Neon White Review

Neon White might be the most fun I’ve had with a videogame in a while. It is a speedrunning game. It is a first person puzzle game. It is a 3D platformer. And it is a visual novel. And remarkably, it manages to blend all of these diverse components into a cohesive, creative and incredibly addicting experience that quickly sinks its hooks in and refuses to let go.

Each stage presents a fixed map filled with immovable enemies and card pick-ups, with the primary goal of reaching the finish line after eliminating all enemies in the quickest time possible. This is where the puzzle-elements come into play. Armed initially only with a Katana, card pick-ups are the main element that allow for different approaches and strategies to clearing a stage. Each card has two functions: It serves as a weapon with limited ammo for dispatching enemies at range, and can also be discarded to grant the player a single movement ability. For instance, picking up the regular gun grants seven shots and a double-jump when discarded mid-air. The shotgun, on the other hand, offers four spread shots and transforms into a dash in any direction when discarded, eliminating everything in its path. Neon White thus becomes a strategic game of discerning the fastest path through each stage, deciding when to shoot enemies, and when to discard your cards to gain a movement advantage.

Though it doesn’t end here. Neon White encourages replaying a stage to continuously improve your time, cleverly tying internal guide systems to the medal system, eliminating the need for external resources. The game excels at communicating to the player how to improve, offering more guidance and hints as you earn better medals:

• Earning a bronze medal unlocks a “gift”, a collectible that requires clever use of the available cards. These collectibles, intentionally not too well-hidden, encourage players to slow down, gain a new perspective on the map, and generate new ideas for improving their time.
• Silver medals unlock the ability to race against your own ghost.
• Gold medals reveal hints, highlighting major intended shortcuts in a level, often allowing players to shave off seconds from their time.

Neon White effortlessly instills the “one more try” mentality with incredible level design, built-in motivation factors, and a perfect difficulty curve. However, it also demands increasing skill as you progress, as ammo can’t be wasted for optimal runs, and some levels require precise shooting from a distance to avoid detours while constantly on the move.

The story is delivered in an anime-style visual novel fashion, and serves primarily for pacing, as to not have the player burn out from constant speedrunning. The game is quite lengthy after all, featuring 96 main levels.

Storywise, the plot is very over the top and delves into a conflict between Heaven and Hell, portraying characters participating in a yearly competition that has them do Gods dirty work and eliminate demons infiltrating the various areas. Overall, the serviceable plot, its theme, as well as its presentation align well with the general style of the game. While characters heavily adhere to known archetypes, their personalities being built around only one or two quirks that are brought to the extreme, dialogue sequences remain fresh and engaging, and are a welcome diversion up to the very end of the game.

Collecting gifts is required to advance your relationship with other characters, providing an additional incentive to pick them up. Advancing your relationship with a character unlocks social scenes and additional dialogue, or a challenge level specific to that character. These challenge levels differ from regular levels in that they often evolve thematically around one specific mechanic. Additional challenges, heaven / hell rushes, are unlocked later in the game, and present unbroken sequences of levels that need to be beaten back to back. Heaven rushes have unlimited lives and restarts, with health resetting each level, while hell rushes need to be completed on a single life, with no restarts, and with no health regeneration between levels. During the latter, the standard Katana can be discarded up to three times total to spawn any weapon card, allowing the player to try to recover from a mistake.

The rushes tied to side characters are relatively short and are composed of the few challenge levels unlocked from that character’s relationship. Mikey’s and White’s rushes, however, feature all 96 levels of the main game – the only difference being that for Mikey’s rush, all weapon cards are replaced with the Rocket Launcher. These rushes can take upwards of 70-90 minutes, which makes White’s Hell rush especially daunting, and a test of patience and endurance, especially as the run nears its end. A shuffle option can be enabled before starting a rush, though, which randomizes the order of levels. This is an amazing inclusion for two reasons. On one hand, some of the more challenging levels might appear early in the run, allowing the player to clear them with less pressure. More importantly, though, using the shuffle option means that the player will practice more levels automatically, instead of playing the first levels over and over just to lose a deep run, never getting to practice the later levels.

Neon White is a thrilling experience, a mix of ideas that work incredibly well together. It exudes style from all of its pores, and offers varying levels of challenge. If you are even remotely interested in its premise, it is undoubtedly a game worth trying for yourself.