Subsonic steps bound off of idyllic tiles, a steadfast one-two sprint. Clasped tightly in his hand, divine intervention is executed by the thunderclap of .500 magnum, a heavenly send-off alternating between the gentle coaxing of automatic fire and the definitive blade of retribution. Closing in, denizens of hell launch bioluminescent bombardments, lethal brimstone sending you down a path 10,000 feet under. As if born to die, the demons are dispatched as quickly as they rise, beings materialized, analyzed, and pulverized within nanoseconds. Speed and focus become one, repetitions on idealized concepts pointing towards sublimity. Your holy arms holstered, your sanctified sword sheathed, you cast your sight upon diamond excellence, an eternity encapsulated in the blink of an eye. Now, beyond the safety of three-round bursts and lead ripostes, you see her.

Her heliotrope hues leave psychoactive cigarette burns; if true angels drive one to madness, her presence in Heaven is well established. Like sewing needles piercing taut eardrums, her voice spikes out, an aural trepanation. More lethal than chambered rounds and heavy ordinance, she implants in your brain the same innate fear that courses through you as you enter convention halls, the same fight-or-flight micropanic as the first step within a college’s Japanese Culture Club, for she is the eidolon of modern otakudom. When you breach the seal on Neon White’s world, what resides underneath isn’t the long-forgotten Y2K Japanimation mecca, but a puréed distillation of the wretched refuse of anime fandom, the Anitwitter and r/animemes congregation speaking in post-post-ironic references, where every man is either a razor-edged twink or a hulking himbo, and every woman either an e-girl yandere or a wannabe mommy-dom that covets humanized mediocrity. Buried under the pretense of being “by freaks, for freaks”, the reality of Neon White puts you in the nightmarish scenario of living through the dreams of the most typical of indie weeb softboys.

Such is the loop of Neon White: for every moment of precise platforming bliss, an hour of Young Thotticus making your amygdala fire on all cylinders, a century of watching history’s straightest couple verbally hate-fuck, an eon of remembering Tumblr-Sexy-Man-ified Junkrat saying “you were my Sasuke!”, an eternity of knowing that the core message of the game is that you have a moral imperative to forgive those who abused you in life, lest you literally go to Hell. Both sides of the equation, fraught and unstable, struggle to maintain a semblance of balance.

When Ben Esposito, Enemy of the People, claimed this project as a game “for freaks”, it masks the reality of what Neon White stands for. Decked in the style of the forums of yesteryear, Online Signature UI and Neocities buttons intact, with a heart beating to the 200bpm pulse of breakcore, the aestheticism of pre-Web 2.0 culture is broken by the asphyxiating smog of The Modern Anime Fan. Sincerity and passion die at the cross of venomous disingenuity, nailed down by ironic detachment and love in the key of “Waifu of the Month”. The work of Angel Matrix, the latest in rebrands of Esposito's predictable shtick, axes even the most optimistic of readings: Neon White is the new face of pretension, wearing the oh-so-relatable mask of an adored time for the sake of drawing attention, not out of love, nostalgia, or passion. Soullessness masquerading as soulful.

and someone please tell the writers that run-on sentences don’t read as like, relatable or quirky. It just looks bad. It’s like, your job to Make Text Read Good. come on.

it's hard for me to write a review about this game. i feel like it was designed in a lab to be optimally enjoyable for exactly me, much like how McDonald's french fries are chemically engineered to be Mathematically and Provably Delicious for the general American public.

i can't talk about Neon White without talking about Arcane Kids. in the mid-10s, being someone who staked a lot of identity into playing games was profoundly embarassing. ignoring the truly heinous shit that goes without saying, year after year, AAA studios continued to pump out "mids at best." on the other side of things, "indie" games were no longer new and were in something of an awkward puberty. i can't tell you how many "physics-based puzzle platformers with a gimmick" i had pitched to me that promised to be Actually Good. they weren't. however, during this time, the Unity weirdos were churning away in their art scenes around the globe. the new derisive joke became "make a game in unity, make a million dollars." of course, the people making these jokes didn't know what they were talking about, but i guess none of us really did back then.

---

Arcane Kids existed as something of an antithesis to the games of the time. when we had more than enough pixel-art RPGs, they gave us ZINETH. when we got innundated with walking simulators, they gave us Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. when indies decided to try and be funny with things like Goat Simulator, we got Sonic Dreams Collection, CRAP! No One Loves Me, and this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNCyc3hzAw). while a lot of these games were "funny" or "jokes," they always had deeper ideas to them beneath the surface around player agency, the joy of moving your avatar, the love of Videogames As Videogames.

i cannot possibly explain how strange it felt to turn on the game and have the title screen after the intro cutscene splash in with a voice echoing "NEON WHITE" as the moodiest witch house track creeps in through your headphones. the fake scanlines, the neon glow on the characters, the tone, the vibes. i thought to myself, "they finally did it." as i played more, i confirmed my suspicions.

