Many Nights a Whisper: The Echo of Dreams
Amidst this flurry of very good (not to say excellent) indie games, there is one that has particularly caught my attention over the past year. It’s not one of the best known, nor one of the longest or highest rated. No, it’s a little game that lasts about as long as the average movie. This is not meant as a criticism of its length, of course—quite the contrary. How and why did such a brief experience, relative to my annual gaming time, come to occupy such a prominent place when looking back on the most memorable experiences of 2025?
This article contains spoilers about the game, so it is recommended that you play it before reading it.
Game and Principles
First of all, we need to introduce the game, which is no easy task, but also say a few words about the two teams behind the project, Deconstructeam and Selkie Harbour. Deconstructeam is a Spanish video game studio formed in 2013 by Jordi de Paco (writer, narrative designer, and developer), Marina Gonzàles (pixel artist), and Paula “Fingerspit” Ruiz (composer and sound designer). The studio has built a solid reputation with the release of its various projects. You may be familiar with Interview with the Whisperer, Gods Will Be Watching, The Red Strings Club, or The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, which are among the Spanish studio’s successes. Deconstructeam has built (“Ba Dum Tss”) a solid reputation thanks to their writing talent and the deep and innovative narrative experiences they deliver. Selkie Harbour is a studio formed by a Spanish-Irish duo, Manon Gevers (character designer, animator, and VFX artist) and Guillermo Ferrando (programmer and designer). They are known for more experimental and contemplative games such as Rêverie and The Anglerfish Project. Their works are experiential, often tinged with philosophy and featuring a highly personal artistic approach.
Many Nights a Whisper fits perfectly into this legacy. The game propels us into the role of a chosen one called the dreamer. He is chosen by the people to perform a ritual that consists of using a slingshot to light a gigantic brazier carved out of the rock of a reef rising out of the sea. He undergoes lengthy training with only his mentor and the dreams of the inhabitants for company. A monastic life divided between shooting practice and lessons from his master awaits him every day. At night, the inhabitants file past the enclosure that houses the dreamer to share their dearest wishes with him, so that he can make them come true during the ritual. If he accepts the wish, he will cut the mat of hair that the inhabitants slide through a hole in the wall. This braid is not only a simple token of acceptance of the wish, it is also the only resource available to the dreamer to improve his slingshot and hope to one day cover the unreasonable distance that separates him from his final goal, the brazier.
The game gives us an extremely important, almost divine role, thanks to our power to act and make decisions. Now that you have a slightly more concrete idea of the game, its goal, and its main ideas, we can start to get to the heart of the matter.
Growing Up and Learning
I would tend to divide the game into two distinct parts: first, a slow period, then a moment as brief as one can imagine. Let’s start by focusing on time.
As I said when introducing the game, our dreamer, then just a simple child of the people entrusted to a temple by his mother at a very young age, will be chosen to embody and carry the hopes of an entire civilization. His life then changes abruptly as he begins the long preparation that will lead him, perhaps, to achieve his goal. From that moment on, he will be in contact only with his mentor, who has the difficult task of helping him in his training. He will have to sharpen his mind and guide him through the difficulties of this life. The dreamer is a perfectly ordinary child, with no prior preparation for this task, having known only the rudimentary life within the temple. From that day on, and for the next decade, the days will follow one another and be much the same.
“it’s a new day”
They always begin with the mentor’s teaching. These moments prepare the dreamer and the player to embrace all the diversity and complexity of the choices and wishes that await them. The dreamer takes advantage of these moments to question the mentor about his role, his life, and his new purpose. It is interesting to observe that the dreamer’s mind is filled with a mixture of fairly light-hearted ideas and reflections that any other teenager might have, along with other much more complex ideas relating to the sacred, destiny, and the weight of responsibility. Little by little, we understand the importance of our status. The mentor’s role is not to influence decisions but to ensure that the dreamer, and by extension the player, feels as comfortable as possible with the sometimes difficult choices that await them. Sometimes this also means understanding their meaning or significance. The mentor reassures the dreamer when they have doubts and confirms their legitimate convictions. They also offer a more detached view of the situation, most likely because we are the fourth dreamer entrusted to their guidance.
