Neon White Review (imfallin)
Picture this: It’s Y2K. Toonami is airing Cowboy Bebop and FLCL, you’re practicing your movement in Quake and Counter-Strike, and rave music is blasting as loud as it can through your speakers. Now imagine a game that threw all of that into a blender, and threw in some cocaine for good measure.
Neon White is a game all about one thing - kill everything and reach the end as fast as possible. Simple and easy to understand, and also surprisingly easy to master. It is seriously addicting to try and push yourself to your absolute limit to best yourself, then your friends, and maybe even the world. The skill floor is low enough to be accessible to most, even casually, while its skill ceiling is high enough that you can pull off some seriously wacky shit.
The lack of tech in this game makes going fast less about “how much can you push this game’s programming quirks to its limits” and more about “how well can you utilize the tools and abilities you have on hand?”. Good runs come down to routing and ability more than anything else; being able to coordinate a hundred actions at once isn’t typically a necessity. Getting good at Neon White isn’t just very possible for everyone, it’s encouraged.
And the gameplay exists on top of the game’s impeccable Y2K era style. The story is cheesy but undeniably fun, full of characters with super slick designs and lovably quirky personalities that evokes memories of late night Toonami. Blaring throughout the game is a soundtrack by Machine Girl that draws from breakcore, footwork, jungle, and everything in between that was plucked straight out of a rave.
Neon White claims to be “by freaks for freaks”. While I’m not familiar enough with the developers to say they're freaks, Neon White is most certainly a game I think anyone could get enjoy and addicted to - though, freaks may get a little more into it than the average person.