Deconstructeam’s mystical archery ritual aims for the sky but its target is within.
Many Nights a Whisper takes place atop a mountainous island ritual site. An isolated place surrounded by lush blue waters, serene fishing boats and monolithic, unlit torches. The Dreamer has spent a decade training here for a long-awaited ceremony: shooting a flaming arrow to ignite a far-off cauldron.
If your aim is true, the dreams of all whose braids are woven into your bowstring become real. If your aim is false, you ensure calamity. Just days remain and your wayward shots still fall short. If you think you’re ready for the ceremony, you’re dreaming.
This is a subtly mystical place, as if Breath of the Wild confined Link to a Hateno Village garden with only a bow. Sparse, tinkling music plays in a beautiful world of bold watercolours. Little is given away, though each time you light a practice cauldron, Steam achievements ingeniously double up as a codex: their text exceeds the intrusive grey box and describes the ritual’s history.
By day, you practice in the small courtyard that’s home and prison in what’s otherwise an island paradise. Archery is hard, especially without guidance beyond your mentor’s wily, gnostic wisdom. No reticule, or even a ghostly arc, predicts your arrow’s destination. You learn by trial and error after error after error. A familiar mechanic becomes fascinatingly reflective. Shots at nearby practice cauldrons are slow, deliberate, full of quiet tension; drawing your arrow takes seconds, seeing where it lands takes seconds more.
Over the space of an hour, you internalise your bow’s capabilities, test its range, learn the exact angle arrows fly from your hand, and watch countless shafts sink beneath the waves along the way. Deconstructeam, best known for The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, focuses on progression we usually skip or abstract, giving the training montage the importance it deserves.
Typically, weapons level up, movesets expand, improvement comes in the form of special moves or blows that remove ever-larger chunks of an enemy’s health bar. Here, the practice range forces a naturalistic attitude to improvement; you develop one skill towards a single goal. Devoting yourself to a single-minded obsession here through Many Nights’ stripped back mechanics proves a refreshing and intriguing task, although those dutiful repetitions start to grate by the end.
Practice as long as you like by day. Next comes the night. You come to know this peculiar place through a procession of hopeful villagers who gather at the residence’s door. They arrive offering their overgrown hair. You may never see them through the wall of statues keeping them out, but their vulnerability, warmth and humour shines through the stone barrier in these brief but memorable encounters. They feed their braids through a slot in the closed temple door, sharing their wish before you decide whether to grant it by slicing their hair to be woven into your bowstring.
Their wishes range from heartfelt to flippant, childish to murderous. As trivial as giving a child an invisible cat anti-pet parents won’t notice, to changes as weighty as remaking the world into a post-work utopia that won’t judge gender dysmorphia.
You need braids to extend your arrows’ reach or you’ll never hit your target; this factor makes your nighttime decisions quietly provocative. Some wishes I granted were simple, acts of pure kindness causing no harm. Others made uncomfortable or unethical requests I turned down. Some made me uncomfortable but I accepted them anyway, a pragmatic choice I felt forced to make to improve my bow’s range.
The cycle repeats. I practise, then I judge, until the day comes to prove my aim. A showdown with destiny momentous as any final boss fight, except the outcome depends on my execution of one action.
Your save state is wiped. There’s no going back. You line up your shot. Confidence shrinks by the second. You take aim, make one final, uncertain adjustment, then fire! The arrow blazes through the night sky. You watch it dip like a meteorite. Everything, absolutely everything, comes down to this. Did you practice enough? Were your choices wise or fair? Does damnation or utopia await? The arrow zips towards its target and… what happens next almost doesn’t matter.
What matters most is that instant of immense tension, and its release in an explosion that illuminated my abilities, my dedication to my task, my underlying doubts, in the light of my own flaming arrow after a journey of deliberate practice and gentle contemplation. Are you good enough? It’s worth spending an hour with Many Nights a Whisper to confront the bounds of your skill and diligence and find out.
Score: 8
This review is based on a PC code provided by the publisher.