Arcane Kids finally made the game it feels like they had been working toward all these years. blazing fast, huge jumps, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master, tight, violent, horny, loud, freaky, all at once. in Mission 11, as breakneck-paced breakcore blasted out of my screen, i screamed aloud in my room to my partner who was watching me play "I. FUCKING. LOVE. THIS. GAME." in time with each click of the RMB that shot me across the map at incredible speeds. in moments like this, you know for a fact that moments like Bubsy pulling out an uzi and a katana at the end of Bubsy 3D or them subjecting a crowd of people at a game conference to vape trick videos that inspired their previous game (https://youtu.be/2pO23GTaBtk?si=ldB9w6CU2UC3TkHI&t=1791) was not just them contributing to the general irony-poisoned sense of humor of the time; they legitimately thought that it was tight as fuck.

-----

one line from the infamous Arcane Kids Manifesto (https://arcanekids.com/manifesto) that i always think about is "the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets."

at a time when even FromSoft has started to move away from their smaller, more-focused world design in favor of chasing the lucrative open-world design potential in Elden Ring, it feels amazing that we have a game like Neon White that is about intricately crafted and infinitely replayable level design. after years of waiting, we finally have the one true Indie Puzzle Platformer, but this time it has guns.

the gameplay (for me, usually) fell into a flowchart like this:
-beat a level once and get whatever medal you get
-go back to find the secret gift
-during this second trip, notice which parts of the levels you can skip or save time on that were hidden to you before
-play the level a 3rd time to get a gold medal
-use the hint from the Gold medal to get an Ace medal on your 4th time
-over time, you begin to amass a collection of "hey, did you know this quirk" movement secrets like shooting bullets, bunny hopping after a dash, or sliding with the shotgun's discard

game design that calls attention to itself like this is beautiful. level designers are artists. we've known this since Doom WADs. however, in the time since Doom we've had several games like Gears of War, Halo, and their ilk that said "wasn't the sickest part about Doom being a huge buff guy with loud guns just blasting disgusting freaks and seeing them explode???" while that does indeed whip, Neon White is on the other side of the coin saying "wasn't the best part about Doom the level design and the joy of figuring out how to move as fast as you can through a level???"

after 11 years of watching speedrunning streams nearly every day, Neon White finally made me feel like maybe i could do it too. first you pit yourself against the Ace medal time, then your friends, then the Dev Times, then your own ghost, and then the world. to this day, i have yet to have a global #1, but i've had a #2 and two #3s. i'll keep going though.

[EDIT 7/17/23: i did it :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWT2b9pwRMI]

---

Neon White is a love letter in videogame form

Ben Esposito refers to Neon White as a "game for freaks." One would assume that this game is meant to appeal to social outcasts, rejects, or at the very least those with very specific and esoteric tastes. Instead Neon White panders to the lowest common denominator of anime fans that dominate spaces like Twitter and Reddit - who are indeed freaks, though likely not the "cool" kind of freaks that Esposito is attempting to appeal to.

The gameplay is fun! A bit floaty, but not enough that the moment-to-moment platforming suffers. The process of learning levels to optimize your time and get an Ace rank is incredibly addicting. In spite of being a single-player game there is an undeniable communal aspect if you're playing with friends, since the PC version compares your scores to those of your Steam friends - a lot of the appeal to me is running levels over and over again to try and best your friends' scores. The levels are gorgeous, intuitively designed while remaining complex enough for optimization, and over in less than thirty seconds. The music is fantastic and the presentation (my distaste for the VN format aside) is spectacular.

Thus comes the elephant in the room: the writing. Abysmal on every single front, an endless fount of regurgitated memes originating from the "Anitwt" community on Twitter only to be reposted and recycled onto the countless cesspools of Reddit. You can't go twenty seconds without hearing a buzzword or in-joke, and in the rare moments without talking about characters' breasts, making John Cena jokes or name-dropping Naruto characters you'll find it hard to take the characters and their dialogue seriously for the simple fact that nobody talks like this. If anything it's only accentuated by the fact that the voice acting is really great (Steve Blum voices the title character!) and the actors are giving it their all with every line, struggling to wring emotion and depth out of dialogue that simply has none to offer.

I don't have anything to say about the plot because I don't care and I'm probably going to skip it from here on out. The only comment I have about the dating sim elements is that the Persona series and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Overall a really fun game if you skip the cutscenes and pretend it's just a bunch of floating levels in a void with no context or narrative presentation!

