Neon White is a first-person action game where the goal is to get through each stage as fast as possible. With a stunning yet minimalist art direction and elegantly smooth gameplay, Neon White is hard to put down once you start, and an easy recommend for anyone looking for a unique and challenging experience.

To forgive, divine

Neon White takes place in Heaven, where the soul of an amnesiac assassin named White wakes up alongside several other mysterious masked individuals. White and his fellow masked contestants, called Neons, are damned souls chosen by Heaven’s guardians to slay demons for a potential opportunity to stay in Heaven permanently and find redemption. Along the way, White uncovers mysteries surrounding his past and the pasts of other Neons, and a sinister conspiracy that threatens the entire afterlife.

While White and his fellow Neons don’t start out as especially nuanced characters, they grow over time as the narrative develops. Neon White’s themes of forgiveness and redemption, and coming to terms with your mistakes, suited the heavenly setting quite appropriately. Many of the supporting characters, from the abrasive Angel chief Mikey to the sycophantic and self-absorbed Believers, were also quite memorable and fun to have around.

Dealing a strong hand

In each of the 100 stages in Neon White, you must slay every demon and then get to the goal as fast as possible. Each of these stages is very brief, ranging from around 30 seconds to only a few minutes for the lengthier ones. White kills demons using Soul Cards, which can take the form of a weapon such as a pistol, shotgun, or bazooka, or discarded for a variety of movement abilities. The key to success is using your cards in the right order and at the right moment to cut the most efficient path forward. New mechanics and Soul Cards are drip-fed to the player every few stages, maintaining a steady sense of progress.

Neon White is all about speed, and its mechanics fully facilitate this style of play. Soul Cards are placed right before they are needed, whether that’s an Elevate card when you need to do a double jump or a Godspeed card to cross a gap. The skill comes from using them most efficiently, taking out groups at a time, being conservative with resources, timing jumps, and discarding abilities correctly. What’s more, if you screw up and discard a crucial card before you can use it properly, levels can be reset at the press of a button. Due to how short each level is, I never found the trial-and-error nature of Neon White especially frustrating, as any mistake generally cost me only a few seconds.

Trouble in paradise

Unfortunately, Neon White’s momentum is interrupted on occasion by its boss fights. The gameplay loop of “zoom through the levels killing demons” doesn’t work as well when the goal is changed to “reduce a big bad guy’s health bar to zero”. While the boss fights often try and maintain the energy of the main levels by forcing White to chase them through an obstacle course, it is let down by how long those boss fights could take compared to the main stages. One late-game boss had a recommended completion time of around 5 minutes, which is substantially longer than any other stage, and the lack of mid-level checkpoints made dying to a mistimed jump or stray enemy projectile especially infuriating. Fortunately, there are not many boss fights, so it is not something that frequently impacts the experience.

A repetitive afterlife

The various locales of Heaven that you visit in Neon White feel somewhat similar on a visual front; when every level is a bunch of floating disconnected towers and office buildings with a spectacular skybox behind them, they can start to blend in with one another after a while. However, this does make the optional side missions and many of the later levels feel a lot more distinct, as they use different and more varied colour palettes and felt more memorable as a result.

Still, considering how much Neon White’s design depends on its levels being immediately readable and easy to navigate at a glance, I appreciate that maintaining a consistent style probably helps in that regard. It is just an unfortunate trade-off that it prevents most of the levels from standing out on the visual side of things.

An entrancing experience