Next comes shooting practice. Everything takes place on a terrace overlooking the sea, with our target constantly breaking the horizon. On this terrace are a bunch of small braziers that serve as training targets. As we observe the scenery, we notice more and more of them, some hidden behind trees, others on small islands further out in the bay. From the very first shot, we realize the gulf that separates us from our target. The slingshot struggles to expel the projectile, our aim is erratic, and we laboriously fire a few hesitant shots. They are a telling testament to the long work that lies ahead.
After a busy day, night falls, but it is not a restful one for our young dreamer. It is for this moment that our status bears this name, the moment when people come to share their wishes with him and when the game unfolds its full potential.
“And the dreamer dreams”
Mirror
Dreams
It is nighttime, and the dreamer, kneeling near an altar carved into the stone, waits patiently for the first wish. A first strand of hair finally slips in front of us, then through the wall, the wish is whispered to us. The dream ritual is simple, peaceful, and discreet. This article is not intended to detail all the wishes in the game, far from it, but rather to show their full power through a few selected examples.
“Oh Dreamer, Behind the wall”
This is the almost ceremonial phrase that we will hear repeated every night. As for the wishes that follow, they are constantly surprising in their diversity, in the variety and scale of the implications they suggest, as well as in the different justifications for each of them. The game is not there to make our choices easier; some wishes are vague or strong enough to make us doubt their full significance, while others touch our hearts and may influence our final choice. They take turns questioning our inner selves, our beliefs, our will, our own moral compass, our emotions, and our experiences. It is also important to understand that the choice of hair braid is not insignificant; achieving the length of hair necessary to make a wish requires true dedication. It implies that each wish is carefully chosen, thought out years in advance in order to be worthy of being presented to the dreamer. The act must be perceived as a kind of sacrifice or gift to the temple in exchange for the favors of a god.
To give a personal example of the type of questions they raise, some wishes are fundamentally good in their initial intentions, but go against my own moral rules. One of them is a young girl who wishes that once she leaves to study, her parents, who are left alone, will get along better and simply live happily and peacefully together. You might ask, how could this wish cause any harm? And I wouldn’t have much to say in response, but morally, I strive to preserve the free will of each individual involved in the consequences of the wishes being granted. This is my personal moral barrier; others will have different views than me, and that’s why the game and each response can appear to be a mirror of the player. Many Nights a Whisper becomes, at times, a philosophical and very personal experience. I’ve only told you about one wish, but it’s important to understand that each one will challenge our personal convictions, in terms of morality, of course, but also in terms of beliefs, equality, rights, individual and collective freedoms… Rare are the games that make us question such profound and varied concepts. They are not approached and treated from a specific angle, serving the broader purpose of a story that seeks to question us. No. We are faced with a request backed by all the experience behind it, and we will be the only ones able to judge it.
The ritual of making wishes can sometimes be incredibly intense cognitively, as well as pushing our own reflections beyond the scope of the game. As I mentioned earlier, the game is not there to make things easier; it also forces players to make quick decisions.
The Choices
The choices in Many Nights a Whisper are one of the central mechanics and are remarkably well executed. In addition to all the moral questions that the wishes raise, the player must take into account that they need strands of hair to improve their slingshot. You must constantly strike the right balance between what you consider morally acceptable and strengthening the slingshot’s string, because, remember, each day of training reminds us that the distance to cover during the ceremony is great.
This constant balancing act is a kind of moral lesson that the game teaches us solely through its game design. As we play, we come to understand that the complexity of achieving something can be proportional to the moral rigor we impose on ourselves.