Neon White is a tragic would-be masterpiece held back by its unrelenting irony-poisoned rejection of anything genuine or friendly, along with completely wrecking its initially excellent mechanical design the second it tries to ramp up the difficulty.

In a first person movement based game, the difficulty and reward comes from the depth of that movement itself, in mastering it and squeezing out everything those mechanics allow. The execution barrier on something like a surf map in Counter-Strike or simply competently playing a match of Quake is a large part of what gives those their richness. A high skill floor does not necessarily mean a high ceiling will come with it, but it's certainly much more likely and works out in these cases. Neon White tries to simplify the kind of satisfaction one gets from mastery of movement to something every player can enjoy, and at first that works. For the first few missions, the easy mode versions of surfing, sticky jumping, and other classic movement options make for compelling levels where it is genuinely fun to compete with your friends and improve. Soon, though, the mechanics lose their luster as you realize how little there is to them. Regardless of angle, all explosions will send you directly up where you want them to, and everything is generally placed in such an easy to clear manner that it becomes mindless. There is simply nowhere to go, and improvement consists mostly of cutting corners and performing actions more smoothly.

This doesn't last forever, though, and eventually Neon White wants to make clearing levels more difficult. At first you cheer, until you realize how they do that. Their basic movement options are so devoid of depth that they just gave up on getting anything else out of them, and instead just layer mechanic on mechanic, hide enemies all over the place, and ask you to route that out. So as you progress, you spend more and more time looking around for what you need and planning things out so that by the time you're doing actual runs and shaving off time, you just want to move on to something else. One might say that this issue mirrors actual speedrunning, where the fast path and how to complete all objectives while going down it is often not clear. That's certainly true, but routing and then grinding out a level in a speed game usually comes after playing casually and genuinely enjoying the space without trying to move through it fast. Getting familiar with the space is then a natural process during casual playthroughs, but you can't do that there. There is nothing else to these levels other than speedrunning. No storytelling or puzzle solving or anything else that makes us love games. There's no hook.

In that way, it ends up feeling a lot like 2D Sonic: utterly joyless restriction of movement makes it so that to actually have any fun, you first need to play through a level several times and get good. Getting through is not hard, but it sure is tedious. The fun comes after the grind and the game doesn't even make an attempt at hooking you in to get you to that point.

The less said about the narrative, the better. Awful anime dub-tier voice acting drags down characters already so utterly insufferable and internet-poisoned with the most mean-spirited "SIMP POGGERS GURO XD" bullshit you've ever seen. If you find anything cute or fun, it will soon be torn down and stomped on.

Can we undo the Danganronpafication and Personafication of anything weeby? Weebs deserve better.

Neon White hits that perfect sweet spot for me where the gameplay is simple and easy to learn but feels super rewarding when you get it down and start mastering the levels.

For the first 8 chapters I was replaying every level to get the gifts, getting mostly Ace ranks with enough Golds to keep me modest. This was taking a while, so for 9 thru 12 I forced myself to just play the levels once each and honestly the difficulty/length spike was so intense I barely even saved any time for doing so lol.

Love the art style, 90% of the levels are really fun to play, the social stuff wasn't amazing but it made for good downtime, the characters were mostly interesting (/hot) so that's nice as well. Story was better than expected, nothing to write home about but I appreciated it.

Ultimately just a great time overall, I can easily see myself dipping in to get the last gifts/Ace ranks/second ending some time

Some really weird consensus with people who like this writing is that it's akin to a 2000's anime? I gotta say I don't remember people in s-CRY-ed talking like a Twitter thread about anime character PNGs imposed over popular text posts but whatever floats your boat, just don't try convincing me that it's good. I was more attached to the F key than to any of the Neons.

Game looks and sounds fantastic though!! The aesthetic is the actual part that feels dragged out of the early 2000's, what with the whole "sleek edginess" aspect of it, especially the mission intro screens. The gameplay is very fine-tuned for what it is, although it would help if it was a bit less floaty in places. Not nearly as gimmicky as it comes off at first and could probably do with a level editor somewhere down the line. Big fan of everything here other than when the characters are talking!!

its called pastiche you dipshits and it rocks

honestly this game is basically perfect, surf maps sega dreamcast sonic adventure gun game good sound design good platforming good leaderboards good skips good everything. adore it!

also here's my spiciest take: if you dont like the writing in this but you do like the writing in hades then you need to get better at having fun because they are The Same, but this one is more joyous

Things I liked:

- The gameplay. Smooth and linear and quick to pick up. Card abilities and weapons are super fun and varied, especially the REDACTED card at the end. Good stuff
- The story - it's not bad! Puts some meat on the game's bones, and the voice acting is good, contrary to popular belief
- The treasure hunts. Having to run a level a little slower and solve a platforming-related puzzle, all optional but in service of acquiring the game's good ending, is a nice departure from the main game, a different flavor to cleanse the palate and rest the thumbs a bit

