Buy White Night

An imperfect gem of a game.

The Good:
- Great art design, and excellent atmosphere
- Well-crafted level design
- Interesting gameplay mechanics and puzzles
- Good integration of light/dark mechanics
- Excellent pacing for the majority of the experience
- Plenty of "game" (~5 to 6 hours for a first playthrough without getting all achievements)
- Above-average writing and voice work
- Nice-yet-predictable storyline
- Genuinely creepy, with a few jump scares for good measure
- Puzzles avoid "moon logic"
- Actually fairly challenging. This is not a walking simulator
- The "noir" look works, most of the time
- Bug-free, for the most part

The Bad:
- Lots of aliasing.
- Low poly models, and some poor animation work here and there
- Save system is a good idea horribly executed. You will lose some progress here and there.
- AI is unpredictable in a bad way. Plenty of cheap deaths waiting for you
- Fixed camera angles make for hit-and-miss
- Predictable ending
- Limited resources can be aggrivating if you're stuck
- One or two lame puzzles
- Sluggish opening act throws the pacing off a bit.
- Unskipabble cutscenes

Overall, if you're a fan of Resident Evil 1, it's hard not to recommend this game. It has a lot of great ideas, is pretty scary at times, and moves the player along at a nice pace. The price is great for the content that is here. Not a ton of replayability, but plenty of achievements for those who care. This could have been a lot better visually if there had been a decent anti-aliasing solution in place, but it doesn't really hold the game back that much.

Be prepared to experience a few cheap deaths, and lose a little progress (it's only really annoying when it happens too long after a save, or after a longer cutscene). Other than that, this is an excellent peice of entertainment for fans of the genre, who want to see it with a noir bent. Dark, brooding, creepy and very fun.

I don't really want to cover the story here, because that's part of the fun of playing the game. I will say I didn't find it to be the main attraction of the game; the game runs quite well on inertia -- exploring the environment, opening up new areas, solving puzzles and of course dealing with all the creepy things sprinkled about gives more than enough reason to spend time in this world. Mise en scene is high, and while I found the written material (books, letters, etc) to be written very well, the core storyline is not hugely intruiging. Your mileage may vary. Short version: You go into a house. Bad stuff happens.

Score: Buy it.

+ Great music and voiceacting.
+ Pretty scary. Soiled myself.
+ Awesome noir theme.
+ Good puzzles.

+/- Used 5 hours to beat it.
+/- OK story.
+/- Above mediocre. I won't play through it a second time.

- A couple of cheap deaths.
- The camera and controls can be very frustrating.
- The game crashed about 4-5 times.
- I had to synch the game a couple of times, because a lot of the objects didn't show. This resulted in being blocked by invisible walls etc.
- Very unoriginal and predictable ending.

Another hard night in Steam Town. I peer into the streets looking for a little fun, but the sight hits me like a Mack Truck full of garbage: Boss Activision has the city tonight. A hundred Call of Duty hatchet men; the gunfire's so thick you'd barely be able to see the movie tie-ins pimping their wares if they didn't swarm like the bugs under a June streetlight. Distinguished old names walk with 'em, but I shake my head in disgust. I see the bruises and I know old man Activision already bought their souls.

Crows will come to eat Activision's buffet. But me? I just pour myself a glass of the hard stuff. That's when she comes through my door: all black dress and ivory skin like something out of an old movie or a graphic novel. Looks to kill for. The whisky burns my guts like a lit molotov and I know I'm going to play this game. She says she's got a job for me, "survival horror just like the good old days." I take another drink and think to myself, good old days or bad hard times? I ask for her name and she tells me through a sly smile, "White Night."

Another hard night in Steam Town.

Before you wretch at the prospect of another horror game on Steam, know that White Night is pretty cool. Okay, so it's got a lot of questionable gameplay elements we knew weren't very good in 1996, a story that's handicapped by its reliance on cliche, and the old cardinal sin of scrapping the visual-interactive medium to tell a story through document collection. Wait! Don't leave yet! You'll notice I still gave this one a thumbs up. And it's not even a half-hearted "this game is inoffensive but completely mediocre, so my thumb is really dead center but I'm in a good mood today" thumbs up.

White Night opens up with a sequence where you control a period 1930's car driving down an empty New England road in the middle of the night. Your headlights illuminate billboards along the road with the game's credits while a mournful jazz song plays. Something like this tells me the developers made something special and they know it. It sets the tone for a detective horror story with a 1930's noir style with aplomb and lets you really drink in the game's visual aesthetic.

