White Noise Online (PC) review "Still budget jump scares and the sound of screams from a million miles away."

It was late 2012, and Xbox Live Indie developers and serial plagiarists copiers, Milkstone Studios had just hit paydirt. Shamelessly stealing from Generously inspired by the rather well-received Slender: The Eight Pages, they created their own version of wandering around a slab of woodlands while being stalked by a monster that was almost always just behind you. White Noise: a tale of Horror couldn’t get their capitalisation right, but creeped you the hell out anyway. Forests at night were already creepy. Navigating with whatever bubble of light your torch provided was already creepy. A luminous white monster popping up constantly in the corner of your screens forcing you to run the hell away was often terrifying. It was as simple and effective as it was ruthlessly pilfered and altered slightly enough to not get sued to hell and back.

White Noise was a bit of a hit in that it wasn’t just a recognised franchise mockbuster like those sy-fi channel films you pretend you don’t love but a solid enough game in its own right. It was cheap, you could download it in approximately 7 seconds and, if you set it up, gave the pad to an unsuspecting friend, turned off the lights and filmed their reactions to share with everyone you know, it was worth its weight in gold.

I’d like to take a second to make yet another apology to my friend Karen that I don’t actually mean. That clip remains hilarious.

Soon though, that version became obsolete when Milkstone decided to have a dabble at a spot of originality. Kind of. White Noise Online took their first effort, snuck in five more maps and offered online play with up to three other players. Some of this was a bit of a bust; wandering off on your own for too long often meant a cheap insta-death, so your one and only option was staying with the group. So, as a unit, you had to explore these new settings and find hidden tape recorders that played inaudible recordings before the bright white monster tracked you down and ate your face.

Thing is, while undertaking White Noise on your own remains the scarier (and still very much viable) option, grouping up does present a brand new set of laudable dynamics. Sometimes, you don’t even see the monster; you just hear one of your travelling party scream, and you know it’s time to leg it. You don’t have time to all plot the same course, so, odds are, in the midst of an escape, some of you are going to get picked off and killed. Unlike the first game, being killed doesn’t mean game over; you are resurrected as a ghost and can try to help the remaining survivors by hunting down the tapes. You can try to re-find your group by following the beams of their flashlights, which you can often see in the distance, even if it means stepping over the odd corpse on your way there.

White Noise Online hit the Xbox Indie scene in early 2013, making the original version obsolete in a little over a month, and its release onto PC hasn’t seen a lot of change. There’s a bit of a graphic spruce up, and keyboard controls have been spliced in, but everything else remains the same. There’s still a selection of characters to play as who all have special talents that still aren’t particularly well explained. It still has that budget feel now with a new veneer of obvious console port, but mainly because it’s a budget title and an obvious console port, so should either really be held against it? It remains a good way to get together with a group of likeminded players and get creeped out by that thing that wants to kill you. And, should you dare peek over your shoulder, is almost always right there.



It would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the game’s best feature still remains; after you’ve all be slaughtered (or if you’ve somehow found all the recorders) you’re presented with a grid that shows your exploration. This often simply points out that you’ve been running around in a panicked circle for the last fifteen minutes. Jumping at shadows, forgetting your exploration once the panic hits, being picked off one by one. Are there many better ways to pass an evening?

Staff review by Gary Hartley (May 26, 2014) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.