Things I didn't like:

- The gameplay. It's sort of... slow, sluggish, shallow, at times? When you're not actively using a card ability, it doesn't feel great -- like eating your dang vegetables when you want to be stuffing your face with sweet sugary cake the entire time. Also, the levels are entirely linear -- would've been nice to get a few open concepts with numerous viable paths thrown in there
- The story - it's not great! A bit thin for how much time it demands of you (though everything is skippable so it's not a huge deal)
- The treasure hunts. jesus fucking christ some of these gifts were annoying to get. Holy god

Get it? Get how I both like and don't like almost every facet of the game? Pretty clever, I thought.

Summer Games Down Quick just finished a few days ago, and as per usual I had the event's Twitch stream open basically any waking moment of the day that I wasn't either working or hanging out with one of my partners. It's partly that I love the atmosphere of the event and what it stands for, partly that it acts as a showcase for all sorts of cool stuff, but also that watching speedrunning is just immensely fascinating to me. People are honestly just incredible, and high-level speedruns act as this really impressive display of commitment, knowledge and skill.

That said, I've never really understood what would make someone actually want to pour thousands of hours into a single video game both just generally, but more specifically in search of making your time as low as possible. When I think of the things that draw me towards video games, their strengths as an artform, I think of the potential for self-expression, the depth of worldbuilding, the manner in which they can provide experiences and stories that feel unique to you. The thought of getting to grind the same route through the game many hundreds of times to shave off a few seconds doesn't really crop up there.

I'm not sure I'll ever really get it, but my early days with Neon White are the closest I've come. It starts with you figuring out the route for the level, getting a silver medal on your first try, and thinking "huh, why not push for gold then?". Upon attaining the gold medal the game gives you a hint for how to get the platinum, a shortcut you maybe missed, so you feel compelled to go back and add that to your run. Suddenly you're only a couple seconds behind someone on your friends list leaderboard so you return again, tightening up your lines, lining up a shot you didn't think of, and before you know it you're fighting to claw up the overall leaderboard, a flurry of F-space-F-space-F-space as you try to get the perfect opening. That iterative fight to become the best you can be.

It wore off for me, ultimately. As the game goes on the levels get longer in a way that makes fighting for a good time much more of a commitment, and the longer the game has been out the more ludicrously competitive the leaderboard has become to the point where the best times are at once both mind-blowing but also demoralising for anyone who hasn't spent years honing pinpoint accurate mouse-twitching. The rest of the game after I crashed back to reality was a solid enough romp, before a genuinely thrilling final 15 or so levels that explore really cool mechanical territory. The magic was gone, and my interest in grinding out good times is unlikely to come back, but it was a fun moment whilst it lasted.

Unrelatedly, I feel like the response to the writing in this game has been a tad harsh. The "social link" style hanging out portions are quite bad, to the extent that even I started skipping them at the halfway point (and I read visual novels), but the various backstories are solid enough, I liked the characters when the game wasn't straining itself to be funny, and the final third of the story is legitimately pretty good. Faint praise, but I certainly didn't hate this aspect of the game like a lot of people did.

Neon White is the most innovative and refreshing action game I have played in years. Fantastic music, sense of speed, and layers on layers of mechanics you feel that you've mastered in seconds, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

I have never been into watching speedrunning, nor have I cared to try it myself, but the compartmentalization of the technique into 15-30 second doses is brilliant. Why did I suddenly care about beating my friends on the leaderboards? It's not something I've ever, EVER cared about before but in Neon White if I saw a friend beat a level a fraction of a second faster than me I'd spend the next ten minutes doing a hundred reruns to beat them.

I will be very open, I think the story is kind of stupid and I did not engage with it after the first hour. The dialogue is badly written and a lot of the VA sounds amateur. This is thankfully not an issue at all, as there's a giant prompt to press the F button to fast forward through every scene, and the game is 100% enjoyable without knowing what's going on. My only other negative is that the game drags for one world before you get the final powerup card.

The final boss of Neon White was so much fun that after a half hour of running it back over and over again, when I finally won, I laughed out loud like a maniac. I can't remember the last boss battle that made me do that, and I'd absolutely list Neon Green as a top 10 final boss of all time. And I got an Ace first try! In addition, the final world is actually the most fun because of a single new mechanic that changes the entire game to make it feel EVEN FASTER. While I wish the story had been any good, it is impossible to deny the sheer brilliance of Neon White. I wish it had gotten more recognition over a certain cat-based indie game, but I'll settle for it residing in the Nirav Hall of Fame.

Neon White is a game where everything from the level design, to the visuals, to the incredible soundtrack compliment eachother so well that they had to channel all of the bad decisions into the writing.

