Excellent gameplay, but suffers from this stupid craze of making the game "hardcore" by making it's bosses frustratingly hard by inflating their health to dummy levels. And it's on top of throwing adds at the player, difficult to avoid boss attacks, and giving us little ammo.
The difference in difficulty between regular levels and boss fights was honestly baffling. And you can't even change the difficulty mid-playthrough ffs. Why?
I suffered through until the final boss, died like 20 times without even getting to the second stage, gave up, and watched the ending on YT.
I guess I kinda am proud of making it to the final boss, but I'd be proud of not dying of colon cancer too. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy having it.

Great game overall, good ideas, fun mechanic, cute story and characters, I enjoyed playing it a lot! Especially at the start

But who in god's name thought speed-based puzzle-solving with this game's limited movement and action economy while chased by a wave of death was a good idea. World five's first four levels were definitively the worst levels. Jesus. Would also love an undo button

I still really like this game but good lord it almost made not finish the game.

A really fantastic action puzzle platformer with an incredible sense of style and soundtrack to match. Not even racing games have gotten me interested in shaving down my time by a few seconds, but the core gameplay loop of Neon White encourages replay and experimentation with really smart design. Combined with a nearly perfect difficulty curve, and what you get is tight, sub-60 second levels that are regularly having you perform stunts worthy of a Quake or Mirror's Edge highlight reel. A real treat of a game overall.

Survival Horror, as a genre, often feels hard to pin down due to its particular origins in adventure games. The prototype tends to be one of attrition and riddles, a game about navigating a maze of monsters while solving puzzles and unlocking doors. But what if you reduced that down, boiled it down like syrup into its absolute most basic form? I think different people will have different ideas of what that syrup would taste like. But it might taste something like Innsmouth no Yakata (Mansion of Innsmouth).

The game consists of running around corridors, searching for keys and map orbs, and shooting Lovecraftian beasties that get in your way. Your ammunition is limited, so you also scour for bullets, as well as health pick-ups. It's almost like a dungeon crawl. But here's the kicker: there's a time limit. A short one, too! You never get more than like, 3 minutes to complete a level. Unlike most Survival Horror, which are slow trudges through corridors of dread, playing through Innsmouth no Yakata is a frantic, desperate sprint through a haunted house.

In a way, Innsmouth no Yakata is almost a precursor to the cult classic Killer7, Grasshopper's own radical reinterpretation of Survival Horror. It's a unique experience, and I'm curious what it would feel like in the Virtual Boy headset.

Now, does all this singularity make Innsmouth no Yakata a good game? Not really. It's too barebones and too repetitive to be much more than an a diversion. And I bet there are other games that have figured this style out better. But it's an interesting piece within the lineage of Survival Horror, showcasing a unique take on just what this genre can be capable of doing, all while draped in that eerie VB red monochrome.

Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?

Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.