White Night Review (Xbox One)

good
key review info
  • Game: White Night
  • Platform: Xbox One
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  • Reviewed on:
White Night splash screen

White Night is a pretty atmospheric horror game that blends noir drama with ESP action and a unique artistic perspective in order to provide a novel gameplay experience.

The action takes place in an old abandoned mansion, back in the 1930s. Evidently, the mansion is also haunted, and you have to brave its perils and uncover its secrets.

So far, it seems like your classic Scooby Doo episode, but White Night also employs a noir styling in delivering its content, making it much more serious and grave than your usual horror game, by also adding in the personal misery of the detective you play as.

The game uses a minimalistic art style, being rendered almost completely in black and white, using negative space and light sources to great effect, creating some pretty cinematic scenes, due to some creative camera angle use.

Story

You start out driving peacefully and minding your own business, when all of a sudden you swerve wildly, trying to avoid a ghostly woman who pops up out of nowhere.

You find yourself wounded, entering a creepy mansion, looking for help. Instead, you stumble upon a ghastly mystery, involving obsession, insanity, and murder.

The classic haunted mansion trope is embellished by the flavor of the period, as the action takes place during the end years of the Great Depression, and there are a ton of letters and plenty of commentary detailing various aspects of both social and personal experiences of the era.

There is a lot of collectable stuff to offer you a sense of context, from scribblings and notes scattered about, to journal entries portraying the state of mind of certain characters or the current state of affairs.

There are also some photographs, strengthening the personal angle that the game is aiming for, and the information you collect is solidified in a sort of newspaper feed, chronicling your adventure and the lives of those you find yourself investigating.

White Night can look pretty good
White Night can look pretty good

Gameplay

Fusing the two very different worlds of Bogart-style detectives and campy supernatural isn't an easy task, but developer OSome Studio certainly tried its best.

In a nutshell, the game feels like a Resident Evil meets Silent Hill kind of thing, where the gloomy atmosphere creeps within you through plays on light, the comic-like styling that results from the monochrome rendering, only for the spell to be broken by a ghost taking a swing at you and beating you up.

The way the fixed camera is used and the character moves, I was instantly reminded of the old Alone in the Dark games. The low-fi aesthetic certainly helped convey that feeling, but it was the movement that transported me back.

You're going to find it difficult to navigate the environment at times, which becomes especially unnerving when you actually come in close proximity of a ghost, materialized seemingly out of nowhere after an instantaneous camera switch.

Fiddling with the controls and seeing the character run in place at a leisurely place, stuck on an innocuous piece of furniture, like a toppled chair for instance, is an effective way to bring back memories from a bygone era, albeit unpleasant ones.

Ghosts beat you up and then it's game over, and you're helpless as you watch the detective flailing as if trying to ward off a swarm of insects, and it's not exactly what I imagine when I think about paranormal activity.

Darkness is your greatest enemy, and you'll need to keep those matches lit while exploring the mansion, in order to read through the journals and notes, and in order to interact with various items.

You then restart at the last armchair, which function as save points, provided, of course, that you did not forget to take a short nap in one after achieving some progress, and then proceed once more to try and navigate the mansion without running into the ghastly apparitions or getting confused by the camera angles.

Power is out throughout most of the residence, so you have to use matches in order to inspect your surroundings and ward off the otherworldly spawns. Unfortunately, you can only carry a limited amount of matches, which turns their use and management into a sort of pointless minigame where you have to try and not waste time, where matches are both abundant and scarce at the same time, due to the artificial limitation on how many you can carry.

Just a few of the light sources still function, and they become the most effective weapons against the ghosts, as electrical light seems to send them packing for some reason.

Darkness is your greatest enemy, and you'll need to keep those matches lit while exploring the mansion, in order to read through the journals and notes, and in order to interact with various items.

The puzzles are mostly of the fetch variety, as you need a certain specific item in order to unlock another specific item that can then be utilized to open a previously locked door or reveal a hidden passage, and so on and so forth.

White Night requires a lot of backtracking, as oftentimes you will navigate from one part of the house to another several times, each time finding the surroundings slightly altered, and having to perform a new set of actions.

Most of the gameplay involves you running around to find keys and read stuff. Hovering over items that you can interact with can be tricky at times, and you can end up missing things due to the camera angle.

White Night makes great use of contrast
White Night makes great use of contrast

Sound, visuals and style

The sound production is, for the most part, pretty good, adding depth to your adventure, and the jazzy and eerie soundtrack contributes to the unique atmosphere, together with the monochrome visuals.

The noir setting and the unique visual scheme alone make the game a worthwhile proposition for fans of adventure games, but unfortunately I feel as though somehow more could have been extracted from them.

The use of negative space is pretty good, with the little detail you uncover with your matches being pretty suggestive, and overall the visuals look pretty good, for a game that makes such bold use of color, using either none or all of it.

The camera angles make the game look pretty good in screenshots, but the lack of detail and wonky transitions make it difficult to find your way sometimes.

Although some static takes look really good, giving you the feeling that someone actually tried to study the composition of the set and offer you the best seats in the house, when you're running around trying to get stuff done it kind of gets in the way.

That being said, I cannot but admire how well contrast and shape are generally being used, although more splashes of color or more interesting effects and experimental plays on what little light there is could have been also thrown into the mix, for an even greater immersion.

The writing itself is sometimes not that great, and the actors' delivery lacking. Some of the journal pieces do a lot toward painting a picture of the lives of those who have lived in the home, but the musings of the protagonist are not always as powerful as they could have been.

There are several moments where everything is great, but a sudden bad choice of words or a flat line delivery breaks the spell and makes it seem somewhat mundane and contrived, rather than thrilling and suspenseful.

There are some interesting details regarding a sort of exposition of the downfall of the American Dream, like in The Great Gatsby, exploring excess, capitalism, decadence, and the fate of the many who had lost everything during the Great Depression, in addition to the main storyline, providing more context, at the cost of focus.

It's not exactly on par with Frank Miller's work, but then again, it's not like that would be an easy task. The general vibe is a more campy, amateurish version of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, and not the compelling atmosphere of the original Sin City.


The Good

  • Stylish minimalist visuals
  • Highly atmospheric
  • Noir theme

The Bad

  • Some shoddy writing
  • Ghosts punch you in the face
  • Wonky camera angles
  • Frustrating checkpoint system

Conclusion

White Night is a unique blend of noir horror, with a very bold visual style, offering an experience that is both familiar and unique to fans of the genre.

I would have liked it to veer more towards suspense and narrative than running away from ghosts that try to bonk you on the head like in an episode of Scooby Doo.

The mood is sometimes killed by those moments when a ghost gets to jump on you due to wonky camera angles and the all-encompassing darkness that robs the environment of useful details, such as where the next door is.

In any case, in spite of its flaws, it's a pretty decent game, offering a stylish adventure and an interesting narrative. However, don't expect any rollercoaster rides, as the main story is not all that great or original, it's mostly something that has been done before and better, but it ultimately serves its purpose.

However, the unique look, atmospheric sound, and everything else come together to create an experience that, in the end, is more than the sum of its parts, and makes trying out the game worthwhile, especially if you're a fan of old horror games.

story 8
gameplay 6
concept 8
graphics 7
audio 8
multiplayer 0
final rating 7
Editor's review
good
 

White Night screenshots (27 Images)

White Night splash screenWhite Night can look pretty goodWhite Night makes great use of contrastWhite Night even has recipesWhite Night screenshot
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