DaRmaZat When the world goes silent, your ears become your only way out.
Casting Whispers is a first-person psychological horror, developed and published by Lantern Bay Entertainment, that places you in 1960s Connecticut, inside a storm-battered apartment building where a failed experiment has unleashed something that should never have been heard. It’s an ambitious debut that listens harder than most, even if it sometimes loses its own tonality.
A Storm, a Call for Help
In Casting Whispers, you play as Victoria “Vicky” Lorne, a young lab assistant at the Sachem University’s parapsychology department. When a violent storm cuts the city off from the outside world, she receives a disturbing phone call from her mentor, Professor Zubringer, begging for help at his apartment on 1195 Norman Avenue. What begins as a rescue turns into a cosmic spiral of fractured memories, urban legends, and an entity that feeds on sound itself.
The opening hours are slow but haunting, though. Everyday noises — a dripping pipe, a neighbor’s cough, a cat meowing outside — feel uncomfortably loud against the creeping quiet. Before long, the storm outside feels safer than what’s waiting behind the next door.
Lovecraft meets Americana
As the narrative unfolds, the setting carries strong Lovecraft-meets-Americana vibes when it shifts to an old city weighed down by guilt and strange science. The heart of the story takes place inside an apartment complex, where surreal moments bleed into reality — smoke seeping from under doors, flickering lights revealing phantom shapes, and distorted voices asking questions with no right answers. The psychological angle hits harder than the supernatural one, and several sequences cleverly play with perception in smart, dissociative ways.
Still, progression can feel too opaque. Objectives are rarely clear, and it’s easy to wander in circles wondering whether you’ve missed an item or triggered a bug. Long stretches between save phones amplify the tension but occasionally slide into frustration. The pacing also dips toward the middle chapters, as backtracking replaces discovery.
Listen or Die
Casting Whispers revolves around its signature “Listening” mechanic. By closing your eyes and pressing the Listen key, Vicky hones her senses to detect what can’t be seen: whispered conversations behind walls, noises that hint at hidden mechanisms, or hidden doors that only reveal themselves through subtle echoes. It’s a smart system — both tactile and tense — and forms the basis for several audio-driven puzzles: from identifying a malfunctioning centrifuge, to dialing cryptic phone numbers, to locating lingering entities by sound alone.
However, Casting Whispers’ interactive controls took me some time to get used to. Actions often require holding or dragging the mouse instead of simple clicks, which can feel inconsistent. Dialogue occasionally offers multiple branches — a nice touch — though some responses misalign slightly with tone or context, not in a game-breaking way, though. Controller support, on the other hand, is still a real problem: menus are impossible to navigate with a gamepad, and none of the multiple-choice answers can be selected. Thus, keyboard and mouse remain the only comfortable way to play.
Another surprising omission is the fact that this game has no true pause. When paused, conversations and animations continue in the background, so the pause menu mainly serves for adjusting settings or quitting the game.
Hearing the Unseen
Visually, Casting Whispers is impressive for a solo-developer project. Unreal Engine 5 lends it dense, moody lighting and gorgeously detailed interiors. Yet the developer smartly hides the game’s limitations: faces are never shown directly, always obscured by doors, shadows, or framing tricks that avoid facial animation entirely. The result feels stylized, not cheap — though it’s hard not to miss.
To be honest, in terms of performance, Casting Whispers does not always run smoothly. Camera rotation frequently triggers heavy stutters during the first playthrough — a common Unreal 5 quirk that breaks immersion. Large areas load seamlessly but hitch unpredictably. Optimization clearly still needs work.
Luckily, audio design, as expected, is the star of Casting Whispers. From rattling dishes and distant thunder to muffled footsteps in the next apartment, every sound feels deliberate. The spatial mix builds claustrophobia better than any jump scare could. There are plenty of voice actors in this game and, perhaps surprisingly, their performances are overall really solid — occasionally awkward in delivery but never immersion-breaking. The musical score, drenched in 1960s noir melancholy, deepens the period feel beautifully.
Final Thoughts
Casting Whispers is an atmospheric and imaginative horror experiment that truly understands the power of sound. Its listening mechanic is inspired, its world-building rich, and its soundscape unforgettable. But the experience also suffers from uneven pacing, clunky interaction, and noticeable technical issues that dull the tension it works so hard to build.
For all its flaws, though, there’s something deeply human beneath its haunted corridors — a fragile story about perception, and about the importance of the voices we try to silence or ignore in our daily lives.
Additional Information
Release Date: Oct 22, 2025
Reviewed On: PC. Download code provided by the publisher and PR agency.
Developer: Lantern Bay Entertainment
Publisher: Lantern Bay Entertainment
Relevant links: Casting Whispers on Steam
