Heaven. Hell. Speed.
Neon White is a game all about blazing through the crumbling halls of a heaven that God forgot; killing the ever increasing demon population that threatens to tear it all down.
As a “Neon”, you’re tasked with competing with other “Neons” to kill the most demons in a certain period of time in order to gain access to heaven for one year. Neons are sinners whose souls were condemned to hell and are given a chance by Heaven’s bizarre cultish council to fight for their redemption. You play as Neon White, an enigmatic, rough-and-tumble type guy voiced by the infallible Steve Blum. Upon realizing you’ve been reawakened from a tormented eternal slumber, you try to recall what events led you to this point, but you’ve lost all memories aside from the basics. With nothing else to really do, you set out on the quest that this Heavenly council has sent you on in hopes of recovering your memories. Along the way, you meet people who claim to be from your past; others resurrected as Neons.
Throughout the game’s story, you’re given opportunities to find treasures throughout the levels which let you play a secret level to unlock some sort of “dating sim” cutscene with one of the other Neons to gain more knowledge about your past. This part of the game certainly exists. The backstory is cool, but the story falls into the category of “too anime”, which is unfortunate with the kind of voice talent the got on board for this one. Oh well, at least Mr. Blum can serenade us with his sultry voice for the whole ordeal. This is easily the most tedious and unfun part of the game, which is why I got to it first. Fortunately for us, the rest of the game absolutely blows this out of the water.
Neon White’s core gameplay loop has you flying through different heavenly locales gunning down demons left and right to reach a goal. Fairly simple, right? Of course, you can just waddle through the whole course to get to the goal, but that’s not really what the game wants you to do. The game wants you to get moving. It wants you to use its mechanics TO get moving, and it wants to show you how.
Upon first clearing a level, your time probably isn’t going to be very good, netting you a bronze medal. You can go on from here to the next level, but the game encourages you to maybe try for a faster time by tempting you with higher level medals, hidden collectibles, and a leaderboard of your friends’ times next to the UI. When you beat a level, you gain “insight” which reveals new information about the level to you. At a certain insight level, the game tells you that there might be a quicker way to beat the level, and nudges you in that direction.
That said, it’s not intrusive and you’re certainly not forced to, but you’ll do it. Not because you want to get better at the game, not because of the collectibles, (maybe) not because of the leaderboard, but because it is FUN as HELL to move around in this game. Moving quickly and beating the levels at a lightning pace just FEELS fantastic.
Hence why I titled this article the way I did. The idea of speedrunning a game pretty blatantly means beating the game as quickly as possible in one go. Speedrunning has seen a surge in popularity as of late, and people are constantly finding new strategies to cut down on time. However, with so many people grinding out for better times, getting into speedrunning is both extremely daunting and time consuming. So because of this, I think Neon White is a great game for people who WANT to speedrun but can’t exactly drop all the time necessary to get into it. Aside from time constraints, speedruns of entire games are usually marathon sessions and any one mistake can totally ruin a whole run. By splitting its runs into little bite-sized levels, Neon White creates a scenario where you can have a little taste of speedrunning to pick up and put down as you please, which I think is much more fun than grinding out one game over and over again just to get the ten-thousandth best time in the world on Super Mario 64.
I can very comfortably recommend Neon White for everything except its story. Its story is something I’d consider a “monkey’s paw” type deal… at least the tropey anime garbage. Great gameplay definitely offsets this downside along with a very unique soundtrack brought to us by the electronic(?) music artist, Machine Girl.
Machine Girl’s music compliments the frenetic and angelic nature of this game fantastically. It uses a combination of angelic synths and breakcore along with strange “lyrics” in such a way that is entirely unique to Machine Girl to portray the sensation of being in such a strange situation as this.
Overall, definitely a 9/10 game. You can find it on Steam for a whopping $24.99, which I’d probably consider a bit much considering its length. Wait for a sale if you’re not in a rush to play it, but if you REALLY don’t want to wait, I can’t say it isn’t worth it.