Neon White is a tragic would-be masterpiece held back by its unrelenting irony-poisoned rejection of anything genuine or friendly, along with completely wrecking its initially excellent mechanical design the second it tries to ramp up the difficulty.

In a first person movement based game, the difficulty and reward comes from the depth of that movement itself, in mastering it and squeezing out everything those mechanics allow. The execution barrier on something like a surf map in Counter-Strike or simply competently playing a match of Quake is a large part of what gives those their richness. A high skill floor does not necessarily mean a high ceiling will come with it, but it's certainly much more likely and works out in these cases. Neon White tries to simplify the kind of satisfaction one gets from mastery of movement to something every player can enjoy, and at first that works. For the first few missions, the easy mode versions of surfing, sticky jumping, and other classic movement options make for compelling levels where it is genuinely fun to compete with your friends and improve. Soon, though, the mechanics lose their luster as you realize how little there is to them. Regardless of angle, all explosions will send you directly up where you want them to, and everything is generally placed in such an easy to clear manner that it becomes mindless. There is simply nowhere to go, and improvement consists mostly of cutting corners and performing actions more smoothly.

This doesn't last forever, though, and eventually Neon White wants to make clearing levels more difficult. At first you cheer, until you realize how they do that. Their basic movement options are so devoid of depth that they just gave up on getting anything else out of them, and instead just layer mechanic on mechanic, hide enemies all over the place, and ask you to route that out. So as you progress, you spend more and more time looking around for what you need and planning things out so that by the time you're doing actual runs and shaving off time, you just want to move on to something else. One might say that this issue mirrors actual speedrunning, where the fast path and how to complete all objectives while going down it is often not clear. That's certainly true, but routing and then grinding out a level in a speed game usually comes after playing casually and genuinely enjoying the space without trying to move through it fast. Getting familiar with the space is then a natural process during casual playthroughs, but you can't do that there. There is nothing else to these levels other than speedrunning. No storytelling or puzzle solving or anything else that makes us love games. There's no hook.

In that way, it ends up feeling a lot like 2D Sonic: utterly joyless restriction of movement makes it so that to actually have any fun, you first need to play through a level several times and get good. Getting through is not hard, but it sure is tedious. The fun comes after the grind and the game doesn't even make an attempt at hooking you in to get you to that point.

The less said about the narrative, the better. Awful anime dub-tier voice acting drags down characters already so utterly insufferable and internet-poisoned with the most mean-spirited "SIMP POGGERS GURO XD" bullshit you've ever seen. If you find anything cute or fun, it will soon be torn down and stomped on.

Can we undo the Danganronpafication and Personafication of anything weeby? Weebs deserve better.