Indie publisher DreadXP has welcomed another upcoming horror hit into their catalogue, collaborating in a publishing partnership with developer Dark Machine Games to help bring the highly anticipated first-person speed climbing game White Knuckle to the hands of horror fans everywhere.
DreadXP is a leading independent horror games publisher with the goal to seek out and publish great titles and uplift members of the indie dev community. White Knuckle joins a long line of DreadXP releases, including award-winning games such as The Mortuary Assistant, Sucker for Love: First Date, My Friendly Neighborhood, Dread Delusion, and the Dread X Collections, an anthology series of mini-horror games.
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
This collaboration is a huge win for the indie gaming studio Dark Machine Games. Dark Machine Games is a three-person development studio based in New Mexico. The trio has been involved in game development for years but formed a studio in 2024 with the intent of developing unique, strange, and otherwise enigmatic experiences and titles. After various prototypes and experiments, the team comes bearing the gift of White Knuckle as the studio’s first official game.
What is White Knuckle about?
Set within a vast, decaying underground megastructure, White Knuckle combines pulse-pounding action, intricate momentum-based movement mechanics, and survival horror to create a unique gaming experience that will keep players on their toes—or fingertips.
Thrust into the role of a lone climber, players must attempt to ascend SUB-STRUCTURE 17, an enormous, crumbling complex buried deep underground. With ten thousand meters of concrete and decay above and an encroaching ooze below, every climb is a race against time.
Navigate perilous environments, using a blend of precision movement, sharp reflexes, and resource management to scale deteriorating walls, leap across perilous gaps, dodge traps, and avoid the deadly forces lurking in the shadows.
What can players expect?
While speed is key to survival, players must also manage a limited inventory of tools and resources to avoid becoming encumbered and plummeting into eternity. Failure to quickly retrieve key items from your bag could result in a deadly fall, making resource management and quick thinking just as important as skillful climbing. The higher players ascend in the structure, the more dangerous the obstacles become, with each new region offering unique threats and challenges.
While you may be a lone climber, you are certainly not alone. Strange, malevolent denizens haunt the walls of SUB-STRUCTURE 17, and the horror intensifies as the environment itself becomes more hostile, forcing players to adapt their strategies to survive constantly.
From the dry, dusty Silos to the putrid sewers of the Pipeworks and the haunted piers of Habitation, each area presents a distinct set of trials and enemies, all contributing to a sense of ever-growing tension. Run, jump, and climb to survive… or slip and face your doom. Every leap could be the last, and it’s a long way down…
White Knuckle will launch into Early Access on Steam later this year. In the meantime, players can refine their climbing skills with the demo, currently available on Steam and rated 99% Overwhelmingly Positive with over 1,000 reviews.
If you need something else to look forward to from DreadXP, they have more in store for horror gamer fans. Their upcoming titles include Heartworm and Paranormal Activity. DreadXP is a sister company of the horror media website Dread Central, as well as the independent horror film production company, DREAD.