Literally everything but the dialogue is fucking great. I get what they were going for. Cool edgy 14 year old writing, but I don't feel that that's a valid excuse when there are plenty of examples of this style of writing done well. Kill la Kill, MGR or anything by Tatsuki Fujimoto goes for a similar vibe, but they actually manage to be funny, or have compelling characters.
It's just a shame that this game is dragged down by dialogue that makes you actively want to skip it.

Wait, the dialogue is designed this way so you speedrun cutscenes? That’s brilliant. I only just realized this whilst writing. Bravo. Certainly intentional.

Near the middle of the game I started to try and beat my friends. Go for high scores.
I then had the epiphany that I HATE my friends and I HATE getting high scores and THEY SUCK why are my friends better at games than me??

Afterwards I realised I was having a lot more fun when I wasn't going for high scores. My bad.

Luckily all of the final few levels and mechanics were absolutely stellar, and immediately hooked me back in. It’s one of the rare examples nowadays of a gameplay loop that manages to gel everything together so well, it becomes impossible not to admire it.

played the demo

the gameplay is pretty fun, i found it kinda weird for the intro to put emphasis on your character's card considering the main character's one is a dinky sword you never use. aside from that, I really liked the levels

but man oh man, once you finish a level and have to be subjected to the plot... the writing is TEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRIBLE. the voice acting is pretty bad too, Ian JQ is really bad in this.. the writing is just TROPE TROPE REFERENCE TROPE BAD JOKE TROPE like huh?? who wrote this?!!!! then they even dared to put dating sim mechanics on this ☠☠ what were they thinking!!

So my beloved friend theadhdagenda_ loves this game and really wanted me to play it. I was already planning on playing it when it eventually got a physical release and what do you know, it got one last year. While I did enjoy it overall, it does have issues that detracted from my experience .

The main issue I had with the game, and I know it's been said countless times before, but the story was just not good. I think it has potential with its concept of heaven and the whole heist thing. It had its moments here and there but in between those few instances of good it has so really awful dialogue. People weren't kidding when they said it was bad though I was expecting it to be more constant than it was. Still tho, it really is pretty bad. Like I said, the story had it's moments but even outside of the bad dialogue, I don't think the story was done well. Not just because it felt undercooked but the theme of forgiveness and it being applied to Neon Green, did not feel right at all. I don't think they were trying to be malicious and were more trying to say you shouldn't let your abuser live rent free in your head and to just cut them off completely, but to have it be forgiveness instead...does leave a bad taste in my mouth. Especially since the book of death ending, which is supposed to be the bad ending, is more satisfying than the good one lol. That's just my take though, even besides the poor story the dialogue is bad enough where you'd want to just skip it all anyways. But alas, the story is a big part of the game time so I must judge it accordingly.

I know I started this review off negatively but that's the biggest negative really because the actual game part is really fun! It's a card based shooter where your main goal is to go as fast as possible. This works very well since, for the most part, levels are really bite-sized. With it being a speed game, it also incentivizes speed-running. There's medals at you get at the end of each level, with Ace being the main one you wanna go for in the end. There's also the dev times that are pretty hard to beat but I did end up doing it once in my whole playthrough. Otherwise, I just aced every other level. Besides the speed aspect, the cards aren't just for shooting as they have a secondary use when you discard them. This is another big reason the game is so fun as you have to figure out what to discard or not in each level. First you figure out what to do in the stage and then you speed through it, rince and repeat. Sadly because there's so many levels, and I went for not only the aces but also the presents, I did get somewhat burnt out by the end. Not enough to dislike the game or anything but I definitely wasn't clamoring to do those rushes when I beat the game (which are just all the levels one after the other with one life).

Speaking of the presents, outside of the gameplay and story there's also this social-link like mechanic where you give a character a gift and you get dialogue and other stuff from them. I didn't really care about the dialogue really, besides Mikey he was cool, but they are somewhat worth it for the little side quest levels you get every so often. These don't have time medals and are slower paced than the usual levels. They could be hit or miss but were mostly fun.

The music is by Machine Girl and while I wouldn't personally listen to it outside the game, it was really solid and fit the levels. The visuals of the levels are also really nice. Mostly in the earlier stages, they have this dream-like liminal space kinda feel which I really like. Some of the later levels not as much sadly but the music still fit those ones. I'm not in love with some of the character designs for the Neons but the presentation as a whole was solid too.

All in all, while I definitely didn't love it as much as some people do due to the story ofc and getting burnt out near the end, it was a fun time overall! Definitely better than the other Ben Desposito game I played, Donut County. I recommend you pick this game up when it's cheap because it is still a lot of fun, just maybe skip the cutscenes even if they are a large part of it's runtime. Idk tho, maybe you'll get more out of them than I did lol.

