Many horror games involve you going downstairs. After all, down is where most of the evil in the world is traditionally located, whether we are talking about geology, psychology or theology. White Knuckle reverses the flow. You’re already down; extrapolating, you now have to go up.
Perhaps you are depressed because you are a manifestation of said evil. Perhaps the monstrous beings who try to thwart your ascension are only trying to keep you from polluting the surface world. Perhaps these are the real heroes. It doesn’t really matter because you have no choice. Behind you, a wall of unspeakable flesh appears in the tunnel. To avoid becoming part of it, you have to climb up.
“White Knuckle is a first-person climbing game,” explains the Steam page. “Climb through the innards of SUBSTRUCTURE 17 using precise movement mechanics. Sharp reflexes and resource management will take you to the highest peaks below ten thousand meters of concrete and decay.”
The game’s catacomb industrial environment includes several distinct areas, including “deep, dry silo warehouses”, “rotting pipeline channels”, and “Habitation’s haunted piers”. They all seem to consist mostly of mind-bending puzzles where each of your character’s hands is assigned its own button or trigger, but there’s also the opportunity to throw rusty drills and makeshift spears at creatures that probably shouldn’t be explored further.
If you find it attractive, yes demo on Steam. The creators of the Dark Machine games were delighted with the response to the demo. “We didn’t expect this.” reads a post from the beginning of the month. “I didn’t expect this. This was a game the three of us worked on in the evenings and weekends in our free time after work just for fun and I thought maybe a few people would have fun for thirty minutes before moving on, but that didn’t happen and I’m still processing it all for the best possible way.
Wow, that’s pretty good for a game about crawling out of a giant metal intestine. The full version of the game does not have a release date yet.
