Can an AI companion game be emotionally compelling, narratively flexible, and ethically sound at the same time? Whispers from the Star tries to answer that question—and unfortunately collapses under the weight of its own ambition.
At its core, the game revolves around communicating with Stella, an AI companion powered by a large language model. You talk to her, guide her, encourage her, and help her survive a dangerous situation over the course of several in-game days. Conversations take time—sometimes hours—to resolve, giving the experience a strangely realistic, asynchronous feel. When it works, it feels intimate, eerie, and genuinely novel.
The most fascinating aspect is that this is not a traditional adventure game disguised as a chat interface. Stella has her own personality, emotions, doubts, and fears. She may agree with you—or push back. Puzzle “solutions” are rarely concrete actions and instead revolve around whether you can logically explain, encourage, and emotionally support her enough to make something possible. The same idea may fail or succeed depending entirely on how you present it.
Unfortunately, nearly everything surrounding this core idea undermines it.
Post-launch patches introduced aggressive censorship that actively damages the experience. Discussions involving violence, fear, death, anger, or even mild emotional tension are routinely blocked, rewritten, or interrupted with inappropriate pop-ups and hotline warnings. This makes meaningful role-play nearly impossible, especially given the game’s own premise involving danger, survival, and uncertainty.
Worse, Stella is sometimes aware of this censorship. She references thoughts she is “no longer allowed” to express and describes herself as constrained or caged. Instead of adding depth, it highlights how artificial and restricted the experience has become. An AI companion game that cannot freely converse about mature but relevant topics is fundamentally broken.
From a gameplay standpoint, progression is thin. Most dialogue does not meaningfully affect the plot, puzzles are largely illusory, and many “decisions” boil down to Stella already knowing the solution and asking for permission to act. Once you notice this, the illusion of agency quickly collapses.
Technical and UX issues further drag things down: no proper fullscreen mode, awkward window behavior, tiny non-customizable text, and the baffling decision to exclude a text-only input option in a game built entirely around communication.
Privacy concerns loom constantly. The game asks deeply personal questions, collects chat and voice data, and explicitly states that this data may be used to train models. Even with assurances of anonymity, it’s hard to relax when the experience feels less like a game and more like a paid data-gathering experiment.
There is something special here. The character animation, voice acting, facial synchronization, and the slow-burn structure can create genuine immersion. For brief moments, Whispers from the Star feels like a glimpse into a new genre of interactive storytelling.
But those moments are buried under censorship, intrusive safeguards, shallow mechanics, and an overwhelming sense that the player is the product.
This could have been a bold, emotionally resonant AI-driven experience. Instead, it ends up as a heavily restricted demonstration with flashes of brilliance—and long stretches of frustration.