Neon White is a first person platformer/speedrunning/FPS game. You play as the epooymous Neon White, a sinner who has been brought to Heaven along with a bunch of other sinners to kill demons for ten days. Whichever of these sinners – called Neons – gets the highest rank at the end of the ten days gets to stay in Heaven, while the rest are cast back out once more.
Neon White has lost his memories, but other sinners who knew him in life – Yellow, Red, and Violet – are all also competing to stay in Heaven as well, and may be taking advantage of his lack of memories for their own ends.
Over the course of the game, you uncover what is really going on, your relationship to the other neons, befriend some angels, and gather gifts during levels to give to people back in the home base to level up your friendship levels, unlocking conversations, additional secret levels, collectibles for your room, and eventually memories of your interactions with them in life.
Overall, the plot aspect of the game is not particularly good – it is very anime (despite not being made in Japan) and the characters are fairly simple and archetypal, and don’t really feel much like they were assassins in live (with the exception of Violet) as they ostensibly were. My favorite character was Mikey, an angel who looks like a cat with a cigar and a hard-bitten voice.
But that’s not really what you’re here for. The plot is mostly just an excuse for the action, and the core gameplay of this game is quite good.
The game’s central premise is that you need to beat the levels as fast as possible for medals. Traversing these levels, you have the standard running and jumping, but you also get guns – these can be shot to kill demons or interact with some environmental objects, or can be discarded to give you a traversal power, like jumping, air-dashing, a mid-air rocket, a grappling hook, or a ground slam. Each weapon corresponds to a different secondary power, and there are six weapons in all in the game. Most of these weapons can’t break barricades with their normal shots, so you usually have to use the damaging traversal powers to break them down or bypass them.
You have to kill every demon in most of the levels, so when you are trying to find a more efficient route, you need to be able to kill all the enemies even if you are cutting off big chunks of the levels in terms of traversal.
This leads to an interesting core gameplay loop of going into a level, learning its layout, then mastering it, figuring out what routes you can take to save time and how to kill demons that are “off route” without going near them. It works really well, and the game has a fast pace and solid level variety, finding a good number of ways to show off the game’s mechanics and create interesting platforming experiences.
The game gives out four ranks of medal at the end of each level – bronze, silver, gold, and ace – and there’s a fifth, hidden red rank that is not needed for 100%ing the game. Acing the levels takes some doing, but isn’t prohibitively difficult; getting those red medals, however, is a very difficult challenge indeed.
The game also has built-in level rush modes which you unlock when you beat all the levels in the game, with internal leaderboards that both show how well your friends did on them, as well as how well you rank globally.
The game also has a hidden gift in almost every level, which you can collect to give to characters; some of these require you to notice them in unusual places, while many are difficult to reach and require you to use your resources cleverly and efficiently to get to them.
All of this combines to create a quite solid gameplay experience. If you like the idea of speedrunning, this game has fun with the idea, and the movement of the character through the levels is a lot of fun.
All in all, I’d recommend this game to more mechanics-focused players who enjoy speedrunning/beat the clock, but people who are more story/narrative focused are likely to be disappointed.
4.0