Breathe in. Exhale. This game rules atmosphere and it doesn't let up after that strong intro. The main character peppers his inner monologue with metaphors as colorful as the game is monochrome. His lines are read with the steady sort of grim determination you'd expect from a noir hero. The fixed camera angles work artistically, if not necessarily gameplay-wise, with each area having strong framing that lends to the comic-book feel. The rooms of the mansion the game is set in couldn't do a better job of conveying an increasing feeling of decay and confinement - motifs central to the story - supported by the Depression-era setting. And the collectible documents bring forth all the history and insanity you need to tie the package together. It's good. Damn good.

As a story, though, White Night has some pretty damning weaknesses. I've already mentioned that it relies on a cliche. I saw the obligatory twist coming before I was an hour in, less than halfway done exploring the first floor. And the game did disappoint by doing exactly what I expected. Seeing where the game was going so early, took a good chunk of the magic out of it for me. Yeah, the game's tone was strong enough to sock me through the plate-glass window of my imagination, but I didn't tell it to stop!

White Night is a ghost story and the ghosts as antagonists really lack the sort of visceral weight I want from a noir thriller. Seeing my guy swarmed by flailing ghosts just doesn't have the impact of knowing he could end up with his skull caved in by a blunt object. In fact, the occult elements of the story really fall flat (not unlike a skull caved in by a blunt object). There's a lot of metaphysical B.S. involving alchemy that clashes with the very believable letters and diary entries. A Depression-era noir thriller could definitely make good use of occult motifs, but here I think they mostly serve to disconnect the story from the gritty tone the game set up so well.

Even though story and atmosphere are where it's at for a game like this, let's talk gameplay before you guys turn to hard drinking and fistfighting just to get some action in. White Night has stolen its clothes from Resident Evil and Silent Hill, if not quite gone so far as to disembowel them and wear their skin. I don't need to tell you guys about tank controls and fixed camera angles. This game's got them and has all the gameplay problems associated with them. You'll experience cheap deaths and confusion from blind angles and getting turned around between screens, make no mistake.

The game doesn't really have combat, unlike its predecessors. Instead, your main resource is matches, which allow you to explore the dark areas of the house without mysteriously dying. Interestingly, the matches behave a bit like real matches in that you might randomly get a dud. Combine this with fixed save points and White Night makes safety an uncertain proposition, which is good for horror. However, it can quickly get frustrating if you have to redo long sequences between checkpoints or go running back to refill your small supply of matches because you got a bunch of duds in a row.

Match light won't kill or even fend off the ghosts that can instantly kill you, only switching on electric lights will do the job. Once again this can make things tense, or it can be very frustrating when you have to run a gauntlet of ghosts randomly moving around in the dark. Yeah, the stakes have been raised, but during these sequences I died so many times trying to navigate them, that I just ended up getting irritated by the futility of it rather than horrified. It's also worth noting that you can't run past any ghost. Ghosts meant to block your way until you solve a puzzle will block your way until you solve a puzzle and it's not often clear which ghosts are which.

So the gameplay walks a razor's edge between tension and frustration. That razor's edge cuts impressively when it works, but when you're juggling it among so many balls, your balls won't feel good when it misses. And I found it to be pretty hit-or-miss.

Puzzle solving is about what you'd expect from a game with White Night's roots. There's a lot of find-odd-shaped-key-for-door puzzles, as well as some weird contraption based puzzles that have that contrived "puzzle" feel. The former have the problem of being too straightforward and the latter tend toward the cryptic, even if there are far fewer of them. The thing to take away from this is that it isn't a puzzle game. It's a horror game.

Alright, after all that why do I still recommend White Night? Can I really sell it to you on the art style alone if it has so many weaknesses? Damn skippy, I can! But more importantly, White Night does something great. Yeah, you'll be brought in by janky, nostalgic controls and those crisp black and white graphics (which could admittedly use better anti-aliasing), but what White Night does best is make you feel like you're an investigator using a hard nose for secrets to fight back the dark. It does this with its atmosphere and its superlative pacing. From staggering into a mysterious mansion, to meeting your first ghost with little fanfare, to pressing forward to the darker and more sinister sections of the mansion; from ground floor, to top floor, attic, and basement; White Night keeps getting darker and more dangerous. It's not a great story, no. But it's very well told. It stood out like a muzzle flash in a pitch black room during the Activision Weekend when I picked it up. I definitely recommend you give it a try if horror is your bag and it's on sale. For fifteen bucks, though? Maybe wait.

