It was a Thursday night, and I had managed to convince a couple of friends to gather into an online co-op session for a game they had never played. As an adult pushing 40, this is admittedly difficult. Removing the buy-in hurdle makes it easier, I suppose. With the Whisper Mountain Outbreak, “friends pass”, my friends can download a demo version of the game and join me as long as I host the campaign. Our avatars appear on screen in the dingy, poorly-lit gathering space before a mission, and we begin to explore.
Prompted with a choice, “Who Are You?” appears above three choices in the center of my screen. We all choose our character backgrounds, allowing us better melee weapons, more damage using firearms, and the ability to sprint faster. Customizing our avatars takes priority as there’s not much else we can do aside from choose a mission. After we’re all wearing what we want to wear, I make the mission choice.
Our first mission is to infiltrate the town hall and extract the “classified container.” Whisper Mountain Outbreak takes place in a fog-covered mountain named Mt. Bisik in 1998. This color is nice, if not somewhat inconsequential. Though the setting is largely informed by the architecture and art portrayed within the game. Going to locales near Mt. Bisik definitely informs you more about the Indonesian roots of the developers, with markets and local clinics looking decidedly less American and Euro-centric.
Whisper Mountain Outbreak has a time and place, and it looks the part very well.
Despite the isometric perspective and pixel-art style, Whisper Mountain Outbreak invokes a sense of a roguelike Resident Evil game. Your health is represented by a patient’s heart monitor that reflects green in high health and red in low health. You can combine green herbs you find to make them more powerful and take up less inventory space. Ammunition and guns aren’t necessarily scarce at the beginning of the game, but become more scarce throughout. There are puzzles abound.
Far from a dig at Whisper Mountain Outbreak, the similarities to Resident Evil simply frame it in a familiar way for the player. The puzzles are unique and less about finding keys represented by playing card suits and more about basic math, memory, or codes found projected on the walls. More importantly, there was no moon logic when it came to solving these puzzles. I found the proper clues and was able to solve them without feeling cheated.
Going through the various locales, we would find and upgrade our equipment, collect reagents and materials, and receive skill points to be used back at base. The macro loop is simple enough. Choose a locale to visit, explore to find materials and equipment, solve the puzzle, collect the objective, and outmaneuver an endless horde to get back to the car. What’s exciting is the moment-to-moment gameplay.
My team was breezing through the earlier missions, exploring every nook and cranny to find equipment, solving puzzles unrelated to the primary objective, and more interested in scouring the stage than completing the objective. Right up until we got to an abandoned factory.
Abandoned factory is a scary locale, and Toge Productions does an excellent job of making these already scary-sounding places perilous. We were tasked with killing a large plant, but in order to kill it, we needed to burn away some connected plants with acid. Finding the connected plants was easy enough, but we needed to break into the chemistry lab to create the acid first, which also required finding the formula.
Whisper Mountain Outbreak wears that Resident Evil inspiration on its sleeve. This is a game that wants you running around with your friends, trying to keep track of one another, share puzzle solutions, and do what you can to get out of these awful situations. Running around trying to solve various solutions while the music slowly whipped up towards a crescendo had my heart racing and me on the edge of my seat. The music drops, a moment of silence, followed by the bloodcurdling scream of a zombie horde.
Hordes occur throughout the mission, both over the course of time and during pivotal puzzle moments. You’ll also receive one once you’ve completed the objective, and the only way out is back to the truck you rode in on. Even getting back to the truck isn’t the end of your journey, as the only person who can start the truck is the one who gathered the objective. And even then, the truck needs 10 seconds to warm up before you can get out of there.
Loading onto the truck is brilliant as it immediately goes to a cutscene where the truck reverses through a barricade and peels out of the parking area. It’s loud, it’s fun, and it enhances that feeling of just barely getting out alive.
Unfortunately, the Early Access to it all tempered my team’s enthusiasm to return anytime soon. Primarily, we had carved out a solid two hours to play the game, the most we all had both energy and time for. Unfortunately, this meant that we weren’t able to complete our run in the allotted time, and with no save mechanic implemented in the game yet, that meant we’d have to start over afterwards.
I think the intent of Whisper Mountain Outbreak is supposed to be run-based. However, the run can take a long time. I think adding a save mechanic would be crucial. Another minor issue is that we all agreed it felt like something was missing when creating the backstory. We’re all mostly the same, and the game could benefit from a class-like ability. Things like a recharging group heal, in-game camera, or adrenaline rush to help melee zombies, it just felt like a little piece was missing.
That said, we had a great time during our runthrough of the game. I myself played a little solo, and while the gameplay was largely the same, I was definitely more on edge. Solo play seems a little more tuned to be easier on the solo player while remaining dicey. Even alone, I was having a pretty good time solving puzzles and killing zombies.
Whisper Mountain Outbreak is a fun jaunt and has the seeds of a really great co-op survival horror experience. Throughout Early Access, if they can iron out some of those issues, I think the release will turn out to be a really solid and unique addition to the survival horror canon.