Astonished at how much I enjoyed this considering the disdain it has harboured from many whose opinions I hold in very high regard. Its eschewing of Sans-Serif Corpo committee-design in favour of a maximal exploration of bombastic and obtuse peculiarities from the aesthetic to the mechanical warms my heart. The sincerity on display strikes a chord of 'cringe' within me less because of its actual writing content, and more because it is a contemporary parallel to the endearing, honest, whimsical edgelordiness of video games past. Neon White is the Shadow the Hedgehog, The Bouncer, Vexx, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Bomberman Act Zero, Dante's Inferno, Jak II, BMX XXX of the 2020s in tone, spit and polished to a shine. It forgoes the failings of mid-2000s muddy and ruddiness, where landscapes and gameplay blended into green-brown smears, and proudly proclaims that games can be capital-C cool and fun as hell. Every skip is the descendant of Ulillillia's Spyro oddities. The soundtrack is the vague memories of Ape Escape and ChainDive, the vibe the immaculate remembrance of youth. It is Lovely Planet with accuracy replaced with speed, speed, speed.

Neon White is unabashedly itself, for good and for ill.

Alright I'll just take care of the elephant in the room right out of the gate: the story is awful. At first I was willing to write it off as "cringe anime fan dialogue" like everyone else has been, but once those jokes slowed down I did make a genuine attempt to get invested into the world and narrative. What I got out of it was a plot that tried it's best to make me believe that someone as abusive, manipulative and unapologetic as Neon Green deserves any sort of forgiveness, all because that's what God would want. Yippee.

It's a shame how it ended up souring my experience more than I expected it to, since the rest of it was basically everything that I never knew I wanted out of a video game. As someone who's a huge fan of platformers with an emphasis on time attack modes and speedrunning (translation: a Sonic fan), Neon White has one of the most fun and addictive gameplay loops I've ever experienced in the medium. It constantly introduces one new idea after another, opening up more possibilities for how levels can be designed. And as you replay them for better and better times, noticing how much each level opens up with shortcuts and ways to optimize your runs makes every single attempt a delight. It's also fantastic in presentation. I really adore the edgy 2000s aesthetics that ooze from every corner of it, along with a stellar OST from Machine Girl that manages to be both immersive and adrenaline pumping. This'd probably be a clean 5 star game if it just... didn't have a narrative this bad. Highly recommended to any fan of platformers and speedrunning.

[for the demo]

red flag when your only two female characters are designed specifically to appeal to the kind of indie airhead who wrote them

however the movement tied to the cards feels v good! could see the puzzles requiring strict solutions / less player expression than i'd like as the game goes on, but using purify to jump around obstacles was enough to sell me on the idea

Few games measure up to the amount of satisfaction that Neon White delivers when you manage to ace a level, whether it’s on your first try or after it’s been giving you some trouble. It is an immensely satisfying game. So much so that, several hours after finishing it, I was bummed that I didn’t have more to play. I’m not usually one for time chasing in games, but the loop of trying to get the best time possible, ace every level, and find every gift, was incredibly addicting.

That said, there were times where my frustration outweighed the fun I was having. For the most part, it only happened on a couple levels that were too long and relied too much on perfect execution. I’m fine with the rapid restarts on shorter levels when you’re only losing 15-20 seconds, but there were a few stages that were over a minute long (one was over 4 minutes), and it got a bit annoying to have to restart after just one missed jump 75% of the way into the level.

Everything everyone said about the cheesy writing was pretty spot-on. Honestly, I actually kind of enjoyed the story and world, as goofy as it was, but the moment-to-moment writing and dialogue is pretty unbearable. You have the option to skip the dialogue, but it’s also the only thing that breaks up the levels. So it’s kind of nice to have a bit of a break between acts.

Overall, Neon White is an incredibly unique, rad as heck game that brought me more satisfaction than most other games, even if parts of the game overstayed their welcome.

+ Solid gameplay feel even on console
+ Insanely satisfying to chase a faster time or get all the ace medals
+ Killer soundtrack
+ Great style

- Gameplay loop is basically the same throughout the whole game
- Moment-to-moment writing is cringey and unbearably bad
- Some levels are a bit too long which made trying for faster times frustrating
- Gift hunting got to be a pain as some of them are too well-hidden and require guides

"Games that make you feel like you're totally sick at them even when you're not doing anything that impressive" is a whole-ass genre at this point and Neon White one of its crown jewels. This game is just cool man, it has a bunch of cool ideas and pulls them off with such finesse. Neon White is a blast, speeding through levels has you feeling like such a god at the game even when most of the time it's just the level design's natural momentum carrying you through, and that it's greatest trick! It has just enough interactivity and player decisions sprinkled into its moment-to-moment gameplay that you feel like this is all you, and that disproportionate level of player competency to player confidence is exactly the kind of magic that makes games addictive.

