White Knuckle Has You Falling From Cloud 9

If there’s one thing that defines the roguelite genre, it’s ascension. Climbing a peak until something – and almost always something unexpected – knocks you back down to the bottom of the mountain. It’s never going to be a breeze, but it’s worth it to know that the wind at the top is going to feel so much better. White Knuckle takes this sentiment to a literal extreme and then some.

This is the debut title from Dark Machine Games, a first-person roguelite parkour platformer, and published by DreadXP, who have been on a tear in the indie horror scene for quite a while now. From the jumpscare jamboree of The Mortuary Assistant to the downright inspiring Dread Delusion, if there’s a forefront, DreadXP are standing there with arms wide open. As it stands, sprints, and springs, White Knuckle is a definitive example of that.

You play as a disembodied pair of hands, stranded at the bottom of a brutalist spire. An autonomous female voice occasionally spouts warnings and staff updates from the intercom, but beneath her announcements, and your own feet, something is bubbling below you and rising up. You’re tasked with climbing this seemingly endless tower to freedom, before you fall victim to the horrors of this facility’s work.

Even in this primitive state of “Early Access”, what’s fascinating to me about White Knuckle is how emboldened it is with crafting an identity for itself. It doesn’t take long for the core, or rather, cores, to open up layer by layer as time goes by, which is admirable, if a little bit foolishly noble for something so eager to make a statement.

It starts off as a goofy precision platformer in first person, like if Human Fall Flat was in VR, where you control your jerky hands and elastic physical movement with the mouse buttons. How big your hitbox is exactly isn’t known, but that seems to add to the general fun of figuring out how you can cheese the climbing system.

One of White Knuckle’s sneaky assets is the inventory system, which is populated over time with pitons you can hammer into the wall to create new routes, weapons, and temporary health buffs. There is a limit to how much you can carry, but for better or worse, the game is reluctant to portray this information, or indeed, any information necessary to retain. With how stripped-down the game is, GUI-wise, it’s exceptionally difficult to figure out what your buffs are doing, even when they’re unlocked for further use.

Then there’s the aesthetic itself, remarkably cold concrete that only becomes colder as it’s smothered in brutalist architecture and PSX-style dithering. It’s not exactly retro, it’s more that it’s lending itself to how direct and suffocating this Soviet-era construction could be, alongside the generic announcements that pertain to employee retention and on-site alerts of failing power units. However, it won’t be long before the voice gives you a fairly direct warning: “It is below you”.

Now the horror kicks into gear, and indeed, the mass underneath you slowly rising up, sludge spitting out to stick to your boots is a threat, and you’re on a timer. You can’t sit there and strategize, this thing is constantly climbing, the same as you, and you’ve gotta pray that you can close the door behind you. You can take minor breaks in interludes that serve as vending machines for equipment, enhancements and extra lives, and this is where the roguelite elements come into play.

Despite this four-piece matinee of mechanics and design trying their best to work in tandem with each other, something still isn’t right. There’s another piece to the puzzle that was exceptionally difficult to ascertain as I threw myself through the monkey bars and motions that White Knuckle presents. It’s not just that the game feels unfocused, but there’s an element in play that’s actively sabotaging the rest of it quite successfully.

Indeed, I kept pushing further, looking for answers when and where I could. In time, I discovered small narrative snippets that present themselves in brief glimpses of the facility’s history and encounters with remnants of individuals designated to the same fate as you. I couldn’t ruminate on them for long, or indeed, at all, because I was on the clock, and there was a good chance I’d lose it if I didn’t make it up in time, which happened a lot, to my rage-fueled chagrin – and that’s when it hit me.

You can point to any number of influences White Knuckle wears as a pinstripe suit, from Portal to Half-Life – hell, even INFRA – but one thing that shines through more than anything else is its synonymy with rage-bait platformers, your QWOPs and your Getting Over It’s. This, in turn, seeks to dismantle the outrageous amount of promise White Knuckle inhibits, to the point where every other core is actively sabotaged by one another.

The roguelite elements tend to be undermined by how linear the platforming elements have to be, lest you’re softlocked by a lack of resources, which happens more often than you’d think. White Knuckle's extra lives system works as such: If you die after using one, you’ll spawn back at the computer you used the floppy disk on, BUT, you lose your entire inventory upon death unless you acquire a perk, and if you can’t find a piton or rebar rod before you come across something which requires it, you can only jump against the wall and await death.

The progression system is undermined by the sheer reluctance White Knuckle shows when trying to convey information, largely reducing the player’s power to contextless icons and minor screen flashes. What’s the difference between the effect of a syringe, and the effect of a medicine bottle? Who knows! One flashes red, and the other flashes blue, but you’ll be damned to the goo before the game tells you what it’ll do!

White Knuckle Early Access Preview | Final Thoughts

Fear is replaced by frustration, and discovery is replaced by dismissal. In its current state, White Knuckle isn’t a well-oiled machine juggling its various gameplay features, it’s the Olympic logo warped to “OOOOO”. Thankfully, this infancy can be nothing but a learning curve, as despite so much vigor in their chest, and pep in their step, White Knuckle has been summoned in a disillusioned state that doesn't know where to jump to.

White Knuckle was previewed on PC using a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 20 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of preview.