The White Door
Beneath simple lines lies a different reality. “The reality-bending tone means you’re never sure of the rules”.
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-and-clickmeets 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. 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, realitybending 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. 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.