The point-and-click adventure game is alive and well in the modern era. A good number is still going after the zany and humorous game that was a specialty of the big developers like Sierra On-Line and LucasArts. imaginarylab pulled off that type of funny adventure game with Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town in 2020, and it's back with Whirlight: No Time to Trip.

The preview build barely scratches the surface of the plot. You take on the role of Hector, an inventor who has had mild success and a good share of failures. Currently suffering from a mental block, he stumbles upon a dream world where a bright blue butterfly has caught his attention. The moment he wakes up, he realizes that the butterfly has given him the inspiration he needs, spurring him to collect the necessary parts to make his next invention a reality.

The preview build barely covers an hour of gameplay, but it provides a very good idea of what Whirlight will be like. The game is a point-and-click adventure in a very simple format that can be controlled with your mouse. Left-clicking makes you move to a spot and interact with objects and parts of the environment. Holding down the right mouse button lets you see all of the interactive hotspots, and scrolling up on the mouse wheel brings up the inventory. That's all there is to it, and the only time you'll need to ever touch your keyboard is to bring up a menu to perform basic functions like loading a save file or quitting.

The preview build lets you visit three different areas, each one quite different from the last. The first is a room completely done up with a black-and-white filter, except for yourself and a seemingly ordinary gift box, which are shown in color. Get out of this room, and you enter a surreal dreamscape with large storm clouds on the horizon and a giant frog . The final environment is your industrial-looking apartment and the quaint dock outside of the building. Each place sports a great amount of detail and some nice-looking effects, such as the smoke billowing out of some geysers. The full game promises more set pieces, and we can't wait to see how they all look.

The locales are vastly different, but the puzzle-solving is timeless. For the most part, your gameplay loop involves you messing with every clickable area in the hopes of finding a key element that can be used to progress to the next step in the puzzle chain. Some of these items can be used directly on the environment, while others need to be combined to create something new that can be used to solve the next puzzle. The good news is that the solutions to just about every puzzle make sense. Despite the surreal nature of some things, you'll have a good idea of what to do once you come across some objects, and you'll be rewarded greatly for that common-sense thinking.

While the solutions to the puzzles might be easy enough to decipher, Whirlight still has you backtracking across the environment. One of the game's few annoyances thus far is that your character walks slowly. The movement isn't glacial, but without an option to move faster or the ability to hold down the mouse button to keep moving, your character will never move with any sense of urgency.

It can be argued that the game goes beyond the titles it is inspired by with sensible puzzle solutions. However, players will also be looking for humor, which is highly subjective. Some of the jokes are the result of silly observations, like heavy scientific books being good as lightweight reading material. Some fall under the category of dry humor, such as being told to clarify what you're asking for when it comes to a fishing rod. Others are just outdated, such as seeing Hector dab for no reason. It remains to be seen how the full game does in this area, but for the time being, the broad range of humor categories means that the game is trying to make everyone chuckle instead of aiming for specific groups.

While the preview build was short, there's some promise to Whirlight: No Time to Trip. The locales are quirky, and the sense of humor can be hit-and-miss depending on your taste. The control scheme is simple, and the solutions to the puzzles make sense throughout. There's still plenty of time before the game is released, but the preview build gives us confidence in the final product.