Originally released in 2001, White Day is a first-person horror game where your utterly helpless character is forced to complete puzzles while being hunted.
Sound familiar?
Nine years before Frictional Games would release Amnesia, this game did basically the same thing, complete with a mental health mechanic. It was almost a full decade ahead of its time (it's worth noting …
Originally released in 2001, White Day is a first-person horror game where your utterly helpless character is forced to complete puzzles while being hunted.
Sound familiar?
Nine years before Frictional Games would release Amnesia, this game did basically the same thing, complete with a mental health mechanic. It was almost a full decade ahead of its time (it's worth noting that Frictional Games' Penumbra series actually did have combat, so it took them a few tries to nail down their idiomatic style), and going back to it feels like the video game equivalent of finding a version of Hamlet written in ancient Greek.
Sadly, White Day had an intersting set of mechanics that's let down by their implementation. Unlike in, for instance, Soma, the janitors you have to avoid are placed in very linear environments, which makes avoiding them an extremely passive process. There are no sprawling levels or alternate routes to take, and the janitors are so easily alerted that the optimal solution is just to hunker down in a darkened classroom until their AI arbitrarily takes them far enough from your current position that they won't hear you opening the doors. The game also does not do a great job communicating when the janitors are active versus when they are not, so I ended up getting funneled into a room through a cutscene then cornered inescapably by the janitor I hadn't ever seen in that particular level. The game does a decent job at building tension in its gameplay, but even just a couple hours in tension was giving way to tedium and frustration.
It doesn't help that the story doesn't feel like it fits. The characters are written like teenage archetypes, and the horror just stops whenever they're talking to each other. The first boss is a giant tree spirit that you kill with acid and pesticides, and frankly after beating it through quick time events (which almost killed me because they came so far out of left field) it's a little bit hard to feel like the janitors are a real threat.
I only got a couple hours into the game, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt, but what I saw was an interesting piece of gaming history. One that showed not only that some ideas are older than we think, but also that it can take a couple refinements before those ideas really shine.
