I've been somewhat following the progression of White Night and when I got my hands on it I could say it got me excited. I booted the game up and started playing with lights dimmed and truly focused on trying to get myself immersed. It sure worked and I had a good mood going and it was great. I had to actually take a break from the game to release some tension, something that has never happened to me. But while playing there were things that tried to rip my immersion away.
Lighting was intentionally made unnatural, dark and atmospheric, but I could say it severely hurts the
gameplay. I would agree it fits better than having well lit rooms, but to actually benefit from it without creating problems like: necessary puzzleobjects being in pitch black (exactly what amnesias night vision fixes) and having to check everything with the flashlight (I missed the door to storage for gas due to it being in pitch black). To avoid those; perhaps you could have positioned the lighting in a more thought out way to affect how the player actually wanders in an area and guide/misguide him. Also, one point light in the editor just does not fade out realistically, not that it really was that much of a problem (it was not like it was that real anyways).
Voice acting felt off at some points, mostly the conversations and like C-zom had mentioned, you could hear the bad quality of the recordings (at least with my reasonably good headphones). Sometimes the volume of speech was too low, thus barely hearable. But for a bunch of volunteers and not so professionals the quality was very good, nothing major was wrong.
There were only few buggy things, static decals too close to wall causing flickering etc. Still, good work polishing everything out, especially when it is sooo long and big!
Puzzles... I bet you've noticed how many can't progress because of the puzzles. I myself didn't really get stuck that bad at any part, but I had my problems too. For example I didn't find a single rock to bash the crowbar off the wall in the stairway. I had to watch a lets play (to notice I did try to do the right thing) and try again.
Then for some reason, when I was supposed to use the
bricks of memory? properly, I just thought "at least if I throw them all down to nothingness, something must happen or I get stuck, right?" That proved to be very wrong and I had to exit and continue from previous checkpoint, which apparently was before the necessary running around cutscenelike part. There shouldn't really be these points in game where you have no way of progress (thoughts ripped straight from frictional blog) and you could have made an alternative way of progressing. For example imply the player tried to forget and throw his memories away, then used some great speech+
FadeOut(2.0f); to get on to the next part if he throws them all away. Also you could grab one brick and touch all the areas with it while keeping hold of it (I have no idea how someone could have to move back and forth grabbing new bricks and throwing them to slowly progress through the long way).
When you think afterwards, there are a lot of places that require you to walk past long distances with nothing happening. It sure builds up momentum at some parts, but when everything is far away and all... Was it intentional and another symbolism thing? Actually, don't answer!
The pacing of the story is a whole different thing where I'm not so sure about everything. It just felt like, when I first played the story it was intense from the beginning, story progressed slow and scares kept me on guard. Then when I started to make progress and the story became much more evident, I couldn't keep up with the story and I was baffled. I did not get all of the story on my first playthrough and the last half of the story felt quite distant.
Then when playing White Night again before creating this post, it was the opposite. Beginning was slow running through necessary parts to get to the treat: unfolding of the story, which just clicked this time. I have to say the story was awesome, but for a story telling experiment I'd like to know is it necessary for many others to play it again to really enjoy it or am I just retarded/can't english?
The music...
Just plain awesome! Akira Yamaoka influenced stuff (+actually his songs I guess), great ambient tracks and some soothing contrasting music used well. I could walk around empty cities for 5 minutes with
Their Heaven playing in the background. Such a shame how it ended abruptly after the short part outside. Actually I was writing this post while listening to the soundtrack with heavy rain and thunder outside. (You can bet its great). I hope the artist's gain some attention from White Night, I think I'll actually put the links included in the
music_credits.txt here:
http://www.broken-notes.com/home.html
http://www.liminalrecs.com/
Some nice things I experienced while playing:
On my first playthrough I got scared like hell at a poofer! A damned poofer... It was the one below the stairs, the scare just happened perfectly. I managed to spot something yellowish at the edge of my eye and when I looked that way the monster poofed right in front of me. It was the most intense scare I've had in amnesia and shortly after I had to take a break.
And because of that experience, later in the game somewhere at the part with red walls there was this a bit similar corner that followed under similar stairs. I got a deja vu and had intense dread even when I was sure there was nothing.
I hope this feedback was something you wanted and I suggest others giving out their thoughts too! This is simply the greatest thing happened to amnesia custom stories! Your dedication and hard work have paid off. Its actually quite ironic how after completion credits, you have to press forget to exit the game, easier said than done...
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White Night - Total Conversion v1.1
