White Night Reviews
White Night has plenty going for it when it comes to artistic essence, but it comes up short in scares, cohesion, puzzle solving, and camera selection. Way short. OSome should've taken the time to make this darkness worth exploring. Instead, you'll simply feel better spending your Night elsewhere.
White Night is a beautiful mix of noir and old-school survival horror and adventure.
Apart from the splendid graphics, there's nothing particularly outstanding about White Night, but it's a decent horror-mystery game. It'd fit beautifully under the Alone in the Dark banner and seems like a much more obvious successor than…well…
White Night doesn't try to reinvent the genre or toy with gaming conventions to come out as a gem of the generation. What it does, though, is provide a unique and satisfying visual theme that surrounds an exciting and mysterious plot where you will find yourself getting more and more immersed in
A great looking game, but its beauty is only skin deep.
This is not the game survival horror purists have been waiting for and not one I can recommend even with its positives. Developer Osome Studios does have the chance to clean up White Night's fundamental design structures and make it more accessible instead of down right annoying in a potential sequel I doubt we will see come to fruition.
White Night is a cacophony of ideas, simultaneously atypical and ambitious
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.
White Night's distinctive visual style make it immediately identifiable; artistically, this game's a success. Its few shortcomings aren't to be overlooked, however, as its sluggish, frequently directionless, and deliberately archaic in its design. Don't come in expecting jump scares and big gore; this is a slow-burning experience with an emphasis on style and atmosphere.
Despite a gorgeous monochromatic art style and an intriguing mix of noir and survival horror elements, White Night allows its artistic ambition to overreach its clunky, frustrating combat.
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.
With a working adventure formula that utilizes light and shadow, White Night offers a haunted house full of atmosphere and ripe for exploration. Just don't run out of matches.
White Night hints at a horror story of quality, but it's hidden in the shadows of tedium and visual ambiguity.
The survival horror genre has struggled to find a place in recent years, but titles such as The Evil Within have attempted to breathe new life into it. With White Night, OSome Studio has managed to invigorate the genre by taking us back to the methodical and tense gameplay that kept us on edge so many times in the past. When playing the game for subsequent playthroughs, you will undeniably blaze through it, but hasn't that always been the case with survival horror games? The art style is beautifully unique, the gameplay is simple yet highly enjoyable and the soundtrack is superb. The reason you'll want to stay inside this mansion, though, is because of the history behind it. A compelling story is waiting to be unearthed and the more you learn, the deeper you'll want to go. The ID@Xbox lineup continues to get stronger and its latest addition is unquestionably worth checking out.
There's a lot to like about White Night, if for no other reason than it genuinely is different and these is real potential for this to spin out into a franchise if the development team can do a better job of rationalising the noir elements and figuring out the solution to a frustrating Easter egg hunt in the dark. The underlying vision alone makes it worth a look, but it's not going to be quite remembered as the same innovative experience as those pioneering horror games it references back to.
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 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.
Once I started I couldn't stop playing. It had me by the throat with its mystery, its atmosphere and finally the ending. This is an instant classic in my eyes.
White Night is a gorgeous and intriguing game that deserves to be played for its engrossing story and beautiful art style. Its impact is unfortunately diminished by frustrating design choices and an overall vague approach to its gameplay, which may leave some of you in the dark.
While being in possession of some clever ideas, a good story and a superbly-realised black and white world, White Night doesn't do enough scares to be a good horror or have inventive enough puzzles to be a decent adventure.