. As of the time of this writing, it is exclusive to this platform.