Whirlight: No Time to Trip | PC Review

May 17, 2026 Tomas Becks

In the past two years, I had the privilege of playing the demos for Whirlight – No Time To Trip early and writing about my thoughts of the game for The Gaming Outsider. I enjoyed that because Imaginary Lab’s first venture into the point-and-click genre was the delightful Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bonetown. So when Scott asked me if I wanted to interview the developers and play the demo before it came out, I jumped at the opportunity. And now, finally, the full game is out!

Venice And Verona Combined

The city of Verice Bay in the 1960’s is a lovely fictional town, based on Verona and Venice. It’s the home of many quaint characters, including Hector, an enthusiastic but not so successful inventor. After experiencing a very strange dream, he gets an idea for a fantastic new invention and he needs to search Verice Bay and its citizens for the items needed to bring his dreamt up invention to life. But not everything goes as it should and before he knows it, Hector is embroiled in all sorts of shenanigans involving time travel, evil clowns, liquid light, a hyperactive squirrel, and the end of the world.

A World Comes To Life

Whirlight does not disappoint. It’s a beautiful game, with fluid animations and gorgeous locations, all handcrafted. The game is fully voice cast, and this really brings the whole game to life. The controls are simple and straightforward. I played the game on the Steam Deck and had no issues whatsoever while playing the game. It played very smoothly, and it has features such as double clicking on an exit to immediately go there. There is also a hotspot finder, so you won’t spend hours pixelhunting. Things like that make me very happy and improve my fun immensely.

Wibbly Wobbly, Timey Wimey

The story is wild and whirly, and it involves time travel. It has a lot of surprises and if you play both demos, then you are already familiar with one of them. The puzzles are challenging but all make sense. It really reminded me of the ‘timey wimey’ problems you get to solve in Day of the Tentacle. And the fun thing is that when you have finished the game, it all makes even more sense, in the way that the best time travel movies manage to wrap everything up in a neat bow. The only nit I have to pick right now is that to solve some of the puzzles you need to talk multiple times to some characters and it’s not always clear that this is an option. This caused some confusion with me once or twice, but eventually I figured that out as well.

A Loveletter To Adventure Games

This loveletter to old style point-and-click adventure games (and Italy) lives up to it not just by how it looks, but also by the time it takes to finish the game. This is not a short game, it took me more than 15 hours to finish it. However, the game never felt long or outstayed its welcome. And it also didn’t go wild on references to classics like Monkey Island, which can be annoying sometimes. It’s a funny, beautiful, playful, and highly enjoyable second game from Imaginary Lab that will hit all the right buttons for adventure games fans and bodes very well for the future of this studio.

To hear me talk more about Whirlight: No Time To Trip, be sure to listen to the May 19th, 2026 episode of The Gaming Outsider Podcast. You can also read my interview with

This review is based on a a PC copy of Whirlight: No Time to Trip provided by Homerun PR for coverage purposes.