Neon White (2022)

The game is an absolute delight to play. I completed everything (all gifts and medals) but I'm still itching to go back and improve my times. If you watch videos of this game it may look intimidating, but it onboards you really well, and getting the highest medals don't require extreme precision. It also consistently introduces new, fun mechanics as the game goes on and it paces itself excellently until the end.

The writing is easily the weakest part and can be juvenile at times. But for me, it's not bad enough to drag the game down in any meaningful way. It also helps that I like the overall premise and plot and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little interested in where it was all leading.

The core gameplay loop is incredible and makes you feel like a master speedrunner when you hit that perfect run. The novel approach of using or discarding gives you enough tools in your toolbox without feeling overwhelming. The gifts and side quests are a great way to provide a more relaxing puzzle play though where time doesn’t matter.

The story is novel but the characters are dull, over-the-top anime stereotypes that have been done before. The fact that the reward for the extras are all linked to the character dialogue is a big downer.

May not properly review this since I don’t know if I’ll bother finishing it or not, but I do think it’s worth picking up. It presents an exciting high-speed gameplay formula, with short levels that reward time spent replaying them to discover alternate routes and optimizations. It feels great to play even on the Switch with a gamepad. I had a great time getting “Ace” rank medals on the first several worlds.

Unfortunately I don’t like much outside that core gameplay, including somewhat grating character writing with thankfully skippable dialogue and social link style elements, clumsy-feeling menus, and an art style that’s functional for the game but otherwise hasn’t really grown on me much.

There’s a point about a third of the way through the game where this one level smoothly links together all the power-ups you’ve learned how to use up until that point and it feels fantastic. Not long after, as more and more new weapons/abilities and enemies were added and levels became more complex, I started to lose interest in the optimization part. Even after taking a break from the game I’m not sure if it will come back. These levels do still feel well-designed, but losing the free-flowing simplicity of early levels and the initial novelty factor definitely dropped my hype a bit.

With my complaints and personal grievances in mind, I think I would have enjoyed this more as sort of a stripped-down title closer to Superhot that focuses in on a smaller number of mechanics with minimal other stuff, instead of the overall package we have here. Different players will have different tolerance levels for what this game has to offer, and I do think its core is super fun, so I do think this is one of the better titles from this year to check out (especially if you like things like Ghostrunner).

Played up to episode 7 with every ace rank and gift so far.

Once you skip through a lot of the tropey obnoxious anime™ dialogue and references(especially at the start), you have a really fun time trial FPS with intriguing character conflicts. After what is the end of the demo, the writing does pick up when we focus more on conflicts and the story rather than character banter. It has such an organic way of teaching mechanics without being intrusive. Some of these later levels had those gears spinning in my brain with how to navigate through as quickly as possible and especially how to get those gifts. Love the puzzle aspect of the game. Only problem gameplay wise is that I do not like how White falls. It feels too floaty and I just want him to fall harder. I'm having a really good time here.