No replay option? Crashes every time I play more than two songs with people online but not solo? Constant lag spikes? Horrible aesthetics? Frequently awful song picks? Battle pass? Yep, everything I'd expect from an Epic Games rhythm game. I'd say poor Harmonix for being contracted into developing absolute garbage, but I'm sure they feel sad about the nice Fortnite payday they're getting. (Though if Epic isn't paying them fairly - which wouldn't surprise me - then I would actually feel bad for them!)

Super frustrating, nearly-incompatible game designs running up against each other here, competing for space and making the game worse overall. One is the classic Alan Wake gameplay, and one is the semi-open-level yet-still-linear method of action progression.

Many compromises get made to fit these two styles together. The good: flashlight recharging is near instantaneous though you're now limited to ten batteries, not that it matters with the ammo boxes, and Alan can run farther while recovering faster, accommodating the faster pace and shift in genre/style. The neutral leaning-on-bad: Emergency boxes are now for resupplying all your ammo and batteries, and they respawn every so often, as do safe havens, making large portions of the game trivial even on Nightmare if you know how to balance your flashlight usage. You can only carry five flares and flashbangs, which becomes only a minor annoyance for flares but much more of a problem for flashbangs.

The bad: manuscripts are littered all over the maps in absolutely random spots (some of which you wouldn't naturally go near over the course of a level), but get shown with an icon on the minimap, meaning you spend a lot of wasted time looking at a minimap if you're interested in manuscripts. You have to be to a certain extent because there are weapon crates around that unlock certain weapons based on how many manuscripts you have, with up to 40 needed to unlock the assault rifle. If you want to play the arcade mode (a frustrating experience meant to satisfy sickos who hate themselves and their time), this is practically a requirement too. This makes the gameplay loop unsatisfying.

Speaking of the loop, the gameplay progression really boils down to playing the same three maps but doing less each time, excepting one thing in the process which you have to do slightly differently. Sure, you could say the repetition is the point to reflect Alan's reality. I call it boring. The tension in these maps is already not that high after your first mission in them, but when you're manuscript hunting, you can end up not seeing enemies for a very long time as they're primarily (not always) tied to paths you take to complete objectives. In Alan Wake, levels could be big, open, and confusing to navigate in the dark. But the structure of these levels and the tight, linear pacing of the game makes the tension effective no matter how often you play it. By necessity, this game has less of those compact tense moments, and encounters very often don't even happen if you're not doing objectives to go weapon + flare + manuscript hunting. So essentially, you're wandering around ghost towns staring at a minimap if you're not solely focused on the story objectives, arming yourself strong to the point of tension diffusion before continuing on to bodyslam the encounters. Nice!

As far as the heart and soul of the series go, the characters already introduced in Alan Wake are at least still great to hear from and see. Alan's less depressive disposition is mostly welcome, though his one-liners, charming and infrequent as they were in the original, now are frequent and cheesy if not outright embarrassing. He's otherwise mostly changed for the better here. Mr. Scratch is written in an interesting manner too. He may be blatantly modeled after Patrick Bateman, but both the writers and the game's aesthetics understand how to make it convincing. Framing the game as a Night Springs divergence is cool too! As usual too, the needle drops are all good here, even if a musical choice here or there may be a bit silly (Club Foot rocks, but I didn't really feel as hype the third time).

Unfortunately, hard to feel as positive for the game-original characters who are much more "present" than any characters from the original game sans Alan and Mr. Scratch. They're only really present to give you tasks to do. Serena may be the best-characterized of them on account of her association with Alice, while Emma at least gets something in the manuscripts. Rachel talks a lot of science and philosophy which distracts from her not having anything to her beyond that. All three still feel like afterthoughts. A weird, possibly(?) unintended side-effect is that Alan is now a hero saving damsels in distress constantly, barely-written damsels to boot; not quite the same as being a wife-lover loser.

