If you’re someone like me who lives with anxiety, it’s unfortunately way too easy to get caught up in the ‘what ifs.’ When you live your life anxious about how you’re perceived, what will come next, and what will happen if you do x or y, you miss out on a lot of opportunities. You miss out on slices of your life. You don’t get to take the plunge on exciting new things, and you rarely trust your gut. Many Nights A Whisper, the latest from indie narrative developer powerhouse Deconstructeam (now with the assistance of Selkie Harbour!), explores these ideas, teaching and training you to be okay with the unknown and trusting in yourself. Despite being just an hour long, it’s an experience that’ll sit with you.

You’re put in the shoes of a punkish figure with a blonde mullet named The Dreamer. Ten years ago, you were chosen to perform a ritual. Situated on a small island, you are armed with a slingshot and fire ammunition, tasked with lighting an elusive brazier hundreds of metres in the distance. All this time you’ve been training with braziers in a closer vicinity, though, come an eventful ceremony evening, you have only one shot to light this one sacred chalice. If you’re successful in your quest, the hopes and dreams of all your people will be fulfilled. If not, no wish shall ever happen. No pressure.

As Many Nights A Whisper is coming from the people who have brought you powerful narratives in games like The Red Strings Club and Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood; this new experience is just as reverent and thoughtful as the rest of their catalogue. There’s only one other character that we actually see in-game: The Dreamer’s mentor. Further emphasising the feeling of solitary and important training that you’ve been going through, this is the only soul that The Dreamer’s properly spoken to in all those ten years. This leads to platitudes and sentiments shared between the two; one of the most probing being your mentor asking you, “What is the sibling of death?” Is it freedom? Submission? Violence? Or something else? With this question, the weight of the world is on her shoulders, as she can grant or ruin all that a person has ever wanted, all within a moment’s notice.

This pragmatic writing is found everywhere within the game. Even within the achievement names and descriptions (each filled by lighting one of the dozens of chalices around the surrounding islands), you’re finding flowery prose. Often musings by Jordi De Paco of Deconstructeam, the main credited writer, but no doubt a group effort due to how frequently cross-pollination of themes and ideas appears in their games. You see, like Deconstructeam’s other works, Many Nights A Whisper explores sex, gender, love, religion… the whole gamut. Where a lot of this is explored is in the nightly ceremony, where the Dreamer is visited at their fenced-off and isolated hilltop abode and asked to consider the wishes of others. With the Dreamer positioned on the other side of a wall to a queue of locals, when it is a given person’s turn, they approach the wall and feed a braid of hair through and confess their wish to the Dreamer. If the wish is one you intend to grant, you sever the braid, using it to develop and strengthen your slingshot for the next day. If not, the wish withers and dies.

However, Deconstructeam stories are never binary and have players considering many facets of a conundrum all at once. All the Dreamer knows is this ritual and this training. This ritual is incredibly holy, and she can’t help but feel the importance of granting these wishes. What’s so wrong with that? As I slice up hair and commit to promises, I envision the Dreamer’s opinions and stakes in these promises. After all, every human is inherently selfish, even if on paper it looks like what you want to do is in the service of others. You’re reminded by your mentor before your series of days of training kicks off to think of the world you want to live in as you grant these wishes. I see myself acting selflessly when I, as a transgender person, vow to help remove gender… but aren’t I also doing that to best benefit me, too? Suddenly, the enigma of Many Nights A Whisper gets more tangled.

All while this is going on, Many Nights A Whisper is delivering excellent soundscapes and landscapes. Composer fingerspit returns again, providing the title track that is rich with blends of fast and slow piano melodies as synth work helps to build the piece up in its grandiosity before quickly concluding in under a minute; a verbose and evocative piece for such a small period. In another track, New Strength, you’re getting an idle and isolated lo-fi electric guitar strumming that is a magical mood-setting bed to the synth, reversing roles with the aforementioned Many Nights A Whisper track. This is some of fingerspit’s best, most magical work in a long discography of game soundtracks.

A low-poly art style filled with flourishes helps paint The Dreamer and the mentor’s small world that they’re isolated in together. There’s deep blues as far as the eyes can see, with an endless horizon of sea and sky, interrupted only by dilapidated and overgrown islands and chalices that breach the sea levels. A lot of the environments are built up by crumbling stone and marble, with tapestries carved into the ritual wall, situating you somewhere European-inspired but nonetheless a place isolated from the rest of society. As more and more braziers get lit each day, more light, colour and warmth enter your world as the fiery beacons of hope in the distance burn away.

You have ample days to practice your aim with the slingshot, with the Dreamer getting stronger and gaining more reach with each day. There are no crosshairs to guide where you’re aiming, only the outstretched arm of the Dreamer helping with some of the guesswork. You’re learning how much you have to compensate for the drop off of your fiery shots the more they travel, often subtly teaching you to look to the environment for ways to reach a target. One day, I aimed The Dreamer’s hand in line with where the clouds were on the horizon to reach the goal. The next day, this same method resulted in me overshooting my target, clearly indicating the protagonist’s growth as they get to know their body more. This is reflected in the animation too; the more days that go on, the more The Dreamer is confident and more deliberate in how they pull back the slingshot. It’s brilliant, subtle animation work, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable using all these little factors to best work out your shot.

I haven’t managed to get what I assume is the ‘other’ ending to Many Nights A Whisper. I’m also okay with that. I don’t necessarily fundamentally believe that nailing the shot and granting people’s wishes would necessitate a ‘good’ ending. Like all of the build-up of that hour was teaching me, it’s okay to be okay with the unknown. It’s okay not to have all the answers or what’s to come next, whether you’re The Dreamer or yourself or me. It’s a poignant message. Granted, it’s one that’s hard to accept in the chaos of today, but it’s a vital one. Like The Dreamer finally getting to put their ritual and training to bed, they’re free, and you can be too if you just let go.

Many Nights A Whisper is so succinct with its storytelling that it’s hard to find a thing to pick apart about it. In that one hour of worldbuilding and storytelling, Deconstructeam and Selkie Harbour alike make something magnetic. If you held a gun to my head and told me to criticise the game, I’d point to there being some issues with the story and experience being as short as it is. There’s potential that could have been tapped in there; how the ritual came to be, more backstory on your Dreamer and so on. When I consider all of these thoughts for longer than a second, though, I think about how antithetical it would be to the story being told. Like the unknown, I and other players, whether they like it or not, will have to live and let be with all they don’t know.