The Haunted Hoard: White Night (PC)

Dark, dreary, cynical… while it’s hard to peg what exactly makes something definitively noir, you can usually count on these words accurately describing the more obvious members of the genre. A black and white presentation with suspense and morally questionable characters often come along with it too, and once you take a look at all these pieces, it’s easy to see how these ingredients could make for the atmosphere of a horror game if twisted just a bit further. White Night does just that, not only borrowing from noir for its horror but straight up marrying the two in a game that still has some interesting gimmicks on top of its surprisingly natural genre blend.

 

White Night’s noir trappings are pretty much the stereotypical fare, but this isn’t a bad thing. The game takes place in the 1930s with our lead character decked out in a fedora and trench coat. Rather than trouble being a dame who walks into the detective’s office though, our protagonist finds himself veering off the road when the spirit of a girl runs out in front of his car. With his car wrecked by the crash, he stumbles off to the nearest residence for help, the ominous Vesper Mansion being his unfortunate but fateful destination. It becomes clear rather quickly that spirit was trying to draw him towards the mansion, as there is a mystery buried deep behind its walls and under its floorboards. Our protagonist approaches all his observations with the same poetic flair many noir detectives choose for their vocabulary, which makes the process of collecting notes, diaries, and other items to unravel the plot a much more interesting affair. The colorful commentary helps set the mood just as well as the heavy darkness, the description of simple items framed surprisingly well both in showing his current state of mind and explaining their importance to his growing understanding of the Vesper Mansion’s history.

 

With our hero not being too forthcoming with his own personal details, the Vesper Mansion and its associated history pretty much becomes the main character, the notes of characters like the unhinged William Vesper, his domineering and deranged mother Margaret, and the songstress Selena caught up in these affairs growing into full characters even as you only really hear their voices by way of words on paper. Perhaps surprisingly, The Great Depression works into the narrative quite well and adds in some economic criticism that fits both as problems of the time, as criticisms of our modern system, and as a key part of the narrative evolving across the notes. The mysterious serial killer the Wolf of the Black Lake soon enters the picture as well, and as the connections begin to form between the Vesper family and these elements, you come to find a story with some pretty tragic characters and decent emotional weight. Technically, you do meet some of these characters you read about even though many of them are already dead, and that’s because the Vesper Mansion is haunted by the lingering souls of those tied to the house’s unraveling history.

These spirits, much like most everything in White Night, ties heavily to the game’s main gameplay mechanic: the balance between light and dark. The black and white aesthetic isn’t just to better evoke the noir stylings it is unashamedly embracing in its survival horror story, but the divide between objects illuminated in white and masked by the blackness of shadows is key to most every form of interaction in the game. The protagonist can’t interact with many things if it’s too dark, adjusting how light enters an area is often a key component of puzzles, and depending on the spirit you encounter, they might put off a friendly glow to follow like the spirit who guided you to the mansion or they might lurk in the shadows and immediately kill you if they get their hands on you. The malevolent specters are actually turned back by the light, but only if it is provided by an electrical source, adding a new layer to the puzzle solving as you’ll often be moving around the mansion by match light and need to find out how to make an area safe to pass through.

 

With many of your puzzles tying to the positioning and placement of light, there’s a few elements that end up key to pulling off your solutions without being captured by the malevolent ghosts. Your matches are your standby, the player able to carry up to 12 matches at a time and there being many packs you can pick up scattered all around the mansion. Save for places where the game deliberately tries to starve you of matches for some tension, for the most part, even if you’re lighting a new one every time one goes out, you can keep a decent stock going without ever finding yourself truly bumbling around in the dark without a light. However, there is an odd design choice where sometimes striking a light doesn’t work properly and you have to immediately ignite another. This feels like it might be an attempt to earn some easy tension as you panic at the failure to get a match going, but if the game wanted things to be a bit more tense it could just remove this feature and do something simpler like limiting your matches to ten in hand and you’ll more often find yourself scraping at your last few before you find that relief of stumbling across a new pack.

