I wasn’t sold on Neon White when I first saw it. I’ve got an unreasonably negative kneejerk reaction whenever I see “card games” shoved into another genre, probably triggered by the upcoming Marvel Midnight Suns, so seeing a speedrunning-style shooting game similar to Ghostrunner using playing cards for attacks made me so quizzical that I was ready to condemn it to my Steam ignore list and get back to trying to play Deathloop. But then I looked at the art style a little more and saw all the positive reviews and decided to take a stab at it.
Neon White is high-speed first-person platforming game with a similar gameplay philosophy as Ghostrunner where it’s built on going fast from one side of the map to the other and looking cool while doing it. Neon White in particular is highly focused on the speedrunning aspect of the genre and features quick, bite-sized levels of between twenty and fifty seconds compared to Ghostrunner‘s longer, average game length levels, and is also far less concerned with challenges in combat as you can take three hits before death as opposed to Ghostrunner‘s much more exacting one hit game over screen. This creates a much more relaxing and less immediately daunting experience, where enemies aren’t very aggressive and most levels can be completed with high ranks as long as you remember the age-old advice of moving forward at all times. While you’re moving you’ll have to traverse traditional platforming obstacles using Neon White‘s main gimmick: discarding playing cards for special abilities.
The way it works is Neon White represents every weapon as a playing card rather than a regular weapon like you might see in most FPS games. You can use them like a regular weapon to kill the many demons that will get in your way, but you can also “discard” the card to use an ability based on the weapon: pistols double-jump, shotguns air dash, rocket launchers have a grappling hook, etc. This makes moving through the level a game of balancing resources as much as it is about doing the moves themselves, where perhaps you should save your shotgun for a more directionally challenging jump while the pistol will do just fine as a way to get up the wall in front of you, especially when the shotgun deals more damage to enemies. However by the same token you want to be sure you aren’t using your cards flippantly, as you may not have the ability to traverse the next obstacle if you use too many of your bullets or skills before you need to, since there’s no way to get new weapons outside of scripted placements on the level.
As you’re playing Neon White you may think its linearity is its biggest problem, since other games like Ghostrunner don’t necessarily have the same cut-and-dry approach to how you should progress through levels, but when the stages open up during the last quarter of the game you’ll start to realize the real problem: the discarding gun mechanic. It’s very rare for games like this to have traversal mechanics with limited uses, and the more you think about it the clearer it becomes an anchor weighing down the game’s design. Suddenly you can’t have a super intricate series of jumps without telegraphing it, because you have to give the player the cards they need to do those same jumps you just made for them. In fact most levels will have you pick up a card only to immediately have its use staring you right in the face, which makes the game’s flow feel INCREDIBLE but frequently feels like the game is telling you how to play. Once you get to those open levels I mentioned earlier you will really start to feel these chains holding you back, since doing things out of order will not only feel terrible from a game flow perspective but also may just be impossible. You’ll be left you scratching your head about how you’re supposed to progress from an area where you went down instead of up, destitute with no cards that can readily get you back where you need to go or no (useful) weapons to kill the enemies guarding the weapons you need.
Since there’s very little else to complain about in terms of gameplay I’ll also throw out that I kind of hate the rocket launcher in Neon White. The idea of “rocket launcher that can be used to rocket jump AND it’s a hookshot” may sound incredible but in practice it leads to a lot of lackluster level design decisions. Suddenly a game that was all about crazy bursts of speed has wide open bottomless pits that you’re just supposed to grapple across for prolonged periods of time, and death-defying air dash sections are replaced by just facing a wall and shooting your knees with rockets for three seconds, which isn’t what I would call engaging. These sections again were probably intended to help make the game feel like you had more freedom, but as I said earlier if you rocket jump off the wrong building you’ll have to restart since you won’t find any more super jumps up wherever you ended your blasting.
The plot that ties this all together is simple enough: once a year Heaven gets overrun by demons and the angels call up the worst killers of Hell to help fight them off, referring to them as Neons. The Neons get a fancy mask that will kill them if they step out of line and the ultimate prize: a place in heaven to the one who kills the most demons. You play as the titular Neon White (all Neons are named “Neon Color”) who unlike the other Neons has no memory of his life or his time in Hell, but seems exceptionally good at killing things. As you play you’ll quickly learn that White has a criminal history with some of the other Neons, specifically Red, Violet, Yellow, and the villainous Green, who is Heaven’s greatest champion of these games, and the game gives you an opportunity to get to know all of these characters by giving them gifts that you can unlock while replaying stages. These gifts not only unlock additional dialogue but also bonus challenge levels with obstacles themed around the Neons that provided them, giving you additional incentive to find these collectables for the sake of squeezing every inch of gameplay that you can out of the experience, not to mention unlocking the game’s “true ending.”
Most every story beat of Neon White is told through visual novel scenes where you have no direct input, and if you’re seen anything about Neon White‘s plot and dialogue you’ve probably heard that it’s a bit of a mess. This is certainly true from a writing perspective, with almost every character just being an archetype rather than a full person and far too many dated pop culture references, plus the game is very fast and loose with what White does or doesn’t remember at a given time. Part of this is the fault of the optional character dialogue moments, as White will occasionally reference past events with his friends despite nothing establishing that he remembers these things, but the main plot will sometimes do this too. During the prelude to the fourth set of levels White will make an impassioned, anime-style vague speech about how he “has to” face off with Green… but the game itself still hasn’t explained why, nor has it made any suggestion that White is remembering things that he isn’t telling us about. The game also has a very inaccurate concept of time, with all of White’s friends having been through several years of this game already but the Neon White‘s flashbacks imply they all died the same day. Obviously very little of this is a deal breaker, both because we aren’t playing this game for the story and the game seems to realize it based on the giant fast-forward button present in every scene, but if you do need a story to keep you motivated then I hope you like anime tropes.
Presentation wise the game isn’t terrible though it’s obviously not trying to win any awards. The demons are all just blobs that you really aren’t supposed to look at much, and the cutscene/in-game models can look greasy at times, though the art style definitely has flair that comes through in the art that represents the characters during the visual novel scenes. The music isn’t anything to write home about compared to the pulsing bangers you generally get in other “don’t stop moving you fool” games like Ghostrunner or Hotline Miami, especially once they start adding phrases to the songs that says things like “yOu weRE DeALt a BaD HaannD” or “HeaVen iS a tRiP” (writing used emphasize the ghostly nature of the lyrics), which gets really repetitive once you’ve heard it 80 times as you play through each stage of a given chapter two to five times to get the high ranking speed medals and the collectables. Lastly the voice acting is fine for mid to low tier anime dub thanks in part to Steve Blum on White himself, but to be honest the voice acting would feel better if the characters had something meaningful to say rather than just killing screen time until the next set of missions are unlocked. You won’t want to gouge out your ears listening to it but you won’t remember any line any character says, whether well or poorly delivered, after they’re done saying it.
Neon White is a good addition to the genre of this type of game, and I’d even go so far as to say it’s a great starting point for people that want to get into games such as Ghostrunner and the like but are intimidated by the absurd speed potential and quick path to death that those other games offer. However the fact is that these sort of games aren’t for everyone, so I can’t just give it a blanket “play this game” like I would for something like Hades, but you shouldn’t let that deter you if you think Neon White looks interesting. The game handles well outside of a few awkward jumps in a few levels, has great tempo that really helps keep you engaged, and has far less frustrating moments than its contemporaries, especially if you aren’t trying to get high scores on every level. Its only major gameplay flaws are nitpicks brought on by the desire to have more freedom in how you traverse the environment, but that isn’t what the game is made for… and with that in mind there’s very little to complain about at all.
