In White Knuckle, you'll feel every death-defying step you take

This Horror Platformer Is Not For Those With A Fear Of Heights

In White Knuckle, you'll feel every death-defying step you take

Swinging hand to hand, hammering in pitons, throwing rebar from a distance to give myself a clutch handhold just as the sludge beneath me begins bubbling up into my room, it all eventually clicked. Every once in a while, I'd climb high enough that the silo would close off a section beneath me, acting like a temporary checkpoint--I could fall onto it rather than plummet back to the very beginning, provided the sludge hadn't risen to blanket the floor yet.

With a limited inventory, I was quickly making strategic decisions. Do I take the nondescript tin can, which contains some kind of fluid that recharges my stamina--thus reinvigorating my fatigued hands some hundreds of meters above ground--or do I take the additional piton, giving myself a chance to make a risky reach a much safer one somewhere along my path?

Though my constrained pockets were certainly a hallmark of horror games, I was consciously searching for other classic horror elements. Its audio and setting are certainly creepy, but without a more traditional horror scenario in front of me, I was wondering just how frightening the game might be. Is it merely a horror game because the setting is vaguely unsettling?

But the farther I climbed, the more I realized that I needn't have searched for or expected any monsters. The act of climbing these structures had seeped into my mind as the game's horror, after all. It was an epiphany I had mid-climb during my hands-on time. Wait a minute, I thought to myself while dangling hundreds of meters above the ground, this is terrifying. The threat of failing a jump, of exhausting my hands and slipping to my death, or of stumbling so repeatedly that the murky goo caught up to me--it was exhilarating. The climb was the monster. It felt like Mirror's Edge by way of unending night terrors.

This epiphany brought the whole experience together. At that point, I was more determined than ever to understand its world, reading its strange signage and listening for its disembodied voice announcing workplace goings-on that always felt like a fraction of a clue as to what the hell this silo was for in the first place. With the stakes real and my character's vulnerability obvious, I felt each step in my stomach. I wanted to learn more of its world and I'd come to understand--if not yet master--its controls, and I finally got the gameplay loop. I felt I was ready to press on when the Steam Early Access game arrives later this week on April 17.

White Knuckle isn't much like anything else DreadXP has published before, and for a label as oddball as this one, that's really saying something. It won't be easy, and it definitely won't be for anyone who fears heights, but if you can endure its wall-climbing horrors, maybe we'll meet each other at the finish line and help each other make sense of White Knuckle's lo-fi, high-tension unreality.

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This story originally appeared on: GameSpot - Author:UK GAG