The Black Within
Release Date: May 30, 2024
Systems: Windows, Linux, Steam OS
Publisher: waleedzo
Developer: waleedzo
Time Spent: 116 minutes
The Black Within was an interesting game, where I think my expectations were a bit too high. Those expectations were solely based on the following criteria:
- The simplicity of the title
- The aesthetic of the Steam store banner
- The self-description as a short, first-person psychological horror game that delves into the character's psyche.
What The Black Within was to me, instead, was a short, first-person horror game with a story that moved too quickly without decent explanation, filled with fetch-quest-adjacent puzzles, and a handful of sucessfully placed jump scares.
Because this game was so short, which is not a criticism, as that was one of the selling points for me, I'm going to get into spoilers throughout the article, both in terms of story and a few of the puzzles.
In The Black Within, you play as Laila (sometimes spelled as "Layla" in-game), who has aspirations of being a successful music artist, although, as evidenced by the shabiness of her apartment and her nearly empty fridge, she is nearing the end of her financial rope. At the beginning of the game, she receives "an important call" from her new manager, Arne, who literally tells her that she's about to sign a contract with the devil and that she needs to follow all of Arne's instructions perfectly. I personally wasn't sure if this was hyperbole or not, but based on Laila's lackluster response at potentially signing her soul away or chuckling at Arne's verboseness, it didn't feel like the content of the phone call was entirely surprising.
The first puzzle in the game, in hindsight, felt like a bit of a tutorial in how to open doors, and because I was playing on the Steam Deck, it was oddly important, as unlocking doors required two actions that functioned differently than if you were using standard mouse/keyboard controls. Following leaving the apartment, I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out where Laila stashed her car keys. I had checked her apartment to no avail, as she apparently doesn't keep them with her house keys. They also weren't in a bathroom that was outside, down a hall, and up a flight of stairs, although it seems like she leaves her antidepressant medication there. It turned out that her keys were in the downstairs unit of her apartment, which was only accessible from a separate door outside and around the corner from the main apartment (with her bed, kitchen, cat, and house keys), where you start the game. I could not give you a logical explanation of the layout of this apartment.
The bulk of the game is spent in Arne's house, which you arrive at at night after spending some time driving. Your goal: sign the contract that's located inside the house. Getting inside the house and locating the contract is the meat of the game, and how seemingly complicated the whole process is feels like it's the reason for there being puzzles throughout the game and for what triggers jump scares to happen. Since the front door is locked, you have to find another way into the house. Once in the house, you have to find a way out of the living room, which is probably one of the strangest and most obtuse puzzles in the entire game. In no amount of time would I have guessed that to open the door out of the living room to explore the rest of the house, would I have thought to pick up a pail of water to dump onto the roaring fire in the fireplace, pull out a discolored brick, activating a mechanism that unlocks the door to the front room of the house.
Most of the time spent in the house is spent locating keys of various fashions scattered throughout the house to access new areas. Need to open a padlocked cabinet (because of course you do)? Use a mallet. Need a key to unlock the blue door? Use the key found (I genuinely don't remember where this key was, but it was somewhere else in the house) somewhere. Need to access a room that's boarded up by wooden beams? Gotta use the axe that was in the locked cabinet in the garage. And of course, finding keys and unlocking doors is what triggers strange things to happen throughout the course of the game.
Some of the scares in the game are pretty effective, often happening while traversing through the house and when things are pretty quiet, but they're not wholly unexpected because you already know what kind of game you're playing, and Arne warns Laila that she will be seeing dark, shadowy figures and that she'll get used to them after some time. Dark figures sprinting up the stairs on all fours just as you enter the front room (at least, I think it was running up on all fours), or a statue weighing a literal ton showing up behind you when you last saw it two stories above you, were all effectively unsettling. Having the image of a bloodied woman appear and scream at you as you walk down a hall is scary because it's a jump scare, but then you wonder who this woman was and question if she's part of the story, or just an asset the developer used.*
After securing the contract and placing it (which took a few attempts as the game apparently didn't register my button presses on the Steam Deck, and doesn't seem to be an isolated issue either, based on some reviews on Steam), you're prompted to leave the house. I genuinely thought that that was the end of the game, but then you're transported (via your car) to a cabin out in the woods, where you once again have to solve several puzzles to complete the ritual. After entering the cabin, I was questioning why the game was telling me that my current goal was to still enter the small wooden house (I forgot the exact description, but that's the jist of it), and only after thoroughly exploring the whole cabin, did I find that there was a small wooden toolshed (shack?) along the oustside of the house that I hadn't explored where I again found another "key" to unlock another room inside the cabin.
After completing the ritual by placing three objects on three pedestals outside the cabin, you slowly walk (because I never figured out how to run, and I additionally didn't feel like remapping the buttons in the Steam Deck customizations) towards the shining door at the end of the path. I'll give waleedzo credit in how the game ends, but only to a certain extent. Upon entering the Door of Dreams, Laila completes the ritual and gains all of the fame and success as a musician, but her perspective is from behind a literal prison, watching herself perform to a cheering audience. I actually really liked this interpretation behind "selling your soul to the Devil," since to me it felt pretty novel and I hadn't come across it before. The problem, though, was that Laila's pain and distress at being trapped in this prison watching herself perform seemed exaggerated with what was being shown. Had there been a montage of her being in this prison over the course of days/weeks/years, I could understand her immediate distress. Had she been flayed or been subjected to Hellraiser levels of torture, I could understand that as well. But instead, we just have Laila standing in a cinderblock prison immediately after passing through the Door of Dreams (and completing the ritual) with no other sign of visual distress to justify all of the regret that she pours out at the player for having gone through the events in the game.
The Black Within had its moments. It wasn't a great game, but it wasn't terrible either. It was fine. It was okay. It was also waleedzo's debut game, so there's room for growth, and that's good.
*I'm not certain, but it seemed like the pedestals used to hold each of the items to complete the ritual were reused mauseleums. On the opposite side, facing away from the viewer in the picture below, all had little doors. At first, I thought that they had something to do with the ritual, that after the item was placed and the fire started, you were supposed to collect something, but then I thought maybe the developer was just repurposing assets instead. It's not obvious, and it doesn't do anything to affect gameplay, just something I thought mildly interesting.
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