White Knuckle

Introduction

White Knuckle sends players climbing through a rising, monster-infested vertical facility, grabbing and scrambling their way upward with controls that draw immediate comparisons to precision-platformer punishers like Getting Over It, layered under real horror-survival tension. Developed by Dark Machine Games and published by DreadXP, it entered Early Access 17 April 2025 and remains there as of this review, with the developer estimating roughly a year in Early Access before a content-complete 1.0. It holds an Overwhelmingly Positive rating across a genuinely large review base: 98.1% across 10,036 English-language reviews, 98.0% across its wider 13,786-review all-language corpus. This review reads the 100 most-relevant English negative reviews and finds a specific, well-articulated complaint dominating a meaningful share of them, worth naming precisely rather than folding into general Early Access grumbling.

A genuinely brilliant core concept

Before the criticism, it's worth conveying how strong the enthusiasm in this review's positive sample actually is. "First you think it's a ragebait 'weird controls' stream game," reads a 362-vote review, "then you actually like the controls. Then really like the controls." Another, 101 hours in, puts it more bluntly: "The only negative thing I have to say about this game is that it has ruined every other game for me that has climbing mechanics." Reviewers repeatedly credit the climbing system as genuinely novel rather than a gimmick, and the horror-survival atmosphere — grainy visuals, creature design, mounting tension — earns its own separate, consistent praise. Crucially, this praise extends specifically to the game's original two zones, which even critical reviewers describe as well-tuned and fair, giving this review a clear baseline to measure later complaints against.

"Does not respect the player's time"

That's the exact phrase used in one representative review, and it captures the single most-repeated, specific complaint in this review's negative sample. Twenty of the 100 negatives centre on the lack of a proper mid-run save system: death resets progress entirely, forcing players to replay well-mastered early sections from scratch every time, and the campaign mode's save option is specifically criticised for requiring an in-game currency to use at all. "This game truly does not respect the time of new players," reads one, "I would like to be able to actually save and quit without using my [resource]." That's a structural complaint about the genre's permadeath convention colliding with a climbing game's demand for physical mastery — losing a run to a mistimed jump feels different, several reviewers argue, than losing a run to a combat encounter, because retreading the same climbing sequence repeatedly doesn't teach anything new the way a roguelike's varied encounters usually would.

The Abyss, specifically

A closely related but distinct thread concerns content added since launch. Fifteen of the 100 negatives name a specific newer biome, "the Abyss," directly, arguing it wasn't tuned with anything like the care the original two zones received. "The Abyss update is seriously the most untested, most unbalanced update so far," reads one 31-vote review, "the new area is absolutely senseless, while the entire game before was and still is balanced enough." Another, more recent review makes the contrast explicit: "when I die to some [nonsense] there, I get to go back to play the previous levels that are actually fun." That's a useful, dated signal for an Early Access game specifically — it suggests the core design team's tuning instincts are sound where they had the most iteration time, and that newer content hasn't caught up yet, which is a very different diagnosis than "the game is poorly designed."

Difficulty spikes and a contested roguelike label

A broader complaint, present in 25 of the 100 negatives, concerns "knowledge check" design — deaths from threats a player had no reasonable way to anticipate on a first encounter, distinct from fair, learnable difficulty. Seventeen of the 100 also push back on the game's roguelike framing specifically, arguing perks are offered too infrequently and carry too little impact to function as genuine meta-progression, making death feel like straightforward loss rather than roguelike-style advancement toward a stronger next run.

Final Verdict

White Knuckle has earned its massive, enthusiastic following through a genuinely inventive climbing system and real horror atmosphere that this review's own critics largely don't dispute — even its harshest negative reviews credit the original content as well-built and fair. Where a meaningful, specific share of its own players push back is exactly where an Early Access game should be expected to show growing pains: a lack of mid-run saving that turns permadeath into repetition rather than tension, and newer content that hasn't yet received the tuning care of the launch build. Neither complaint undoes what makes the core game special, and both are the kind of specific, addressable issues a developer can act on before a full 1.0 release. Buy in now if you're the kind of player who thrives on mastery-through-repetition; wait for further updates if losing an hour of climbing to one mistake sounds like frustration rather than fun.