Game seems to be going a bit under the radar so thought I'd shed some light. White Night is a horrorish adventure game with a minimalist art style, almost all in black and white. Everything in the game is pure darkness unless illuminated by a light source, and so it often creates scenes oozing with style, especially when couples with the fixes camera angles.

While the game has some obvious survival horror roots, it is mainly an adventure game, never really involving any sort of combat. The game is set in a decrepit mansion evoking the likes of Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark, but playing out a bit more like Silent Hill. Lighting is one of the main puzzle mechanics. You need light to explore and interact with the house, so you need to manage matches so you don't run out. Spending too much time in the dark or running into one of the residents will not end well. The puzzles often involve either lighting up areas to force enemies away (they can't stand electric light) so you can progress or lighting area so you can perform an action that would be too hard in the dark. There are also some traditional "mansion owned by loonies" types of esoteric puzzles to solve, though they are probably a bit on the easy side.

The game's story is a bit bare bones. The main character is driving and swerves his car to avoid hitting a ghostly woman and from there enters the creepy mansion of the Verner family and is stuck investigating their secrets. From there there's not a ton of meat, with the vast majority of the story being fleshed out with journals to read that are dropped like every 10 feet. Some of these have some questionable translation. Even still, the game has some pretty obvious plot turns and twists that everyone will guess an hour in, which can be frustrating to watch the game treat as big deals later.

Where the game excels in is atmosphere. The enemies you face are consistently creepy and rarely get to be a chore like in a like of similar games. Some great sound design. Not reliant on jump scares, though there's a couple good ones, and the way it treats the enemies with never really being in focus is unsettling. When you take back an area of the house by turning on the lights it feels like a real accomplishment. The game does have a few cheap deaths from the fixed camera angles if you're unlucky. If you get stuck on a puzzle too it can be easy to run out of matches and really screw yourself, though I only came close to this once so I imagine it won't be an issue for many.

Game lasted me 5-6 hours and should be roughly the same for most. It's not a game I'd shout from the rooftops about but it's a good little entry if you're looking for something creepy. Good first outing, will look forward to seeing what they can do with a bigger budget and maybe better translators.

Let me start with the good.

- Great atmosphere
- Great art style
- Great music
- Good spoops
- Decent voice acting

And now the bad.

- Hilarious dialogue/terrible grammar in some places
- Infuriating controls
- Cheap deaths
- Strange save system
- Predictable but strange ending

I will say that playing this game would be hilarious fodder for a "Let's Play" video, simply because of the dialogue and written pieces that you pick up along the way. I'm familiar with the noir style of dialogue, but in White Night I found it very hard to take anything William said seriously. He would spout random, weird descriptions of things that were just downright silly and instead of being afraid I was sitting there laughing. Combine that with the running mechanic while changing camera views and you've got yourself something closer to Goat Simulator in tone.

EN	Early impressions :	v. 0 -	FR en dessous...

White Night story’s unfolds in a manor which appears to be completely cut off. Your character finds himself there without really understanding how. It’s the 30’s, times appear to be very troubled and unsure, somehow it feels like cities and civilization are collapsing in the distance. After first lines of voice-over, you can already understand how tainted you are, the fatality, the alcohol…

The atmosphere at the very beginning of the game is Noire (obviously), warm vocal jazz, deep voice of narrator speaking… Horror part comes far later and to speak the truth White Night events call to my mind a Noire mixed with supranatural plot rather than a classical survival horror.

Adventure deeply reminds me of the original Resident Evil, one unique location (the manor), levels and rooms feel like a maze, previous scene wasd’s subjective control, the static camera which automatically switch point of view also does a great job. Once inside you’re locked in, you got there hoping for help but you’ll find questions and puzzle instead.

