White Shadows

“The black and white graphics are a little grainy, even on high resolutions, making identifying your character a bit difficult in places.”

“Changing subject the models are quite low quality graphically; even on ultra the game at times looked like a game from 15 years ago. While this could work to its charm if it embraced low quality or low poly designs, it doesn't.”

“Poorly optimized graphics, and lacks an in-depth options menu.”

“The mechanics are fine, standard limbo/little nightmares-esque clumsy platforming, but all of the platforming is extremely basic; it's way too easy and linear to be anywhere near fun gameplay, and the "puzzles" in this "puzzle-platformer" exist almost solely of either moving boxes to climb ledges or pulling levers in the correct sequence, and the worst part of all is that most of the game isn't even the basic platforming or the boring puzzles; you just walk.”

“Maybe it gets better later on but by the 0.8hrs in I'd had one puzzle where despite there being nothing difficult about the puzzle itself I got stuck because of a newly introduced, completely un-clued, game mechanic, which I had to go to a playthrough to work out and then backtrack a bit to find, and then one section where a similar lack of clues put me back to a re-spawn point from several minutes earlier.”

“For the price I paid it wasn't too bad but I can definitely see glaring similarities and gameplay scenes from other games, there was a part of the game where you can avoid being seen by a light and you had to move with a crown of birds, the scene felt like it was plucked out of inside and put into this game but with just less polish and execution; on the topic of polish a lot of this game's assets just don't operate properly they either clip or simply phase out of reality, although asset and model clipping isn't the end of the world and is quite common in games, when it's almost every animation that has it it gets to a point, as well as the clipping and models just vanishing and reappearing, a lot of the animations break quite often, one of the larger scenes within the egg room where the robotic arms are moving in tune to a classical song several times throughout its run they either didn't sync correctly or just kept resetting their cycle, once again not the end of the world but it felt like such a huge miss and it was a pretty cool scene it's just disappointing to see.”

“Having mentioned the use of classical music, this game uses it so often, it's not that I'm not a fan of the classics, because I am, but having almost every other scene feature either a classical song or repeat a song that played just five minutes ago, which also doesn't fit, gets boring and repetitive—especially when I've heard 'Flight of the Bumblebee' for the third time. Aside from classical music, the sound design and use of audio is jarring at worst and repetitive at best. At several points in the game, there will be an area that constantly loops the same exact sound over and over, which isn't a bad thing; however, the sounds loop about every 10 seconds and can get very annoying very quickly. I'm not asking for the devs to have several unique sounds for every small detail, but it'd be nice to have more than one sound for a train, and that the same sound doesn't almost give me a heart attack most of the time I hear it. Also, at times the audio seems to dip in quality, like it was screen recorded instead of an audio file. Not to say it was, but to me it's the best way I can describe the drop in audio clarity.”

“Add to that a soundtrack of classical music that's in the public domain instead of a proper soundtrack (I mean, I really love some of these compositions, but come on), long unskippable cutscenes that you have to watch again and again if you try to get some of the more difficult achievements (I didn't bother), and a last chapter that was extremely underwhelming and boring (and let's not talk about that ending, gee whiz), and you get a disappointing package.”

“The robot arms don't sync with the song at all; learn what tempo is.”

“I was also a bit bothered by the sound design, mainly because many things that should make a sound just do not, which hurt the atmosphere a little.”

“While the game has its sweet moments, overall the art direction of the game fails to capture the noir atmosphere it was intended to create.”

“The atmosphere felt like Little Nightmares at first, but as soon as you realize that you are basically in absolutely no danger regardless of your choices, the intensity became nonexistent.”

“The visuals are interesting, but the optimization is terrible, putting an inordinate amount of strain on your graphics card.”

“Some of the worst optimization I have seen.”

“There's a lot of performance issues, framerate creeping from 300 to 40, and then back up and back down, clipping is extremely awkward in a lot of places, ledges not being possible to grab, and there's no yellow tape to guide players where to go which led to me having to look up a walkthrough due to the poor readability.”

“The graphics, sounds, cinematics, and all the visuals in general were amazing, but the gameplay at times could be a bit stale and a little buggy.”

“Platforming is very basic, sluggish, and buggy.”

“A few glitches here and there, lots of clipping which was annoying at times to see, especially since it was right in your face.”

“You'll need a second life for grinding.”

“The game has very long puzzles that become boring, grinding and tedious after a while.”

“Everything is slow, clunky and tedious.”

“I completed the game in little over 5 hours, and there are no side quests or extra content, not much replay value either.”

“But because you can complete this in a single evening, I'd say watch someone else play it rather than buy it, as it has zero replayability (unless you're an achievement hunter) and there simply isn't anything worth exploring in this linear sideways platformer.”

“It will take you between 1.5 and 2.5 hours to complete, and apart from replaying the exact experience again there's really no replayability.”