White Night is a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is a film noir themed adventure mystery that uses the godawfully bad stark black and white graphics as part of the game mechanic. You need to use matches and other sources of illumination to explore a dark house. This doesn't work nearly as well as it looked on the back of the coaster they drew this game up on at a bar.

Gameplay here is an awkward and frustrating experience with poor camera angles, deliberately obtuse layouts to make the illumination game theme even more frustrating. Navigation is just an annoying trial and error system that just doesn't work if you have an expectation that video games should be fun. You can also just get instakilled quite easily... I think it's important that playtesting gets done before games get published, I'm not sure how much of that happened here.

From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The mobile app features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" black and white assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with.

It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the mobile app. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it. Sure, it's stylised, but it sticks out to the trained eye that the game assets are really low quality, to cater to the Android and Apple phones the game was designed for.

Another defect in the mobile app caused by the gaming/mobile appliance design is the intolerably bad camera controls. There's no effective mouselook, and control of the viewing angles is deliberately outside of reasonable control from the user.

This defect springs from the limitations of inferior gaming platforms, but on PC we don't have this limitation due to KB+M controls... however, the developer deliberately chose to arrogantly foist this handicap onto PC gamers. Out of spite, or laziness, it's unclear, regardless, once more mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone.

Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.

These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The mobile app never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this mobile app every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $15 USD, on app stores, it's $5. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay THREE TIMES THE PRICE for an already overpriced mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this is a mobile app, is priced to insult and gouge PC gamers, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend.

Just who do they think we are?

i really liked the game atmosphere which is unique in its own way. The black and white noir feel is awesome.