White Night Reviews
Check out White Night Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 16 reviews on CriticDB, White Night has a score of:
White Night’s biggest achievement though is clearly the terrifying atmosphere that pervades throughout its duration. Though certainly not absolving the game of its other flaws, the sense of dread and fear is palpable and in a genre which has largely neglected the finer aspects of its craft, White Night stands out as an exceptional, yet mechanically imperfect proposition.
It would be more accurate to say that White Night is an exploration adventure, an interactive story in the “weird tale” tradition. Just enough obstacles exist to make that story feel as though it was earned, that the player participated in the telling, but conveying the story is the priority. From clever exploitation of gameplay mechanics to the pages and pages of rich exposition which carefully unravel and the moody jazz soundtrack, everything exists in service to the fiction. In that, it succeeds, and it’s a story worth experiencing and deserving of praise.
White Night embraces many of the conventions of noir tales (from the mysterious blonde and use of narration to the sense of foreboding) in conjunction with the survival horror genre. The severe black and white visuals are paired with a light/dark gameplay mechanic, combining form and function for this adventure game. As in noir, powerful forces work against the protagonist, extracting a heavy price, and in the end there's no such thing as a complete victory.
If you ignore the insipid faux-noir dialogue, you'll find that White Night is a pleasing old-school survival horror gameplay experience with a sharp visual style and an intriguing story.
A unique, memorable horror game that's sometimes too stylish for its own good
White Night is a pretty well crafted survival horror game. You’ll get scared. Unfortunately for it, a few niggling mechanical issues linger through to the released version of the game and dampens the experience somewhat. Otherwise, it is a thoroughly enjoyable game, at a very minimal cost, for fans of the genre.
The game brings something we haven't seen all that much, but it doesn’t bring it in a way that makes you want to play the game hour after hour. When taken in small doses, White Night can actually bring a couple of scares and jumps but not enough of it to be among the best on the market.
White Night, the debut title from OSome Studio, is a bit of an oddball. A monochromatic neo-noir horror adventure, the game is certainly more than capable of standing out from the crowd. Sadly, while it gets a heck of a lot of things right, it also has some issues that let it down.
A noir horror adventure where more than just the floorboards are creaky.
White Night is a great concept with a really nice art style. The atmosphere it provides is incredibly convincing and genuinely unsettling, right up until the time that the perceived threat becomes a reality and things take a nosedive. A tad more polish would have seen this become a real benchmark for the genre, but a number of missed steps mean that it will likely just fade into the darkness.
The art style and premise are great: as a detective, you’re meant to introduce light into White Night’s world of darkness. And early on, it definitely feels like this is going to be a neat, smart idea that’ll be central to everything. But once you get into the house, it mainly involves scrambling about in the dark and bumping into furniture you can’t see as you run away from ghosts you can’t see either. The bones of a decent procedural horror game are buried under roughly six feet of frustrating fixed camera angles, insta-death, and bad checkpointing. Ultimately, it’s just not that much fun being a detective in the dark.
But the most important question for a game of this type remains unanswered – is it a scary game? In some aspects, White Night realises a great sense of tension extremely well. When your character’s match goes out, the controller begins to vibrate with an increasing intensity (presumably as something in the dark approaches you). It’s such an effective and simple way to elicit fear that I’ve always been too chicken to let the event plays out to see what happens. There are some cheap jump scares here and there (which still always admittedly made me jump) but overall the game does a great job at building tension.
Do you enjoy one-upping your friends about the misfortunes in your life surrounding the holidays? Ever slipped on ice in the parking lot? Set a Christmas tree on fire accidentally? Absolutely hate a beloved Christmas classic? Have a holiday radio classic that drives you insane? This game is your time to shine as you bring on the whine. At the perfect price point, with its uncomplicated set of rules and pocket-sized container, this game would make an excellent stocking stuffer. It’s the perfect game to whip out for anywhere from 15 minutes of fun to as long as your complaints may go. Best enjoyed with some holiday cheer (aka wine).