#The white door day 6 skin#
In two hours, using art assets that while well-drawn wouldn't look out of place on Newgrounds for their minimalism and resource economy, The White Door gets under your skin and makes you feel what it's like to be somebody else. All of us can find personal relevance and significance in that, and I suppose that's the power The White Door has.
It is also a game about feeling better, and enduring life's colour-drained, joyless passages, emerging from the other side, and finding beauty in the smallest, simplest things. Without delving into the narrative specifics, The White Door is a game about feeling as bad as it's possible to feel, and with just a few brushstrokes and some voice acting it's unpleasantly effective in putting you in that mental space. Jumble things up with dreams and visions, leave a few questions unanswered, and hope the player does the rest.ĭespite all that, I found the subject matter much more challenging than the puzzles. The vagueness of the narrative might be aiming for literary complexity but, well, it comes across as taking the easy route. Sinister psych wards-all the classics are here, and its opaque storytelling style is a trope too. Games concerning themselves with mental health issues are increasingly common, and this one doesn't have much subtlety about it by comparison to its peers. In any event, there's a link within the game options to developer walkthroughs for each level, or the option to ask for a hint on the game's Discord server, so you're never truly stuck. Point-and-clicks have run the risk of being obtuse in their puzzle logic since Ron Gilbert still got IDed buying beers, so when you introduce the conceit that you're a confused and amnesiac man being held in a room by people whose motives are unclear, well, the puzzles are going to get pretty messy, aren't they? Logical they most certainly are not, and a few are just a bit too abstract to feel satisfying when you suss them out. You don't question why doing X produces outcome Y but instead just lose yourself to the flow of the journey.
And in much the same way as the magical realism of Kentucky Route Zero led to tuning radios for no discernible reason, sometimes playing with the image you're presented with and challenging your assumptions about it hold the key to moving forward. It means you don't question why doing X produces outcome Y but instead just lose yourself to the flow of the journey. As it progresses it becomes something more like a traditional puzzle game, employing pattern recognition and logic challenges to gate progression, but The White Door's woozy, reality-bending tone means you're never sure of the rules. You might be dragging a coffee cup up to Robert's lips as he narrates that he took another sip of coffee in a dream sequence, or answering multiple choice questions during your daily psychological examination.
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