Schools are excellent locations for horror. They’re a shared experience for most of us, so developers benefit from the familiarity and can play on that to set up unease. Attending school is also a highly emotional experience that covers the full gamut thanks to a combination of societal pressure and hormones, and so the nostalgic feelings that we have for our time at school can fuel narratives that play on fears. And so White Day 2, just like its predecessor, has the perfect setting for a few hours of terror.
While I personally refuse to rule anything out, chances are that ghosts, spirits, and the like aren’t actually real – or at least if they are real their presence in the human world is non-existent. And yet the concept of them continues to fascinate people, even those who don’t believe in the ghost sightings or aren’t religious. Why? Perhaps the hint is this passage:
“Some ghost hunters and paranormals propose that poltergeists are actually the emotions of troubled individuals – built up during times of stress. This theory, known as Spontaneous Recurring Psychokinesis suggests that this built-up stress then unconsciously projects outwards in the form of mental energy, which effects the physical environment and produces the phenomena attributed to poltergeists.”
Or to put it another way: Whether they actually occur in reality or not, ghosts are entities that are a kind of emotional communication. It’s typically negative – fear, anger, hatred, stress – but then there is also any number of ghost stories that embody love, melancholia, even warmth. And that’s why ghosts continue to appeal to even the non-believers: What a ghost represents is something primal and human, and it therefore tells us something about what it is to be human.
White Day 2, first and foremost, works well as a ghost story with some dark musings on humanity. It just takes a bit to puzzle through, with a dozen-odd endings and multiple character perspectives and you’ll probably want to experience a few of those to get a full sense of just what is going on in this deeply sinister school space. It starts simple enough, with you breaking into the school (it’s the same school as the original White Day) to investigate the death of a young girl by fire. But that’s just the first breadcrumb in a trail that’s going to lead you places you just had no hope to predict ahead of time.
Thankfully you have plenty of time to digest what’s going on, because White Day 2 has a very slow pacing courtesy of two things. Firstly, the puzzles, which are of a very old-school variety and there is minimal handholding to help you figure it out. With no objective markers and no easy clues for sorting these puzzles out, it is entirely possible to get stumped on some of them. On top of that, some of them feature randomised elements which means that guides aren’t going to be as readily helpful as normal. It’s almost brave that a developer would be willing to frustrate players to the point that many of them will give up without ever finishing the game. Of course, it also means that solving the puzzles is enormously satisfying. It’s a trade-off well worth making, even if it does mean that White Day 2 is almost certainly going to be a cult favourite game at most.
The other thing that slows the momentum through the narrative down is the other side of the gameplay: it’s a stalker horror game. That means you’re going to spend most of your time trying to avoid being spotted, chased, and killed by the enemies. Your methods of defence are limited. You’ve got a camera, but film is limited, and unfortunately, unlike Project Zero, the photos don’t damage enemies. They just temporarily stun them. You’ll need that to get away because those same enemies are terrifyingly effective in catching you at a straight footrace. So you can’t rush things, else you’ll likely crash right into your doom.
It’s unfortunate that the developers aimed for cerebral, atmospheric horror, because the aesthetics aren’t quite up to standard. The original White Day had a quaint appeal on the basis of its age. Its archaic presentation is, therefore, charming. This White Day is a much more modern production, and there are issues with framerates, a rather mundane approach to much of the environment design, and very poor voice acting and presentation of the cut scenes let that side of the experience down. Again, these were all issues with the original White Day, and perhaps the developers deliberately did some of it to ensure the sequel was in alignment, but it’s still a missed opportunity to give us something really intense and make us sweat over the controller.
Also, the unlockable and DLC costumes are disappointing. The original White Day had bikinis and we really need to bring back the era of swimsuit bonuses (just watch as someone in the comments goes ballistic at me now).
The original White Day is one of my favourite horror games. It’s clumsy and clunky, but it had the right energy and really had a lot of creative ideas going for it. I am disappointed that White Day 2 is relatively unambitious and struggles to have its own identity. It’s still an awful lot of fun and I much prefer it to the big action “horror” games that want to be action shooters with ugly monsters. While I found White Day 2 to be an admirable commitment to a more classical form of horror, I was just hoping for something with a little more impact behind it.