Artistically there's so much to love about Neon White as well, in all the best ways it makes think of the kind of game SEGA would make if they were still a 1st-party developer with home consoles and stuff; the unique ideas, the anime cheese, the bright sparkling blue skyboxes, it all just screams Dreamcast to me. As much as I appreciate all the different backdrops and environments the game takes you to, I can't help but wish there were more levels that just looked like the early Glass Port stages because UGH, they get me so nostalgic for the good ol' days of Sonic Adventure. Maybe it's the movement as well, lol. (While I think the whole game's OST is good by far my fav songs are in the first 2 areas as well!!)

Also, the dialogue isn't that cringe, and when it is it's mostly intentional! I think people are kinda overreacting - the characters, White and Violet in particular are supposed to be pathetic losers who still reference no-scopes in 2022 and talk about their boob sweat! Take it from me, Anime Hater #1, - it's not that bad, in fact it's at it's worst when it's trying to be serious imo! All this "we were a family of assassins" and "you were the only one who could ever beat Green in combat" bs lmao, gimme a break. The anime brainrot is so real. Go back to the silly references to John Cena! I liked that shit! This game could actually genuinely be pretty funny sometimes, and it did so through actively painting the characters as sad idiots, that's the point!

Neon White is focused, original, and ends just when you start to worry it might wear out its welcome. It's not a 5/5 for me because some of the storytelling I did find kinda eye-rolling, the boss fights were pretty lackluster (altho this may partially be the Switch's fault bc this console can not handle this shit no more) and I think it's clear that the game's mechanics could still be pushed further and I wanna see that potential grow - but damn, what a cool game. Like a fusion of Super Monkey Ball, Mirror's Edge and a tiny bit of Persona. Nothing else like it out there, and totally unlike anything any self-important AAA studio would ever dare be creative enough to put out. Proof that indie games are the future right here folks

Neon White is the best feeling game of 2022. I've only ever taken the most baby of steps into speedrunning. But Neon White is able to condense that joy into a digestible package.

The dialogue and characters are something I'm mixed on but the style is a perfect match for the gameplay. The environments aren't too cluttered to keep them readable. And the music helps elevate your own tempo to match that which the game requires to ace each level.

The final set of levels, titled Thousand Pound Butterfly is one of the best culminations of a platformers mechanics in the genre. Taking all of the movement abilities and lessons from the journey to that point. Flipping them on their head with the final card and movement mechanic led to the apex of its many levels.

Important Disclaimer to My Score (IDTMS) #1: The first thing I did after seeing the intro of this game was go to Options —> Audio —> Voiceover Volume and pull that slider to zero so hard I broke an analog stick

IDTMS #2: I studiously avoided every optional side activity and event in the hub

Now that we have that out of the way: this game was great! I thought…[the remainder of this review has been cut due to its plagiarizing the praise for level design and music you’ve seen 100 times already]

Playing Neon White casually when I have several friends who consistently rank in the top 50 players in the world is very strange. My personal impressions are clouded more than a little by the secondhand excitement of watching someone grind out better and better times, cheering for them when they overtake their rival, laughing as they look at the excellent names on the leaderboard. I love Neon White the milieu and I've seen up close and personal why someone would adore this game.

I don't adore this game.

There were moments when I thought I might. In the early-middle chapters, the game achieved a graceful balance of complexity and precision that had me excited. The levels were bite-sized without being simple, the weapons were cleverly placed to introduce possibility without breaking the game, and I found myself improving my route run after run until I found something close to the best possible (even if my execution could never measure up to my friends').

But this joy was short-lived. New weapons were introduced that ran against the grain of the game, doubling down on onerous precision and execution requirements in a game that by its nature has plenty of both already. Optimal routing started requiring me to comb the screen for pixel-perfect shots, or (as I actually did for the last chapter) simply look them up online.

Even in its failures, there's a compellingly homemade quality about Neon White. It has such an excellent core idea that it's easy to forgive the various flawed design elements. And although Ben Esposito is a veteran game designer, this project requires a different kind of design than anything he's published previously, with crucial elements of play unfolding from tiny decisions—how many frames should this take? how much ammunition should that have? how will this type of gun inform the level design inform the player's experience?

I spent the latter third of this game waiting impatiently for it to either end or get better, so I doubt I'll pick it up again even if DLC drops. But I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad I played it through, if only so I'll have the context to fully appreciate watching my friends shave milliseconds off their personal bests.