Since light positioning is so important in White Night, the game decides to adopt a fixed camera perspective for every room that can change depending on where you’re standing. This can lead to some awkwardness as you start running one direction, the camera shifts, and you find your attempt to adjust your movement slightly now sends you careening in an unintended direction. These camera angles can be acclimated to in much the same way players got used to old Resident Evil games pulling the same disorienting trick, but White Night does have a few problem areas that this aspect doesn’t exactly help. While the game mostly uses the dark ghosts as good roadblocks, interesting threats during a light puzzle, or as a way to inject some tension and danger into your travels through the mansion, there are two points where the game gets a bit carried away. After a fuse blows and wipes the electrical light for a bit, the player has to run through a room filled with the malevolent specters, the limited light making it easy to accidentally provoke one and then the camera shifts make fleeing them effectively a bit annoying. An attic section later in the game fills the room with these spirits as well, and while you can outrun them, they’re packed in so tightly it’s easy to run right into another one and die. Saving whenever you find a candlestick and arm chair is key to not losing progress even if it costs a match, but even with the game making you put out matches to carry heavy objects and open chests and the like, the price of even frequent saves seems accounted for in the perhaps overly generous match pack placement.

 

Despite the occasional issues you can’t quite overlook, White Night still handles itself pretty well most of the time. It has a few jump scares, but it does well with the looming dread of what might be in the shadows. The spirits are actually more terrifying when you already know they’re there but can’t figure out where exactly they might be because of the limited lighting. There is a visual distortion and strange noise surrounding them like an aura to ensure that in calmer situations you won’t throw yourself right into their grip, and since much of the game is about solving puzzles at a pace you determine, the amount of pressure is usually good for maintaining tension without often dipping into seemingly unfair scenarios.

THE VERDICT: White Night takes the components of noir, horror, and puzzles games and rolls them together into one experience with a good degree of success. It has a few moments where the perspective shifting harms play and others that feel like the dangerous spirits are poorly placed, but most of the experience makes good use of what each genre provides. Noir brings with it an interesting time period and a protagonist who describes the unraveling mystery in a way that’s interesting to listen to, the spirits roaming the halls of the Vesper Mansion provide frequent tension on top of the atmospheric sounds and black and white style setting an eerie tone, and the puzzles ask you to play with light in different ways that help the adventure be more than avoiding ghosts and reading notes. With all three sides of its identity working together as well as they do, White Night ends up a horror title that easily holds the players interest despite its stumbling points.

 

And so, I give White Night for PC…

A GOOD rating. White Night definitely has some quirks that must be accounted for when you play. After saving and exiting the game once it wiped out all the Boston Daily News I collected, but these mostly provides quick summaries of items you look at for future reference rather than being key to the experience. Sometimes a save chair might be a little far after a long stretch of puzzle-solving, or maybe a room might have too many ghost ladies for its own good. Still, White Night’s smaller problems don’t harm the narrative that builds up as you come across journals and letters, it doesn’t take away from the effectiveness of the dangerous spirits as threats to be feared, and the puzzles keep concocting new ways to rope in the light and dark mechanic so that it doesn’t just feel like you’re illuminating areas in the same way across the whole adventure. The darkness rarely hides objects it isn’t meant to and the light does a good job of revealing stark sections of the environment so you’re not going to be straining your eyes to search the darkness… although the whiteness does mean an occasional object might blend in with its surroundings a little which means you might miss notes because they simply didn’t stand out enough.

 

Still, White Night does well with its core mechanics on top of mixing in noir staples with its horror narrative. The mystery carries you forward to the end even if you figure it out early because you grow to understand its cast and their motivations better as you solve nifty light puzzles and avoid legitimately dangerous threats. Some players might find it hard to adjust to some of its quirks like the abrupt camera shifts, but White Night can still hold a candle to other horror puzzlers thanks to its creative mixing of genre elements that gel surprisingly well.