“In my world women shone like the Moon, they did not go through the doors like ghosts”
In the videogames sector, and now more with the indie market, there is an unofficial category but it is created in which all those titles that present good ideas, remarkable moments, even novel ones, come in, but for one reason or another they remain in a “What if …?”
to not finish making their mechanics curdle as bright as the trailer, that demo shown in an event or putting on the paper of the idea seemed to make believe. Amy left with a handful of good intentions at a time when the Survival Horror was dead; Contrast is a paragon of
brilliance in certain aspects, but not cohesive as they should. White Night joins these “What if …?” Presenting one of the best visual works in the field of scary games seen in recent years, but as you can see from the note,
Boston, Massachusetts, 1938
White Night is one of those whose gameplay can not be equated to its presentation, simply because the Osome Studios rookies have put the rest with a masterful artistic and sound design. But let’s start at the beginning: We are in Boston, in Massachusetts – the puritanical American state and anti-witches par excellence – and the ghost of the Great Depression after the crack of Wall Street in 1929 continues to hit hard in 1938. We are a ‘bloodhound ‘, a private detective
like Raymond Chandler nicknamed his Philip Marlowe in The Eternal Dream. A hound soaked in alcohol on the way home has an accident and comes to a grim mansion as empty as ghostly, with a cemetery in his garden and freshly excavated tombs. Someone has recently died, but we still go to seek help to heal.
With a duration that oscillates between 6-8 hours (if we go to sack and we do not get stuck much or if we want to explore with tranquility), and totally guided by its plot, White Night tells us a history of ghosts, misery and desolation supported to half way through a detective story in the first person and a whole gallery of letters, notes, newspapers, manuscripts a
nd books. It’s as if The Maltese Falcon knew The Haunting, The Black Dahlia was steeped in the once bright Night Shyamalan. There is no room for humor,
but rather for a depressive air of loneliness and sadness, although the problem of the script is rather that all its secondary narrative support does not achieve that the main storyline is derived to usual supernatural grounds in the gender.
Alone in the dark
The central gameplay of this survival Noir is basically to explore and solve puzzles. There are no combats, platforms or QTEs, but the spirit of the purest graphic adventure mixed with the pure scent of the old school of terror, the one that made Alone in the Dark the pioneer of these things -Resident Evil was later. We wander, we wander through that oppressive mansion solving riddles, realizing that the omnipresent darkness is as dangerous as the entities that come from time to time for us, because a lot of time in the dark and the detective will go driving progressively crazy.
As a good adventure that is, talk about the quality of their tests, something defined by the words brilliance and imbalance. Brilliant because the puzzles revolve mainly in warding off the darkness and bring the light to every corner of the house, either by only activating a switch, or solving a complex test to have access to it or to be activated. And the imagination put in fusing the black and white aesthetic with the puzzles is that, brilliant at times. But at the same time unbalanced, because there will be difficult tests, but others instead too easy. And if one is an expert in the genre and has spent hardships solving brain tear-offs of other graphic adventures, in White Night you will find little challenge in general.
