A visual spectacle in black and white: White Night
Welcome to my blog! Where I talk about some of the games that pass through my pc catalog, in general I'm hooked with strange concepts in several indie games and one of them is any game that associates music, an enveloping atmosphere and any concept of mystery or plot of those that usually had the noir cinema of some decades ago, I find it such an interesting point to be able to tell stories from a black and white point of view where other aspects such as angles, effects and camera movements are one of the only ways to give a certain personality to a work, This works in movies like Sin City but in video games I had not yet seen a title that took advantage of these effects until I could get my hands on White Night, which although it has several flaws in its gameplay I think I can forgive them for being a game that has a tiny budget and uses it quite well to make a story full of Jazz, black and white and the aesthetics of cinema of the late 20s involving all kinds of gangs and mafias, is a fairly short title so this analysis will focus on seeing everything new that brings to future works of the medium.
White Night is a game that ventures through the darkness of the hand of a private detective in various serious problems, is a premise that has already been seen a thousand times but uses various resources of the thriller genre and even horror to mix all its aesthetics with a delightfully atmospheric gameplay, the light will be our greatest ally as we move into a mysterious mansion that has been abandoned for years, but in it we witness several horrors and although we want to run away a wound at the beginning of the adventure limits us too much to escape, our only option is to venture out and get resources to spend the night in the mansion but with the constant threat of darkness, which in the early stages of the game does not seem to hide anything but maybe if we stay too long we will die without remedy, so it is our duty to always have a light source at hand either by a switch in the mansion or by our limited matches, all this while solving the puzzles that puts us to the test in the house.
The feeling that resources are quite limited gives a new sensation once we start, the anguish is constant and the game knows how to play very well with our senses once it detects that we are short of resources, and is that the game in this aspect is very hard, it does not forgive us if at any time we waste one of our matches nor does it intend to make us anything easy puzzles so we always have to be in constant search of the switches in the rooms of the mansion because although the house has been abandoned for a while, The puzzles in each room move between the very ingenious combining all kinds of games with lighting and the very standard with simple puzzles that serve to unlock doors to new areas of the mansion, at this point everything is quite natural and although there is a plot behind each new area the truth has not seemed interesting enough to comment on it.
The real potential of this title is in its aesthetics and in the way it combines those looks with the gameplay, which at times manages to do so at a very high level with moments of anguish and terror alike, but I feel that these moments pass very quickly and there are not too many moments where the highest moments of the game are repeated, the spirits in the game that function both as an obstacle and as part of the puzzle also have the objective of giving us a good scare if we want to retrace our steps to explore a little more the mansion (which we can find clues about the following areas and we do), although in any case we can escape the area without many repercussions and although if there is a certain fear of dying the reality is that we have some checkpoints that we can distribute and thus go covering the entire terrain of the mansion little by little.
White Night is a game that glimpses at times, it is also true that the production team has had to deal with a meager budget that many of the ideas that implements this title would look spectacular with a little capital behind, the visuals of this title contrast very well with its lack of capital putting from the first moment an aesthetic of black and white throughout the adventure, and although we have some moments where you can perceive some color the truth is that at all times the aesthetics is reinforced with the visual spectacles that can offer the mansion from different angles (thanks to the camera work also), also providing a bit of variety in the gameplay if we add that everything is made based on this dynamic between light and dark.