Neon White is a cheeky mix of lightning-fast platforming, fast and frenetic combat, and a quirky card-based resource system. Neon White is a nifty and special speedrunning FPS that's easy to understand but hard to master.
Hellscapes in neon white
You're running through the floating architecture of an abstract sky and you're on your way there. Add a little Trials HD and try to drive the perfect route over the corpse of Mirror's Edge and you're even closer. With its precise and elegant controls and its uncanny ability to make even the average shooter player feel sleek and deadly, it's extremely easy to get sucked into the loop of Neon White, even if the story that puts everything together, immediately exceeds his welcome greeting.
A sinner from purgatory
The strange premise of Neon White, which sees sinners being taken out of purgatory to serve as parkour pest exterminators and wipe out a plague of demons in heaven as part of an annual competition where the winner gets to stay there, rings on the Paper certainly interesting. In practice, however, it turns much of Neon White into a young adult visual novel, with a bunch of colorful, dead millennials reminiscing about their past lives and arguing. The game consists of 12 chapters and 97 levels. Developer Angel Matrix built it and added context, but overall, Neon White is a slightly over-confident hybrid of Christianity and anime.
The group
This makes for a lot of characters to play outside of puzzle-platforming. There is the titular white man, a scrawny man who wears three belts, none of which appear to be connected to his trousers, and who likes to stand with his shoulders back and his crotch pushed forward. Then there's Violet, a knife-wielding pixie with a peculiar voice. There is also a cigar chewing cat.
The visual novel
In the levels themselves, Neon White takes on an identity all of its own with some razor-sharp FPS action. Your goal is to kill all enemies and get to the exit as quickly as possible. Each level is a parkour puzzle, and reaching the end within the allotted time limits requires judicious juggling of finite weapon and ability cards. Each card grants White limited use of a weapon as well as use of a one-time secondary ability. The pistol transforms into a double jump, the rifle into a high-speed air blast, and the machine gun into a devastating grenade that doubles as a vertical boost. Shotguns turn White into a soaring fireball, rocket launchers turn into grappling hooks, and SMGs turn into devastating earth missiles.
The abilities
When you use an ability to close a gap, break through an obstacle, or destroy an enemy, the card that granted it burns, but there's still another. The beauty of Neon White is that it always has the exact selection of cards you need to complete a level. It's only up to you to collect them all in the perfect spots and execute them. This ends up being a lot less intimidating as there is a very carefully considered visual language at work in Neon White. With sharp and simple graphics and a very deliberate use of color, Neon White usually makes it pretty clear which direction you need to travel, what barriers you can overcome, and what gaps you need to fill. It's remarkably intuitive. There are definitely instances where you'll jump into a void on the first pass through a level and die with no clear idea of where to go, but those are exceptions.
The swing in neon white
As a result, Neon White not only has a wonderful sense of panache, but also a fantastic ability to flatter you. There are certainly plenty of occasions during Neon White where you feel like the greatest dead parkour assassin in the universe; breathless moments as you reach the end of a level and pick up your trophy. Playing the footage feels like you're watching someone else play the game better than you. For an absolutely exceptional shooter player, Neon White's ability to make you feel good while gaming is a real merit.
The speed
The faster you drive, the more it encourages you to keep improving, first by giving you your own ghost to hunt, and next by revealing new shortcuts to you. After mastering the moves. You look for other hidden jumps and parts of the level geometry that can be scaled or exploited. It hooks you into its just-one-more-try loop. Levels can last anywhere from 10-20 seconds to a few minutes, although the sweet spot seems to be around a minute or less. The longer levels and boss fights towards the end of Neon White introduce a powerful new map and some new techniques. With no mid-level checkpoints and extremely limited health, the longer levels are more frustrating than fun.
Conclusion
Neon White is a fast-paced and compelling first-person platformer that's surprisingly easy to pick up and play, but packs a very tough speedrun challenge to its core. Neon White blends your combat options with a traversal mechanic, turning each encounter into a deadly parkour puzzle that can be repeated over and over in your quest for the perfect run and the tightest time. The dialogue between his unlikable squad of terrified, anime-inspired assassins might be a thorny misstep, but his airtight level design and awesome sense of momentum ensure Neon White's gameplay is something to celebrate.