In the survival horror genre, atmosphere is arguably the biggest aspect for developers to focus on. There are many things that can make a game good, but if your objective is to scare the player, to make their heart race and to provoke screams and yelps that can be heard halfway across the globe, atmosphere should be the focal point of development. If you examine any given list of the greatest horror games of all time, you’ll find games like Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2, and Dead Space. These games are wildly different from each other, but through their aesthetics, soundscape, and game design, all achieve a palpably intense atmosphere that keep the player on edge. Even low budget indie games like SCP: Containment Breach, which is many respects is barebones, manages to engender an acute sense of dread with its broken steam pipes, long corridors, and mostly uncombatable enemies.
All of this said, atmosphere cannot stand on its own. Poor game design will reveal itself eventually, and the tension will dissipate. Soon the player will see through the charade and be far too annoyed to enjoy themselves - after all, it’s still a video game. Sonnori’s White Day: A Labyrinth Named School is an example of this sort of thing, where carefully crafted atmosphere can initially enamor (and scare the crap out of) a player, but eventually will need more than just itself to keep the player interested. It’s a game that is tremendously effective in many regards, but is holds itself back in serious ways.
White Day was released in South Korea for the PC in 2001 by a small developer called Sonnori. While there were plans for an official English translation, they fell through in 2004 and the studio has since closed, leaving fans to pick up the pieces via an unofficial translation patch. Given its obscurity, it can be difficult to track down - but as abandonware, some fruitful googling will eventually lead you to some download links.
In East Asia, White Day is a holiday that takes place on March 14, when boys give white-colored confections to the girl they’ve been eyeing all year. This has very little relevance to the game, but it justifies why the silent protagonist is visiting the school late at night: it’s White Day, and So-yeong needs her candy. Things go haywire almost immediately when the doors to the school lock behind you and you find yourself creeping around the school doing your best to avoid a mysterious ghost and a bat-wielding janitor overcome with bloodlust. Throughout the game, these two are always on the lookout for you (though in our playthrough, we encountered the ghost twice and the janitor what felt like a hundred times), adding another dimension to the game’s various puzzles and fetch-quests. More often than not, you’ll find yourself about to solve a puzzle when you’ll suddenly hear the jingling of the janitor’s keys and be forced to hide yourself until he decides to search elsewhere.
With its first-person view, sparsely lit hallways, and enemies that are always searching for you, White Day seems to begin as quite an effective survival horror game. Its puzzles are difficult and are to some extent randomized, requiring different solutions each playthrough. Running away from the chortling janitor is terrifying, and stumbling on his bucket and wet floor signs give the player the impression that they are in his domain and that they do not belong there. Our hearts were pounding as we hid in the bathroom stall, praying that he would skip past it and search elsewhere. Even some of the cheesy ghost stories found around the school are chill-inducing. White Day’s atmosphere starts off as unsettling and does a fantastic job at making the player feel defenseless, to say the least.
Perhaps the peak of that anxiety comes while searching for an exit, when the first boss appears. The player finds another student in a hallway, and before your conversation is even halfway finished, an enormous plant monster (possessed by a ghost) appears in a nearby classroom and grabs your classmate. Her screams are barely audible over the monster’s maniacal laughter that booms throughout the school regardless of where you find yourself. The faces of the monster’s past victims are embedded in the vine infested floors (almost certainly a nod to Junji Ito’s Uzumaki). The worst part of this in order to defeat this boss (which, by the way, is one of the only things in the whole game you can actually kill) and save the girl, you’ve gotta solve a puzzle that requires some significant brainwork and even more footwork. You’re forced to spend a great deal of time being cackled at.
It’s this moment in White Day where the player really comes to realize just how completely out of control this school is. Right upon entering, things seem a little off, given the janitor patrolling the hallways, slaying anyone he can with a baseball bat. There’s also a couple of other spooky occurrences that happen early on that deserve not to be spoiled. But when a gigantic monster spontaneously appears, the player becomes acutely aware of the fact that just about anything could be hiding in any of the classrooms (a fear that is actualized again and again throughout White Day’s short run). Suddenly, the game is no longer you versus the janitor - it’s you versus the entire ghostly kingdom, and the pressure to escape the school is amplified greatly.
White Day maintains its atmosphere throughout its entirety, a feat which many other horror games struggle to achieve. The soundscape is consistently unnerving, and the developers took care to constantly throw curveballs at the player. Sure, many of the puzzles essentially boil down to fetch quests, but they have you doing different things every time. Sometimes you’re fumbling around with a fuse box, sometimes you’re setting clocks, and sometimes you’re even making music with a telephone. If the game isn’t something, it’s certainly not repetitive. Where White Day begins to fall apart can be found in its game design, and it unfortunately crumbles to such an extent that its atmosphere cannot act as its saving grace.
Once the player has run away from the janitor enough times, it becomes painfully obvious how unthreatening he actually is. Escaping from him is as easy as stepping around him and running up a flight of stairs. Even if he manages to catch you, he’s needs to wail on you several times before he actually kills you. Once you realize how poor his AI is, dealing with him is no longer nerve wracking - it’s just annoying, and what a nuisance he becomes. In the later parts of the game, the janitor develops an uncanny ability to pinpoint your location, and you spend a lot more time running from him than doing anything else. You lose your senses of fear and helplessness and simply just get frustrated. If White Day was any longer than it is, all this might become unbearable.
With all that said, is White Day worth a go? Absolutely. It’s certainly buggy, and time hasn’t been kind to its visuals, and while the game does become a chore towards its ending, the majority of it is worth playing. White Day achieves a certain atmosphere that many horror games of its time failed to attain. Like any survival horror endeavor, it falls to the allure of easy jump scares, but it also features a lot of things that are legitimately frightening. While White Day is undoubtedly a cautionary tale to developers to ensure that their games’ mechanics are solid, it’s also a prime example of not how to shock the player, but how to scare them.
Jamie Goodin
@falconkick
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