Budget shibuya-kei Neon White outshines its direct comparison for me for two reasons. One is that it offers a significant objective aside from speed - you get one star for clearing the level under par time, but another for clearing with 100% shot accuracy, which gives a great incentive to keep coming back to levels since you probably won't be too focused on accuracy your first time through. The other is that this game gets HARD. It's a pretty obscene ramp in difficulty that comes mostly near the end - the first four worlds have a reasonable curve while world 5 absolutely *eclipses* them in difficulty - but it's that same difficulty that made it so compelling. Going from perfect clearing every W1-4 level and feeling like it was tough but fair, to some W5 levels feeling nigh on impossible to even *clear* - and then toughing through it, learning and coming out the other side.

While I still got the satisfaction of the 'grind' that I'd expect from a time trial/speedrun/whatever game, it still doesn't have enough depth in its basic movement to be really compelling as one, and some physics awkwardness make it annoyingly resistant to allowing cool skips. (or maybe I'm just missing stuff - all the WR times are REALLY low, but some are also obviously cheated.) It also has some performance issues that made it lag a LOT at some critical moments and needed to be restarted to fix. It's still no TrackMania as far as time triallers go, but its best moments still gave me the same levels of satisfaction. Hard to say too much about it, but I really just wanted to chance putting it on people's radars!