It's pretty frustrating to see what Remedy were going for here. The commitment to sticking with Alan Wake's main gameplay mechanics is too at odds with the action direction they wanted to take to make anything work well. Did the story come first here, or did they marry the story to their gameplay hook? The latter feels more likely, which comes off as disappointing in the end when the story ultimately barely works on top of rough character writing and bad gameplay. Being short is a blessing only in that you don't need to spend too much time wallowing in it. I'm fine with Remedy taking the risk here, even if it didn't pay off.

As fun as Neon White could often be, I ended up being frustrated by it in equally frequent measures. To get it out of the way; Neon White is mostly super leet and epic to play the whole way through, especially if you respond well to its MLG pace along with its hype to always gotta go fast. The level designs are often epic baconsauce, stanning the speed you're pushed to go further and further with. Not only that, but it's addictive to go beyond being a n00b until you get the Ace medal on each level.

This is what makes some of the snoozefest (relative to the rest of the game) levels and boss fights especially rage-inducing when you come across them, reorienting the flow in a mid way. Along with some levels that felt real 💀 by reusing older challenges nearly beat-by-beat, mainly like around the middle third of the game, it feels like the design was stretched out a bit too much at 96 levels. But when most of it hits, it hits, excusing the lame stuff elsewhere in the game.

What doesn't hit is the cringe piled onto a perfectly good game. You play as the titular Neon White, a bad dude with amnesia who doesn't afraid of anything, forced to pwn demons to gain the privilege of temporarily staying in Heaven, running across Neon Yellow (your bro no homo), Neon Violet (the psycho e-girl who's also lol so randum xD) (the only one I responded positively to and I'd let her kill me), Neon Red (the tsundere baddie who's clearly into you), and Neon Green (the crazy murder dude that really makes you go "um... did he just do that???"). It's nearly-impossible to get invested in any of it despite the rare few Crowning Moments of Awesome. The often-hammy voice acting doesn't own, and wouldn't be much of an issue if the characters had dialog or writing worth giving a shit about.

Not only do they not, but there's even an insane amount of meme-filled, tongue-in-cheek, Joss Whedon-esque writing that plagues much of the interactions and story developments. It's weird, badly written, insufferable, and distracting. It comes off like a justification for the gameplay as well as the aesthetic, when I would much rather have just played these nearly 100 levels without the bad writing doing its best to make it harder to get through. Yes, it does let off the gas pedal with the memes and the like by around Chapter 7, nearly stopping altogether from the next one on. But it's almost too little too late with such a bad impression up until then. From top to bottom, the story, characterization, and overall writing simply needed to not be as bad as it was here in order to be compelling; no memes would have been a good start.

Thankfully, there is a part of the game that doesn't require you to play the story - the level rushes. Playing all of a character's themed levels (which at least do well to match the kind of personality each of the characters are), playing through all the story levels, or doing the same but with only the Dominion card (the rocket launcher card you unlock by the final third) back-to-back-to-back is its own thrill. Even the maddening Hell versions where any death means you must restart from the very beginning.

If you have skill issues like me however, not only is the difficulty curve on something like this immense, but you're probably somewhat worn out on the gameplay by this point. Especially when you also frequently run across the lesser levels in constantly restarting; that puts a damper on the excitement somewhat. Another irritating problem also highlights itself here, with the floaty airtime you get making it remarkably difficult to judge if you've overshot or not with a jump. Combine that with getting too close to a surface's edge meaning that the game simply won't register your jump at all, and a number of deaths will end up being extremely frustrating, especially in something as high-pressure as the Hell rushes.

Still, there is a good game in there. If you only look at the main crux of the game and most of its levels, there's a lot of fun to be had throughout its runtime, and you will definitely feel cool after racing through a level and getting an Ace medal. Even with some faults, it's pretty fun! It's just too bad it had to come with a story. There's a nice attempt buried within the writing, but none of it lands, which sucks, because it'd make coming back to the meat of the game more enticing. Still, what's there as far as the non-story side of it goes is rather good, so even though it's a wash for me, if you can stomach its cringe, you'll find plenty to like.