Some of these wishes and choices have quite far-reaching implications. A man who has succeeded in everything in his life and has everything he needs to be happy comes to see the dreamer to ask for his place in hell, saying that it is not normal to have had everything. He tells him that if hell does not exist, he will create it in his own image. He wants to experience defeat just once in his life, even if it means being responsible for the birth of hell. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know his concrete conception of hell, or whether this personal hell he imagines will have to welcome its share of the damned to fill it. Another wish asks the dreamer to put an end to all this belief, to all the ritual, to our dreamer’s entire reason for living, as well as to the potential false hopes of his people, who could lose themselves waiting for an impossible miracle. The game offers us an opportunity to reflect on our own condition, on the influence of our status on our own society, but also an opportunity to confirm or otherwise our determination regarding the choices we have already made.
On the last night before the ritual, a very specific inhabitant will appear by the wall: our mother. She comes to explain her own story to the dreamer, that of a mother forced to entrust her child to the temple because she was unable to care for him. She comes here, as a form of repentance for abandoning her son, to offer him her wish, to give him the chance he should always have had. The choice you make here is of little interest to us, but it is interesting to note that for the very first time, our dreamer is faced with a choice that concerns only him.
Finally, there remains one last choice to be made, which is ultimately the most important and powerful choice our young dreamer can make: whether or not to try to actually reach the brazier. After all, failure is simply synonymous with life continuing as it was before, a world where prayers remain just prayers and the feeling of hope remains intact. At least until the next dreamer appears.
Decisive moment
The days passed, the mentor’s training and teachings bore fruit, and many residents paid a visit to the dreamer. I have told you about the time, now comes the moment, the evening of the ritual and the final ceremonial shot.
Few games make their final action so decisive and, in a way, so stressful to perform. It’s not a complicated choice, an impossible boss to defeat, or a huge puzzle to solve; it’s just a matter of making the right move. The same move we’ve spent years learning and mastering. During numerous training sessions, we’ve even achieved it several times, giving us time to understand the right position, the right power, and the right angle of fire. Almost like an athlete about to experience the decisive moment of their career, even if they’ve succeeded in everything so far, it no longer matters; only this final act will remain.
This last shot is difficult because it carries the hopes of all those who have seen their wishes granted. It is also a testament to our own determination to make the wishes at stake come true. We slowly advance to the firing line, which is lit by torches, as the shot will be fired at night. The whole town and the surrounding area will see the flaming projectile pierce the starry sky before eventually falling back to its target. This only increases the pressure tenfold. As we advance, we notice a carpet of torches on the water, pointing towards the brazier. We take our position, raise our arm, and then, slowly, we begin to pull back the slingshot. We adjust the aim, the force, the angle, and now everything is ready for the most important moment of our lives. This is where everything is decided, at the precise moment when the dreamer releases the string, the femtosecond when the string is no longer in contact with the skin. This moment corresponds to the Aristotelian vision of the term, as this tiny fragment represents a real break between what was and what will be, between the present and the future. From this tiny fraction of time, as fleeting as it may be, the fate of the world is already decided. The formidable power of this moment will remain one of the most memorable of my year of gaming.
Conclusion
Now we must wait a few seconds suspended in time for the projectile to travel the distance separating it from its target. The world around us, the mentor, the dreamer, and we behind our screens, wait with bated breath for the outcome. During this brief moment, the future is worthy of a Schrödinger experiment, suspended between two states, both changed and similar. I would like to conclude by explaining that, in my opinion and despite all the pressure it exerts, the outcome of the shot ultimately matters little to me. Whether it is missed or successful, what will remain with me, and with each individual, is the path of personal reflection traveled so far, as well as the power of that last moment. The game leaves us facing its end screen with the impression of having experienced something unique and of having dug deep within ourselves to reach this conclusion. It is a game that brilliantly addresses all its themes through dreams. It manages to draw us into moral dilemmas and pushes us to dig deep within ourselves. I hope I have managed to convey why Many Nights has Whisper stands out as one of my most memorable gaming experiences of 2025.