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When a game gets in the way of its own strengths it’s hard not to be really disappointed. White Night, an eerie horror game in the vein of the classic Alone in the Dark, eschews combat in favour of exploration, puzzle solving and the odd bit of running for your life, but moments of confusion, infuriating insta-deaths and a troublesome save system refuse to let the experience flow. It might be called White Night, but it was a Blue Room by the time I’d finished swearing in anger.
You play a man who, in the darkness of night, thinks he’s hit a woman in the road. He swerves his car and injures himself, then looks for help (and answers) in the house nearby. With a garden full of graves and strange symbols all over, things go from odd to creepy extremely quickly.
Played from multiple third-person camera angles, similar to the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill, you wander about the large house, finding clues and solving simple puzzles that are almost always related to shining light onto something – whether it’s on a chest so you can open it or a hallway so you can safely pass through it. Gameplay ends up feeling like a mixture of old-school survival horror and Grim Fandango-style adventure.
That danger comes from ghosts, often leaving you in peace until you alert them, but occasionally roaming about like guards on patrol. Let any of them touch you and it’s game over, so you’ve got to be careful, or get good at running.
It’s the fear induced by these apparitions that makes the experience so nerve-wracking, but the instant death when you encounter them up close means you’ll often find yourself cursing the lack of save points. This is made worse by the way you are often ambushed as you walk through a door, spotting the ghoulish girl too late, your step already too close and the monster on you before you have chance to hold down the run button. Combine this with numerous situations where you’ll likely be scratching your head over what to do next (tip: make sure you’ve searched high and low for light switches or lamps or similar), and it’s easy to get ripped out of the ghost story and find yourself taking stress breaks.
In order to try and avoid the pain of a badly timed instant death, I found myself backtracking to save points (where possible) after every key event. Arm chairs serve as White Night’s typewriters, and matches to light a nearby candle essentially the ink ribbon. For much of your time the only light comes from a lit match held in your hand, and it’s possible to run out if you don’t keep stocked up. In pitch black you can’t deal with the situation, your character slowly freaking out until it’s game over again and back to your last save.
There’s a pleasantly unsettling story running through White Night, told well through in-game scenarios and plenty of documents found lying around – books, notes, letters and pictures all doing their part. You’ll want to see it all unfold despite the numerous irritations, and the game’s art direction helps with that too.
Presented in black and white apart from the flame of your match, White Night can be gorgeous. Rooms once covered in specs of ambient light among darkness are suddenly bathed in blooming white as you open a door, shadows creep up walls when you find a much needed light switch, and ghosts float around on the edge of your vision. The look ties perfectly to the film noir presentation that runs through the voice over work and music, making for something you’re unlikely to have experienced before.
There’s a lot to enjoy in White Night, but I wish it wasn’t so keen to punish you – often for simply exploring. It’s a haunted house ride that is constantly and needlessly stopped, the carts sent back a few moments so you’re forced to sit through the same scares time and time again until you either get lucky or so frustrated you just want to get off. Those scares always make you jump, but once would have been enough: you just want to see what’s around the corner. I found myself worrying about the gameplay systems more than the things in the game world, and that’s not a good thing.
Had White Night been more of a ride, dragging you through rather than slowing things down, its subtly unsettling tone and at times nerve-shredding moments would have had a much greater impact. Sadly you’ll spend longer crying foul over the game’s many issues than you will enjoying the adventure. There’s still something of note here, but it’s a lot harder to recommend than it should have been.
Version Tested: PS4
