White Day 2: The Flower That Lies – Review

White Day: A Labyrinth Named School was a Korean game released on PC in 2001. While it achieved some acclaim it didn’t leave its own shores. Fast forward to 2015 and White Day gets remastered for modern systems and localised worldwide and achieves a cult following, White Day 2: The Flower That Lies hopes to continue the story and recapture some horror vibes.

The first thing I’ll be open about is that I never gave White Day a proper look, I own it and played a little but it got pushed down my backlog. So I’ll be approaching this as a newcomer essentially, and oh boy was I lost.

When you boot the game, you are presented with three stories, which you can tackle in any order. Looking back at its history White Day 2 was kind of released episodically, with episodes one and two being released together and episode three dropping later. The three stories do intersect but don’t affect the outcome outside of their individual paths.

White Day 2 is centred around Yeondu High School one day after the events of White Day. Story one is about Jung Soo-jin and Jang Sung-tae, two teenagers who break into school because…. reasons. Story two follows Kang Seo-yeon, a teacher at Yeondu School who is allowed in and is exploring for… other reasons. And story three is Han Na-young, a young girl who is in the school because, you guessed it, reasons.

I don’t know if it was lost in translation but I wasn’t given any motivation for any of the main characters to actually be there or any reason they couldn’t just walk out of the front door when stuff started getting spooky.

I was often just plopped in a room with a vague objective like “find out what’s going on” or worse no objective at all leaving me wandering blindly from room to room, scouring for anything interactable to advance the plot. You do get some context clues if you inspect an item and sometimes the game blatantly tells you what to do making it a very inconsistent experience.

So what do you do in the game? White Day 2 is a first-person horror puzzle game set in a Korean School at night. You go from room to room in the sectioned-off area you are in, picking up clues and unlocking new areas, all while dealing with cheap jump scares, stalkers and the dark. Oh boy is it dark!

As you can tell, I took issue with how dark the game is. Now, I don’t mind dark games as most give you some way to combat this. But while White Day 2 does give you a torch, with the worst light radius in the world, and that reveals your location to the stalker.

You see, at a certain point, a stalker will activate and patrol the school corridors. These range from security guards who you can hear via their walkie-talkie static to a violet ghost who doesn’t care about walls and on one occasion the principal who will make sure no one leaves the school. You have very limited options when it comes to dealing with the stalkers. Human opponents can be stunned for a few seconds which uses a finite resource, but more often than not your best bet is to run.

I found escaping a stalker was random at best. The ghost stopped chasing after a certain distance accompanied by a musical sting, but the security guards seemed to require breaking the line of sight and gave no audio indication of escape.

The stalkers’ patrol route seemed to gravitate around you as well. I would sneak past to go to a completely different part of the school only to find the same stalker now patrolling this section until I was done, then follow me again. But their patrol route wasn’t always limited to the corridor. Sometimes (often it felt arbitrary) they would enter the very room I was in, through a closed door I may add, which would of course trigger another manic dash leaving me nowhere near the puzzle I was working on.

Couple this with the random scares, the darkness and searching every nook and cranny of every room for items led to a very uncomfortable gaming experience. I don’t know if it was my personal issue because I usually have no problems playing horror titles, but this was unpleasant to play. This unsettled me so much that I had to put it down for extended periods. Thankfully, after experimenting with the options I found that the gamma could be adjusted so the school wasn’t as dark and I could continue.

But, as I’m sure I’ve said in a previous review, if I have to turn part of your game off to access it that’s a failure in game design.

Technically the game isn’t great either, with long load times, spelling errors, and a drastic level of pop-in upon loading a save (seriously I would load into empty classrooms and the furniture would pop in twenty seconds later). The most egregious, however, would be upon rebooting the game the controls would return to default, except upon going into the key bindings they would be set to my custom forcing me to reset and reconfigure every single time. This was a lesson in frustration.

The localisation was done pretty well and the voice acting wasn’t terrible, not great but it did the job. The names of characters were not localised though and although some people might not have an issue with this, I could never tell who people were talking about without consulting a cheat sheet I had made. Music again while not spectacular did its job of keeping the mood tense when it needed to be.

Each path had a few cutscenes sprinkled here and there, and aside from not explaining much, there were the obvious lip-syncing issues caused by just replacing the language, but some of them were well-animated and energetic. All the stories had multiple endings as well, all triggered by what you do in your journey.

Some were obvious like a dialogue choice and some were so convoluted when I checked a guide I was like, “How did anyone figure that out??”. But we’re not talking about the difference between two endings here, each path has at least four with a grand total of fourteen endings for the entire game.

There are also collectables to find. There are grisly murder and ghost stories to find in the game, and certain jump scares can be photographed to view in the main menu. Finally, we have clothing options. Each character including the stalkers has multiple outfits you can dress them up in (including some horny ones) but I was left with a feeling of “But why?”.

You cannot see your character outside of cutscenes and do not meet anyone in gameplay aside from the stalkers, so this left the whole purpose null and void. The one saving grace was that this didn’t appear to be a premium upgrade and was included in the base game.

I really struggled to play White Day 2 let alone enjoy it, which is a shame as sometimes there were some genuinely great puzzles here. It felt like this was buried under lacklustre presentation and sloppy gameplay. Furthermore, it adds to my personal belief, that I see proven time and time again, that trying to expand upon a story that has been in hibernation for a certain time will never be able to recapture the feeling of the original.