White Day: A Labyrinth Named School (PlayStation 4) Second Opinion Review

Hui-min is an average Korean kid attending Yeondu High, an education centre with a checkered history of hauntings, and is known for its unusual layout, which has led to a bizarre flow of energy. Yeondu's feng shui has made it a festering cluster of deranged spirits and restless souls dating as far back as the Korean War, making this high school rife of rumours and legend. It is the evening of White Day, the Korean equivalent to the West's Valentine's Day, and Hui-min makes the worst choice of his life by deciding to stay late after school to confess his attraction with a box of chocolates to the cute and popular So-yeoung. Along with a few other students, Hui-min gets trapped within Yeondu's cursed walls, while a pair of possessed janitors skulk the halls and are in the mood to play some tee-ball with Hui-min's face.

White Day: A Labyrinth Named School shares a lot in common with the Amnesia games in that they are first-person exploration adventures with no combat and lots of puzzle solving, note reading, and, of course, avoiding pursuers. White Day adds more threats and deeper gameplay than the average first-person horror game by having various spirits that can inflict damage, and the only way to know about them in advance is to pay close attention to the various notes and flavour texts found within Yeondu High's hallowed halls. Not all these spirits are harmful to Hui-min's health, but it is pretty much a guarantee that they will cause whoever is playing the game to feel the hairs on their back tingle... At least as long as the developer has spared the expense to make the scare effective.

Sadly, White Day's limits are felt in the presentation, and it's obvious that most of the effort went into the scenes and animations involving the interactions with the girls of Yeondu. Almost everything that happens in real time gameplay is sorely lacking; the animations are stiff and limited, and there is no sense of weight. There is just a general lack of things connecting, like how the janitor pursers don't physically open doors; they just open and close by themselves as they walk towards them, and their path finding doesn't make any sense at times, making their AI seem broken.

This overall lack of polish is extended to pretty much every spirit rendered in 3D geometry, with some laughable animations that wouldn't be out of place in an early House of the Dead. Even the simple act of moving Hui-min has a very obvious keyboard-y jankiness to it, since he goes from completely stationary to what can be best described as a very brisk speed walk, which makes moving in smaller rooms feel especially jerky.

For all of White Day's lack of polish in its presentation, the actual playing of the game is a sort of mixed bag. The best moments are exploring, reading notes, finding interesting objects, and encountering spirits. The stealth mechanics feel like a crapshoot when trying to avoid detection during pursuer encounters. Sometimes they will walk right past Hui-min, whilst other times they will see him from the far end of a dark hallway. This inconsistency is present regardless of which difficulty is being played on.

That being said, White Day does feel rewarding to make progress in, since it throws some twists when it is least expected, like the timed sequences that test the acquired knowledge of Yeondu's layout, and how to solve certain puzzles. These moments are when the game is at its best, and those who can get past the roughness will be in for quite a surprising and robust horror game with a lot of replayability thanks to the wealth of branching story beats that Hui-min can take.

It is recommended to start on the normal difficulty, since White Day's challenge can be a bit steep and it is better to familiarise oneself with Yeondu's layout in this manner. Normal mode is really just preparation for the game's true mode, because only by playing on hard mode can Hui-min get the best possible ending. There are about five or six endings that all pertain to which girl Hui-min saves (being a coward and saving no one is an option), which results in an ending as well as some unlockable costumes.

White Day is a tough game to recommend. It does offer a similar horror experience to the Amnesia titles, but with more replayability, as well as being a more interesting setting. That being said, the developers cut a lot of corners when crafting Yeondu High, and it is really immersion breaking to see the same exact rooms copy-pasted like 20 times with the exact objects placed in the identical formation dozens, if not hundreds of times. Even early PlayStation 2 survival horror games like Siren kept prop use restricted to not reuse them over and over.

By far the most impressive aspect of White Day is how it uses sound to toy with the user's imagination and to evoke some sneaky scares and to keep tension high. Functionally, this is a pretty spooky game, but it is held back by unimpressive visuals, lack of details, and some really convoluted puzzle design.