Developed by Scenic Route Software for Playdate’s Season 2.

Snow falls on the highway, and it’s been falling for years. It piles up on broken-down vehicles. It dusts the shoulders of a man in heavy clothing, but it doesn’t cling. He stays in motion, always moving forward. Where else is there to go?

The Whiteout is an adventure game taken at a slow pace. You play as an unnamed traveler in the near future who has spent years moving through a dystopian apocalypse of perpetual snow, and in the game’s opening moments that means just trying to survive. Your first order of business is to find a new jacket. You’ll accomplish this by trudging up and down the highway, looking in the windows of snow-buried cars.

Even when you’re not on a highway, you’re still on a road. The Whiteout’s scenes all take place along linear paths stretching from left to right, which greatly simplifies puzzle solving: it’s hard to miss anything you might need when you’ll inevitably pass everything that could be important. And the puzzles themselves are usually straightforward: in that highway scene, the jacket you’re looking for is in the first car you pass. It’s sealed shut, but a tool in the truck just ahead of the car will crack it open. This is the tutorial puzzle, so of course it’s simple, but the puzzles also don’t get much more complex. The distances between points A and B stretch as the game goes on, but they mostly follow the same formula.

And so, The Whiteout is mostly a game about walking, about the spaces between A and B. As he walks, the traveler’s sight is hewn in by the falling snow, showing him the world only a few feet from his eyes before it gets washed out in white. Through this perspective, this visual cutout, we see trees, boarded up buildings, and occasionally other travelers. And we see all of this very, very slowly. At first, this bothered me. I felt impatient, felt the experience being padded out by exploring this terrain at a snail’s pace. And then I realized that it wasn’t the pace that bothered me.

The traveler is a blank slate, a cipher for the player. He comments on the state of the world, but we rarely get insight into his own experiences, or how the snowpocalypse has affected him. He has no stakes and little interiority. This would be fine if he was just a lens through which to investigate a compelling world, but the world isn’t up to that task. It’s repetitive, its characters are simple, and it lacks scenery worth lingering on or walking slowly through. There are occasional bright spots. The sound design does the most to ground you in the experience, with a constant howl of wind and a deep crunch of snowy footsteps doing more to convey the monstrous weather than the actual white-out pixels. And the game’s best puzzles rely not on finding the right item, but on listening for the right cue.

And toward the end of my experience, there was a shift. I was able to leave the traveler behind and inhabit a different character with more interesting stakes than “trying not to die.” The game came much more alive then, like I had finally found a campfire burning at the center of all that cold. But even as a short story, at only a few hours to complete, the game held out that warmth for too long. The cold wasn’t worth it.

Elsewhere, on Our Wonderful Web

I’m dissatisfied with the state of online discovery and curation these days (algorithms, social media, AI, etc) that’s largely controlled by a few enormous companies who don’t have our interests at heart. In an effort to make the web more human and more our own, I’m going to start adding links to the bottom of my posts to things on the internet that I felt I truly benefitted from. Some will be new, some will be old, and most will be unrelated to the post itself.

Today I recommend reading Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s Crushing Difficulty Conveys A World In Penance by Elijah Gonzalez at Endless Mode. This essay not only digs into Silksong’s religious themes (as well as some Christian history I was unfamiliar with), it also illustrates how those themes make meaning with the game’s mechanical difficulty. I haven’t played Silksong yet, but reading this made me more eager to do so.