Like in Amnesia, the light is your friend, stay in the dark for too long and you’ll die, out of matches, death it is. If resident evil used typewriter for saving your progress, you’ll need in this game to sleep in coach and armchair.
You have only one save game and you don’t get to control it.
Beside of staying enlightened, you walk from room to room trying to find keys, useful items, or any clue that could explain what’s going on in the manor, you have one ally, the gost of a singer who used to live there.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=402259203
Monsters are like the one in Mamas' movie, slender, silent, hidden in darker area. Most of the times it’s “jump scare” that you’ll experience rather than gloomy and evil mood. Many (many) objects await you to understand more about the plot: newspaper excerpts, family’s member journal and macabre vintage photographs. As you progress visited rooms get debated by the ghost’s wrath.
Note that most of the time it’s an hide’n seek gameplay since you can't kill ghost with your basic matches.
If you're looking for more similar stories I'd recoomend this movie (actually a set of shorts film). Among others, Charles Burns is featured http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0792986/ .

Technically: only 2 graphics option (vsync/aliasing) as well as non standard resolution (but no hotsampling allowed). The game displays a non deactivable film grain. A very strange grain actually, it cripples the purity of black and white visual.
Keyboard can be remap (default key for sprint is U… if someone has any explanations about such choice I’m curious to know it).

- -	Smithfield	friendlist info.	review policy

FR
Rapidement: C'est un jeu de petite envergure, pas aussi vaste et profond que Outlast. Mais quoiqu'il arrive il est très inspiré de Resident Evil (original) Caméra fixe dans la pièce, un petit côté labyrinthe, l'action se déroule dans un manoir unique. (la VF est très convaincante, la voix-off me fait penser un peu au ton de celle des Sin City). Mais pour moi jusqu'ici, il penche plus du côté noir que du côté horreur, mais certaines scènes m'ont quand même donné de belles décharges d'adrénaline.
Rappelez que le jeu offre une VF intégrale et elle est tout à fait convaincante!

Absolutely amazing experience. Throw back to old static (partially static) camera angles. Terrifying unknown. Pure classic survival horror. A must for any fan of Clock Tower or Alone in the Dark. Can't wait to replay this gem again. Top notch presentation and even better sound. Just an engrossing storyline told very cleverly. Excited to see more from this studio.

White Night is kinda like the film noir of horror games. Its deceptively simple black and white graphics highlight the importance of light as safety... because you never know what lurks in that deep blackness! It can get really disorienting at times which adds to the creepiness of the atmosphere. The music is phenomenal, art direction incredible.

My only complaint is the changing directional controls when the camera changes on your character. It makes running away from Margret MUCH harder!

A throwback to the roots of 3D survival horror. Channeling the 1992 Infogrames classic "Alone in the Dark", White Night shares many aspects of the original: Mostly puzzle-driven gameplay with a large, derelict mansion to explore; Crooked, static camera angles Sam Raimi himself would be proud of, and a large part of the story told via books and diary entries. Both games even feature the same Camille Saint-Saëns' composition - A nice little touch.

Not being bound by 90's technology, White Night additionally handles exposition by integrating an ongoing vocal narration. Listening to the somber musings of the protagonist sink in the film noir aesthetic, a goal that is visually even more evident: Everything is presented in black & white, either illuminated by a flickering matchstick or shrouded in ever-unfolding nocturnal shadows.

Finding ways to produce even the tiniest gleam of light to fight back the gloom requires careful observation and thought, since you're otherwise weaponless against the void and its spawn. When cornered, running away is the only option. To make matters even more dire, you're always burning through your stack of matches, a valuable commodity that the game carefully administers to keep up tension.

While White Night is oozing with stylistic charm, in some ways it clings perhaps a bit too closely to twenty-year old design choices; Probably enough so to make most modern gamers squirm in discomfort. You die in one hit. You run out of matches, you're dead. The camera angles sometimes make navigation way harder, especially in high-stress situations.

The worst offender, however, is the obnoxiously bad checkpoint system. Replaying through sizable chunks of puzzles is a common occurrence, since there simply aren't enough savepoints between some scene transitions. I understand that a certain sense of stinginess in saving possibilities is required in a survival horror game, but come the hell on - Don't make me watch story scenes multiple times just because you've set up a murderous wraith around the next corner right after it.

Anyhow, I was brought up on way more vicious stuff so in the end I overcame, but I can easily imagine folks of a less forgiving mental disposition towards games attempting to screw them over to just keel over and capitulate way before the slender lady sings. As the end credits rolled, I walked away from White Night feeling that here's a game that was created exactly for people like me - A fleeting validation that maybe my thirty plus years of gaming haven't been a total waste of time. Some people do still remember.

Next time, also bring back the Cthulhu mythos.

Great game! Totally recommended. Unique art style, gameplay and storytelling. A must-play for any classic horror fan and anyone seeking for a thrilling experience.