White Day 2: The Flower That Tells Lies Complete Edition PS5 Review. White Day 2: The Flower That Tells Lies is a direct sequel to the original White Day: A Labyrinth Named School. While it tries hard to recapture the horror and puzzle-solving of the original, it ultimately fails to stand out.
White Day 2: The Flower That Tells Lies PS5 Review
White Day’s 2 Story Is All Over The Place And Don’t Follow One Particular Path
White Day 2 tells one story from three different perspectives and characters as it transpires simultaneously. It’s an interesting idea if it weren’t so confusing. You enter a school where a fire took the life of a young girl, where your task is to find out what happened to her. The problem is that the story doesn’t even follow what actually transpired there. After experiencing the full narrative, I’m still not sure what happened.
There are a dozen endings to unlock, so maybe the true ending eluded me, but after unlocking at least three of those endings, I just couldn’t be bothered to go back and replay the game a dozen more times.
The story goes in various directions. The school is haunted, and everyone accepts that. The scares come from all over the place: a young girl running down the hall backward or on a ceiling, a ghost popping out of a locker to give you a jump scare, and so on. It all seems commonplace in this school, and nobody seems to care, and kids are allowed to attend it?
It doesn’t help that the narrative is basically all over the place. You enter to find out what happened to a young girl who died in a fire, and it goes off the deep end with a cult trying to resurrect someone, a psycho living in the basement doing experiments on people, and security guards and manikins possessed by something never explained.
It also doesn’t help that the cutscene animations aren’t that great, and the voice acting makes PSOne classic Resident Evil sound like a masterpiece.
Repeated Scares And Events Diminish Their Impact
There are some scares here, but most are quick jump scares that are repeated, often diminishing their impact. The other thing that takes away from the scares is your pursuers. You are constantly being chased by either a security guard or a ghost of a girl who hung herself in the school or by manikins.
Each of these pursuers is highly annoying. If the security guard sees, you may as well give up because outrunning them is impossible. For some reason, the ghost gives up if you enter a stairwell but can chase you through walls. The manikins give you panic attacks and slow you down, so you can’t escape them because they will always catch you.
You can deter these pursuers with a camera. Taking pictures of them will stun them for a short time, allowing you to get away and hide. Cameras are a scarce commodity, so they should be used when necessary.
Fantastic And Complicated Puzzle Solving
The puzzle solving is where the game shines—going back to traditional old-school puzzles without hand-holding. You’ll find a clue from a note and have to figure out the clue on your own.
One example is rearranging books in the correct order on a shelf. This puzzle is random, and one solution doesn’t work for everyone. You have to find the order they are to be arranged based on the day of the week. To know the day of the week, you have to find out what day it is by scanning notes or trying to find a calendar somewhere in the school.
Some puzzles drive people crazy and can be pretty tough to solve. One reason for this difficulty is that many clues and puzzle solutions are scattered throughout the school, so you may find a puzzle but not know its solution hours later and then try to remember where the puzzle room is.
It’s tough, but I personally found a lot of satisfaction in solving these puzzles simply because they don’t hold your hand like so many games these days tend to do. I had to take out a pen and paper to write down the clues.
An Errie Location That Isn’t Allowed To Shine
The school is a great location for a horror title and acts as the best character in the game. The notes and diaries you find written by the school’s occult club paint a terrifying picture of what is going on in the school. White Day 2 does great in its world-building; it sadly just doesn’t utilize the great setting it has built to its advantage.
Visually, White Day 2 leaves much to be desired and somehow looks worse than the original game. The character models are fairly decent, but the rest of the school is repeated textures and models. The textures themselves are particularly egregious, especially when you walk up close to them.
On the plus side audio design is excellent, and the constant noises of ghosts laughing and running down the halls constantly stopped me in my tracks to wait and see what happened. The security guard’s radio is also loud and can be quite haunting even though it relays basic information.
Many of these sounds indicate that a pursuer is in the area, so you can prepare to run or hide while waiting for them to pass by. On the other hand, the voice acting and music are laughable, with almost no redeeming quality to them.
White Day 2 Tries Hard But Ends Up Failing Where It Matters The Most
White Day 2: A Flower That Tells Lies tries hard to capture the magic that made the first game such a cult classic, but in doing so, it treads familiar ground and reuses some scare tactics that appeared in its predecessor. Its story is all over the place and hard to follow, and its characters and voice work don’t do anything to help it stand out.
Its only saving grace is the school’s fantastic lore and world-building, and its solid puzzle-solving keeps it from completely failing its predecessor. White Day 2 will certainly find its audience and die-hard fans, but there is certainly much better out there for the casual horror enthusiast.
White Day 2: A Flower That Tells Lies releases on August 15, 2024
Review code kindly provided by publisher.