PCPOWERPLAY

The White Door

Beneath simple lines lies a different reality.

- DEVELOPER RUSTY LAKE • PUBLISHER SECOND MAZE rustylake.com/adventure-games/the-white-door.html

An absence of colour can be wielded in media with all sorts of intentions, but the most profound effect monochrome has is to make you notice what isn’t there. There’s an implicatio­n that something’s thematical­ly missing when you watch a world in black and white, so we tend to look at monochrome game worlds as a stylistic shorthand for grief, loss, depression, and other such subject matter that can really mess up your Sunday.

That’s certainly true of Rusty Lake’s The White Door, but in this point-andclick-meets ayahuasca journey you’re asking the question literally, not just figurative­ly: what’s missing? Small changes to the daily routine imposed by the white coats behind the white door; an empty white plate instead of the meals you’re used to receiving at exactly 5.00pm – these feel like major narrative revelation­s in the minimalist confines of your cell.

You are Robert Hill and the year is 1972. You know this because it’s written on the calendar on your wall and the driving licence in your drawer. Otherwise, the wheres and whys of your life, most pertinentl­y how you ended up in a mental health facility, elude both character and player. What follows is a few days of mundane hour-by-hour routine laid out by unseen people who – you hope – are caring for you.

It’s a classic bout of testing the player’s obedience, pushing you further and further with prosaic tasks like brushing your teeth, at the same time, every single morning, until you start to question things, pick at the corners of that simple white box you’re confined within, and uncover something more complex.

While you poke about at the bits between the game, Robert too goes somewhere else between his monotonous days, escaping in his dreams. Here a story starts to form of how he might have ended up behind the eponymous door and why he looks so glum in the mirror every day.

Mechanical­ly it’s always light-touch. 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. 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 tone means you’re never sure of the rules.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. It means you don’t question why doing X produces outcome Y but just lose yourself to the flow of the journey.

MUDDLED MEMORIES

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. Darkness and colour. Muddled memories. Sinister psych wards – all the classics are here, and its opaque storytelli­ng style is a trope too. Despite all that I found the subject matter much more challengin­g than the puzzles. 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. 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. All of us can find personal relevance and significan­ce in that, and I suppose that’s the power The White Door has.

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. And it does this not with its exposition sequences or puzzles, but by making you live Robert Hill’s tightly scheduled life, toilet trips and all. PHIL IWANIUK

It’s a classic bout of testing the player’s obedience, pushing you further and further with prosaic tasks like brushing your teeth, at the same time, every single morning..

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