- PC version tested on my 4K projector, a treat!
- No more milking in just under three hours
- Code transmitted by the publisher
- Monokel is now a studio to follow closely!
The end-of-year media drum, as ruthless as it is unstoppable, leaves little space for newcomers. Hard to dig his commercial hole for the last of the ropes, without it being a grave. Big publishers like to saturate the « available brain time » with a lot of show games. In the middle of this No mans land artistic, some resistors seek to pierce a front line. This is the case for the Swedish publisher. Thunderful. Recent merger of several independent bastions, including Image & Form, Zoink and Rising Star Games In particular, the allying creative portfolio publisher has just entered the stock market, like a certain Devolver. With Firegirl, The Gunk and White Shadows, this makes no less than three new licences catapulted simultaneously (and clumsyly) in December. Winter black swans, White Shadows bathed in the shadow of the specialized press. MaG is now restoring the light on this genius flash, the first fun fable of the German studio Monokel.
A game Ravens(burger)
WHit Shadows the Swedish master Playdead's productions to whom the memorable Limbo and Inside. At the crossover die and retry and puzzle game This school is particularly distinguished by its minimalist narrative proposal. First golden rule: a non-existent interface, no HUD or tutorial. One button, two, at most. Dialogues reduced to inaudible sounds or languages. Second mantra: a radical visual style with aesthetics dedicated exclusively to narrative. The first born of Monokel fits perfectly in this line and ticks one by one the prerequisites to seduce the player. The game starts with an entry into the field in media res, without even going through the menu box. Why?
The camera is close to a huge phone with a mechanical cuckoo being pulled out. Our crowhead humanoid then escapes. With its palette of shades of grey and its powerful neon, the title smacks references to the 1930s. There are vast towers in the sky, crossed by mechanical trains at all speeds. White Shadows recalls immediately the masterpiece of Fritz Lang, Metropolis. Powered in the middle of this production chain that crosses these aerial districts, one participates in an eternal flight forward.
Propaganda
Murder sentence « The ravens are guilty » We read on the facades of this city which also recalls the old Kowloon citadel, Hong Kong neighborhood with verticality and density of worthy of Blade Runner. Our small raven, despite its presence in a quasi-concentration production chain. Like the child - and hero despite him- Limbo, the bird's eye cries out, like a lantern in the dark night. We move forward, sometimes surprised by large bright halos and proto-fascist advertising screens, which associate the evil bird with the black plague. Dizziness is ubiquitous in White Shadows, which seems to have perfectly integrated the labyrinthic construction and the rhythm of inside. Here, an elevator activated by a pig in a metal wheel, makes us discover the vastness of the city and its generous panoramas. In the distance, bells ring to announce the next programme of the sinister metropolis of « Funworld », all this under the ride of the Valkyries of Wagner.
Lightening comes after the rain
Machines operate in the shadows, while in the background lobotomized pig lines are transformed into electricity. The cattle are immediately propelled into glass tubes to the other end of the city. Like a sequence plan The thirst Evil Each scene contributes to the coherence of the universe, which imposes its identity in just a few minutes. White Shadows plays with depth of field and is not just a simple scrolling 2D horizontal or vertical. Propagandist paintings recall the beginnings of German expressionism, specifically the silent cinema of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. We then slide into the heart of the machine. A platform scene makes us jump from trains to trains like flying dragons Ghosts before entering the interior of the ministry of lights. References to labour camps and then to the holocaust are gradually revealed according to a contemporary variant. The latter could as well denounce our slaughterhouses in our unlimited consumer society.
« Battery maker since 19.. » One reads on a sign, while only the last two numbers erased allow for the dark years of the first Nazi extermination camps. We have to play White Shadows to understand how this German game reinvents the narrative grammar in its own wayInside. It is not just a matter of games of shadows and lights, nor of these crazy sequences, where, by a narrow margin, one escapes death among our corvid congeners. It is through its unfolding that one participates in history as a ribbon. Use of our congeners Lemmings which is sent to the pipe breaker) takes a path other than that imposed by Inside, of which White Shadows seems to respond directly. The OST, composed exclusively of classical music, helps cement this particularly disturbing atmosphere. Rats roar in a loud language reminiscent of the idioms of aliens of March Attack. Finally, radio and television sounds are a genuine success.
« All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. »
Very quickly, White Shadows takes the foothills of theInside, His codes were taken up with joy to better divert them. Remember this scene from the Swedish game, where the child, sniffing out of a cornfield, found little chicks that followed us with joy. Same point of departure here, dilemma and playful forcing, but ending all other... White Shadows chooses a narrative loop path that is otherwise more inclusive and less pessimistic. Infinite plans suggest arms of metal that grow egg farms, produced in battery, until the advent of the prophet: the one who chooses to take the scrolling Down. The slogan « All animals are equals » will be declined according to the opposing proposals of both sides. Propagandas, counter-propagandas fight for a single story, bathed in this theatre of cruelty where one is sometimes victimized, sometimes accomplice, if not executioner. White Shadows is an original modern rereading of the animal farm of Orwell.
By reviving some scenes by a skilful ride, the suggestion operates naturally and the player, marked by the previous traumas, will change the course of the story. Mid-term narrative reversal written with intelligence, the magic of the tale works wonderfully. Only a few collision problems, clumsy jumps and invisible ladders will slightly reduce the experience. White Shadows is a brilliant Orwellian fable with its approach, flexibility and style of the 1930s remarkably transcribed. He questions the reverse of plebiscite, populist indoctrination, like the engines of racism and exclusion, the first levers of fascism. A raven that augurs - for once - a good future for the Monokel studio!
For
- Rich visual style
- Well controlled rhythm
- Powerful power of suggestion
- Direct response to Inside
Against
- Collision problems per moment
- Rigidity of the character sometimes abusive
- Short (but intense) experience
- Release into a relative indifference of the year-end calendar
You convinced me, this will be my next game when I finish Pillars of Eternity!