WHITE NIGHT

LA LUNE NOIR ET LE PIANISTE

White Night, created in France by Osome Studio and published by Activision as a download game for 15 bucks, although deprived of any colors, is a rather refreshing sight among the survival-horror games. But aside the black and white (noir) presentation of the game it is almost well done in terms of the actual classic horror game experience. Partly produced by former creators of the mother - as I like to call it - of all horror games: Alone in the Dark, this game not only got me very excited from the first moment I've heard about it, but ultimately didn't disappoint... although I have to admit that at least I have some problems with it.

Set in the 1930s, you - as the initially unknown protagonist - are on a journey through the past. With classic fixed camera perspectives, that make every room unique and unforgettable, you mostly explore an old house filled with ghosts and twisted conclusions. The game manages to melt dreamy motives about the moon, love and jazz into a great experience and adds spices in form of constant fear, disturbed imagery and deep layers of critical story telling. - Probably a bit too much of the latter, for my taste.


White Night is dark - black actually! And the central mechanic behind the game is light, which will make things white. You can't see without it, you can't find or touch anything without it, you can't kill ghosts without it,... and eventually you will die without it. Many of the old electrical wirings are not working or constantly being tempered with by some of the ghostly presences in the house. - Obviously some of them were electricians. But luckily you have a good stock of really enduring matches with you and somebody has left hundreds more scattered all over the place. Personally I find it fascinating how long this game can keep you busy, given its linear nature and that it takes place in a rather small house. The angel sitting on my left shoulder would now very positively give credits to the game/ level designers, but the small devil on the other would probably point out that this game is full with constant and utterly useless dying, reloading and playing the same sections countless times, thus blaming the very designers for the same effect. - I guess the truth lies in the middle and as much as the creators can be praised for thoughtful and well staged, old-school puzzles they also have to accept the accusation of messing up an otherwise great experience by giving this game - or rather its enemies - too much randomness.

TOO MANY BLUE NOTES SPOIL THE JAZZ

I think I have written this in countless reviews already and I am about to write it again: RNG cannot be balanced! So please don't do it in every game! If - as it is often in this game - there is a room, containing three ghost, of which all of them kill you simply by touching you, it makes no sense and it can completely destroy the experience for the player if those ghosts have random spawning positions on every reload! Seriously, please answer me this question: Did you do this because you were too lazy to think of one or two save ways the player can navigate through this room and placing the ghosts according to that? Or did you do this on purpose to test the patience of the players and in the meantime to get more playtime out of it? Seriously, I don't get it. Maybe I am not supposed to and I never will, but for me the fact remains that I was - and still am - cursing this game to the abyss from time to time. Here is an example of what frequently happens in White Night: You will find an item you need to open a door two rooms away. Luckily you save again before trying to get there because now - since you have picked the item up - you have filled those two rooms with three ghosts each! - In other words: A task defined as: "Run through one room to the very end of the second and open the door with the item you just picked up", that could (and should!) be done in roughly 15 seconds, thanks to randomness, needs to be repeated 30 times and including reloading times now takes 15 minutes instead! - Sorry, I don't get behind this design choice and I don't believe that nobody didn't notice that... You don't have to make it so easy that everything can be done at the first attempt and that 90% of the players would finish the game on their first run in one hour without dying,... but making enemies that kill you instantly be subject to randomness instead of making them part of a thoughtful level design, is just one of the cheapest moves possible!

Moving on; Since I am already raging about what (en)raged me the most while playing this game, how about one more thing? Yes, it's a download game. And as the unspoken rules of download games declare - also this game (unfortunately) is a collection feast!! Don't get me wrong, I really missed a game where you are sliding along the walls of/and invisible collision boxes, constantly pressing your search button to discover something. Really! - That is something I loved to do in Alone in the Dark as well as older Resident Evil games for example. This is something I really miss in modern games where everything you can interact with automatically glows and nothing is left for imagination or trial and error. So, in a sense it is not the modus that is making me angry but the implementation: Why are there - roughly guessed - 300 collectables in this game? Why? This game is full with letters from him to her, letters from her to her, from her to him and him to him. Furthermore you have her diary, his diary, this guys diary and that guys diary, not to forget news paper articles, journal entries and a never ending photo collection. - Are you kidding me? If all this paper was real I wouldn't have to replenish my toilet paper for the next four months!

It's not that what is written is garbage, but it is just so amazingly useless and honestly adds nothing to the game. - And this you have to hear from someone who's actually pretty fond of reading! - But sorry, after the 20th-something letter in this game I stopped reading them because they simply pissed me off and destroyed the atmosphere! Maybe it is meant well, ... but seriously... it is simply too much. The only genre where I tolerate reading on such an intense level is the almost vanished master genre of RPG! Did you read 300 pages in Resident Evil? - No! There were some books, some letters,... but that's it. Imagine a Resident Evil where every new room gave you three new letters, three new diary pages, one picture (with text) a newspaper article and two journal entries to read...

DO YOU LOVE ME?

Alright, no more. I am done. That's all I have to point out negatively about this game. White Night is above all an artistic game. Every scene might seem simple due to the high-contrast nature of the game, but in actuality every screen of this game is a piece of art the goes far beyond black and white. What I want to give the game the most credit for, is the fact that it - at least - tries to be played liked a classic survival-horror game, that it takes me back to a playstyle I thought to be dead and that it has a lot of potential to grow with every playthrough.

It kind of makes me sad however, how the forceful attempt to adjust it to modern conventions (300+ collectables) and/or probably a neglected level design (random monsters) take away a whole lot of the experience that would have been possible to get out of it. Like I said, I haven't finished it yet. And though I am eager to see where the story goes, I somehow feel repulsed to take the controller back into my hands just to waste another hour on aggravation because of random ghosts. I think at some point, on this blogging and reviewing journey of mine, I already said something like (subjectively speaking, of course): "If a game doesn't make me want to pick up the controller immediately again after I turned it off, something isn't right with it." Please don't get me wrong; White Night is awesome. It is absolutely worth its money and I love it! But still, something is wrong because although I want to finish it, I hesitate on turning it on and constantly postpone continuing to play it. I think - especially! - a game like this needs to be consumed instantly - in one evening, and not in daily portions over two weeks. Unfortunately I can't do it, I am unable to "consume" this game. It feels like sitting at your grandmother's table and having a full belly from eating too much candy before. You want to eat that special dinner you wished for and she cooked extra for you. You absolutely don't want to make her sad but in the end you are just shoving it in; slowly, one spoon after the other. Everything takes forever and you can't get any joy out of it. It's a shame but playing this game feels somewhat similar to that for me.

Have you played it already? What are your thoughts about this game? Wasn't this supposed to be an Xbox One Exclusive and is it true it will be launching soon (or already is) on PS4 and PC too?

Play more! Jazz more!