Noir Survival Horror White Night Out Now

Our Adam first turned black and white with excitement about White Night [official site] back in January. It's the story of a standard behatted 30s gent who, after a car crash, finds himself exploring a deserted (OR IS IT?!) mansion in search of help. Puzzles to solve and a night to survive, think Resident Evil with ghosts and all the colour drained out. It's immediately interesting just to look at, and it's available now on Steam. Trailers below.

What's coolest for me about White Night's art is the lack of greyscaling - it's pitch black or stark white, with no middle ground even for the smallest details. Only the flame of the match deviates, a unique yellow. The odd, German-cinema-inspired camera angles are excellent for providing unfamiliar and strange viewpoints, heightening the sense of being out of place. It all just oozes creepy atmosphere and very old school horror in a way the vast majority don't even aim for.

It remains to be seen if there's substance for the style, a good game to marry all these surface elements together. Puzzles are at the heart of it, avoiding ghosts that wander the darkness and managing your light sources. Narrative's important too and hopefully this won't fall into the pitfalls of cliché that well-used genres like Noir and, uh, Spooky Mansion Horror are rife with.

Here's another trailer from early last month that shows off a bit more of the backstory and some different areas:

They've also done, well, this:

Yeah. Video games. You can grab White Night on Steam.