The greatest strength of Neon White is how exceptionally laid out its core design is, and how its gameplay loop is expanded upon from world to world in a surprisingly beefy campaign if you’re trying to get Ace Medals (Platinum Relics, basically) through it. Almost every one of the new chapters introduces a new gimmick with a new kind of gun and its two uses, feeling like it makes the most out of whatever power a level gives you.

As the game goes on, levels have you hot swapping between these constantly, and it feels like a great amount of thought, effort and detail went into to making every single one feel distinct, in a similar way to games like the first two Super Monkey Balls or Donkey Kong (1994). I do think some levels can stretch the length quota; any stage that go on for 2+ minutes can feel aggravating to replay, but the majority are able to keep things interesting. Often more than certain main stages, I really got a lot from the side challenges from each of your companions, and how these stages operated in different ways that let their distinct personalities show without incessant painful dialogue. In particular, I really liked Yellow’s penultimate stage and how it felt like the game briefly became a boomer shooter.

Although level progression can be enjoyable when everything clicks, some stages force styles of movement progression on you that can turn the method of controlling into an aggravating stress test. It’s very easy for the 360 turns the game forces you to do for level optimization to ruin your mouse position when trying to say, circle around a tall structure, see the sky after using the stomp power that faces you toward the ground, or rocket launch up a building to be met with a stuck-out structure covering your camera. I can't imagine playing with a controller for lacking precision aim but even with a mouse it was incredibly unfun to have my view wrecked by being unable to move around in a circle without straight up lifting the mouse up, which would cause an immediate reset if it got stuck during a run. The final gift sequence felt less like a fun challenge and more like a tedious slog when dealing with a 360-tower scale at the end of a 2-minute level gauntlet where a single screwup meant doing the entire stage all over again. I feel similarly in regard to the second boss fight; the first and the final one do compelling work to translate the level moment to moment feel into a run that feels quick even if you lose, despite the wimpy finishers, but the second boss got so overly indulgent with the scripted sequences that the slight chance of screwing up in the middle of that 4-5 minute battle felt painful every time I felt like I wanted to restart.

As many others have pointed out, it's really the writing that's the most able to turn heads. To its credit, it’s able to be skipped almost in its entirety and doesn’t directly affect the strong core gameplay level progression I noted above. But in a way it affected my attitude through it, because every time I power through a new world, the story dialogues meant to break it up only show me how thoroughly uncool the character I’m playing is as a person. It feels like there’s a fundamental disconnect between euphoria for mastering a stage and White’s personality compilation of referential animeisms outside of it, despite Steve Blum’s best efforts.

It’s no secret that Sonic games have been wildly inconsistent, often for mechanical reasons, but one place I think most of them succeed in is properly communicating the spectacle, fun and thrilling sequences a player is meant to be experiencing in the stages through Sonic as a character, be it the expressive sprites of the 2D titles or his modern version’s trick posing and light comments chirped from time to time. They connect the intention between what personality the character is feeling versus what you, the player, are meant to feel while playing that just doesn’t exist in Neon White because of how divorced those sides of his character are.

Yet, for all the writing’s incessant need for forced references, incel humor (there’s a blatantly obvious 2019 Joker line, flat asses, and S-tier insults among other things) and all the tediously tepid character tropes that have me rolling my eyes even in actual anime, it’s the constant emoticons that deal the killing blow. They’re used so often, even in scenes trying to be emotional, from pretty sparkles to overly saturated blushing and depression lines that just makes any dialogue they’re paired with that much more performative. There’s even the very literal throwing up emoji, something that’s not even an anime effect so I’m genuinely baffled it’s present.

When it comes to weeaboo style writing goes, it's bordering the same level as RWBY, with worse jokes and slightly better thematic cohesion. Just like the first two seasons of that show, the best parts are, ironically, when the action director oversees the story. The side quests for your companions communicate their personalities in a way far more suitable to Neon White’s status as a video game than any dialogue unlock (which feels like if you gave an AI a Danganronpa script). There’s a lot more meaningful emotion to glean from your very first sequence of finding one of Green's gifts, conveying a creepy, yet sorrowful mood purely from gameplay, than almost any dialogue sequence where the writing is either comically bad or just borderline nothing (any conversation with the cat characters comes to mind).

The end of Neon White left me satisfied with how well everything had progressed by that point on a structural level just as much as relieved I’d never have to endure its unfun execution to justify its concept. But dammit, I felt something almost the entire time. And is that not the purpose of art, to make you want to feel, even when it’s intensive negative emotion? Neon White is a pendulum swing of a game I think succeeds at being a well-made and lastingly developed experience on numerous design levels despite its off-character cohesion and the incessant annoyance of its skippable writing. The tightly put together building blocks alone make it a recommendation, but it’ll be up to others to make the most of what’s surrounding them.