White Knuckle is a roguelite. I wish it wasn’t.
Now available on Steam Early Access, White Knuckle is a first-person horror game that drops you at the bottom of a massive ventilation shaft, connected to some unseen facility. Something has gone wrong and you have to escape, but the only way out is up. You have to scale the walls 50 meters at a time, using whatever handholds you can find or make.
Shortly after you start, the shaft slowly fills with a black liquid called the Mass. If you touch it, it absorbs you and your run is over. The Mass isn’t fast, but if you take too long to make your next move or you miss a jump, it’s always waiting to pull you under. You’ll occasionally reach an environmental seal in the shaft, but that only buys you some time.
There are other hazards, such as monsters that try to snare you with their sticky tongues (the developers admit Half-Life was an influence here), but most of my runs through White Knuckle have been about me vs. gravity, and the Mass.
There’s a deliberate lack of precision to both the game’s physics and systems, and you’re encouraged to stretch them both to the breaking point. If something looks like you can grab it, you probably can. If something might be in your reach, it probably is. You can only maintain your grip for so long, however, and you’ll frequently run out of obvious routes. Sooner or later, you have to improvise under pressure.
White Knuckle’s horror is, more than anything else, about that pressure. It has very little music and its sound effects are used sparingly. Every once in a while, you’ll hear a pre-recorded message from the facility’s PA system about local outages, which only hints at what’s happened. It’s quiet, but it’s intense, especially when some distant hiss or crash breaks the silence.
I don’t ordinarily enjoy this sort of first-person platformer, especially ones where I can’t see my character’s feet, but White Knuckle takes a freeform approach that cuts down on a lot of my usual issues.
You can grab almost anything in White Knuckle that has a distinct corner or edge, such as a railing or a crate, and you can use pitons, improvised rope spears, or chunks of rebar to create your own handholds on the fly. It’s messy, but it knows that and works with it. When it works, it works very well, although it occasionally breaks in unexpected ways.
My biggest surprise was that falling doesn’t kill you unless you end up submerged in the Mass, which takes some of the sting out of missing a jump. The real problem is that if and when you fall, it sets you back far enough that you’ve probably used up all your lead time. Now you get to race back up the nearest wall with a Lovecraftian oil spill on your heels.
As noted above, White Knuckle is launching into Early Access. This is a trip report from the earliest available version of the game, rather than a full review, since the game isn’t complete. According to its Steam page, the developers expect to be in EA for about a year.
With that in mind, I expect that the game’s roughest edges, such as a few under- or unexplained mechanics, will get addressed. White Knuckle does ask you to twist your fingers into the occasional knot, especially if you’re trying to use an item in mid-climb, and a couple of elements like its upgrade system are unnecessarily complicated.
My biggest issue, as I noted above, is that White Knuckle is a roguelite. Once you get past the first seal, the rest of your run appears to be a randomized selection of short hand-made maps. Some of those maps are much more difficult than others, and a few essentially present a hard stop to the run unless you’ve found and kept the right items.
More importantly, dying in White Knuckle is obnoxious. If you get killed, you’re sent all the way back to the beginning, and death can be cheap. While I get that the precarity is a deliberate part of White Knuckle’s tension, I’d argue that it doesn’t pair well with a game in which you can die from a single missed input. I’d be more comfortable with the overall experience if you got a quick-save every time you crossed a seal, or if you could load a fixed sequence of levels at the start of a run.
As it is, I’d argue White Knuckle is worth a look. You have to have a high threshold for both frustration and first-person motion sickness, but it’s quietly creepy with a solid hook. If it keeps up its current momentum, White Knuckle could be a decent sleeper hit, on the basis of doing a few simple things as well as it can.
[White Knuckle, developed by Dark Machine and published by DreadXP, is now available on Steam Early Access. This column was written using a code sent to Hard Drive via a DreadXP PR representative.]
