White Girl

Genre: Card Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

White Girl, released in 2021 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a bit difficult to describe, but I’ll try. This is a Card Game for four players (or you plus three bots) where each player takes the role of a “girl” who is actually some sort of alien or supernatural being. Sometime after mankind goes extinct, these beings seek to absorb the essence of the memories and emotions of humans, color coded red, blue, and green. In doing so, they desire go from being “black” (not black-skinned, but a sorta’ elemental affinity) to white. However, these girls are in opposition to each other, and in trying to reach this color-coded perfection, must destroy each other.

At least… that’s the best I can do at interpreting what’s going on here. White Girl’s instructions are given in extremely poorly-localized English, and players will very likely have trouble making heads or tails out of it. The important part is that it’s a Card Game, you’re using cards to power-up your character and perform attacks, and these cards also increase your red, blue, and green levels, with each of these colors strong against one other color and weak against another (if it helps, just think of them like Pokemon’s fire/grass/water type weakness triangle). Players start with 1000 health and win by being the last girl standing after everyone else’s health is dropped to zero.

Each card has an amount of time it takes to be played, an amount of color to be added to your meter(s), and usually one or more additional effects. These effects can be buffs like increasing your attack and defense or reducing cast time for future cards, they can be useful abilities like a one-time heal, they can be special triggered effects like preventing your death once, they can do damage based on how much of a specific color you have stored up or a fixed amount of damage, or they could be situational cards like doing a huge amount of damage to any player with over 500 health or sacrificing health to boost a color by a large amount.

The colors change your character’s appearance, but more than this they fuel your attack and defense. Players making red attacks against opponents will be fueling their power with both their attack stat and their red stat, while defenders will resist these attacks using their defense stat and blue stat. And because you can see what color other players are (thus roughly indicating their stats) and what color they’re charging (thus indicating attack type), you can incorporate these into your decision making when choosing cards to play, if you think you can play a card before their attack is ready.

The ticking timer not only indicates how long until selected cards activate, but also when new rounds begin. The game has three rounds, and each subsequent round introduces increasingly more powerful cards, raising the stakes and making attacks exponentially more powerful as the game goes on.

These mechanics are reasonably self-evident, but there are others that the game doesn’t really explain. Many cards increase things like “Perverse”, “Innocent”, and “Derange”, stats that the game doesn’t show you how much you have and doesn’t explain what they do. What exactly does extra “Noble” get me, game?

I also have the strong suspicion that the card options you’re randomly given tie into choices you make, though I’m not sure which choices this is. Is it the unexplained descriptors I mention above? Your color type? Your decision to attack, buff, or boost your colors? This is where the game’s terrible localization really hurts the game. Players can only guess as some elements of how this game works, which really hurts the strategic elements of the game.

Another major problem here is a lack of options and settings. The only settings you can change are the game’s language and your name, and the only options are whether to play with the “World” or whether to play in a “Room” (public matches or private matches… though there’s virtually no one playing this game online so “World” ends up just being matches with bots). There’s no way to see all the cards and what they do, change how time works in a match, change AI opponents… nothing.

The presentation here is nice, with 2D anime-style characters that animate in a “paper doll” manner, backed by a decent soundtrack that seems like it would be right at home in an anime. I think the menu layouts are initially confusing but you do get used to them soon enough.

In the end, I think White Girl had so much potential, but it’s really held back by an extremely poor localization, a terrible lack of options, and a complete lack of other players to compete with. This is such a truly original Card Game, but with all of these problems, it’s hard to recommend it.

tl;dr – White Girl is a Card Game where players take the role of one of four girl-like beings absorbing colors to fuel their abilities and attack each other, aiming to be the last girl standing. This is a wildly original entry in the genre, but it’s really hurt by an absolutely abysmal localization, a horrible lack of options, and no one else online to play against. These issues make it hard to recommend this game, despite how clever and unique it is.

Grade: C

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