Ben Esposito refers to Neon White as a "game for freaks." One would assume that this game is meant to appeal to social outcasts, rejects, or at the very least those with very specific and esoteric tastes. Instead Neon White panders to the lowest common denominator of anime fans that dominate spaces like Twitter and Reddit - who are indeed freaks, though likely not the "cool" kind of freaks that Esposito is attempting to appeal to.
The gameplay is fun! A bit floaty, but not enough that the moment-to-moment platforming suffers. The process of learning levels to optimize your time and get an Ace rank is incredibly addicting. In spite of being a single-player game there is an undeniable communal aspect if you're playing with friends, since the PC version compares your scores to those of your Steam friends - a lot of the appeal to me is running levels over and over again to try and best your friends' scores. The levels are gorgeous, intuitively designed while remaining complex enough for optimization, and over in less than thirty seconds. The music is fantastic and the presentation (my distaste for the VN format aside) is spectacular.
Thus comes the elephant in the room: the writing. Abysmal on every single front, an endless fount of regurgitated memes originating from the "Anitwt" community on Twitter only to be reposted and recycled onto the countless cesspools of Reddit. You can't go twenty seconds without hearing a buzzword or in-joke, and in the rare moments without talking about characters' breasts, making John Cena jokes or name-dropping Naruto characters you'll find it hard to take the characters and their dialogue seriously for the simple fact that nobody talks like this. If anything it's only accentuated by the fact that the voice acting is really great (Steve Blum voices the title character!) and the actors are giving it their all with every line, struggling to wring emotion and depth out of dialogue that simply has none to offer.
I don't have anything to say about the plot because I don't care and I'm probably going to skip it from here on out. The only comment I have about the dating sim elements is that the Persona series and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Overall a really fun game if you skip the cutscenes and pretend it's just a bunch of floating levels in a void with no context or narrative presentation!
The gameplay is fun! A bit floaty, but not enough that the moment-to-moment platforming suffers. The process of learning levels to optimize your time and get an Ace rank is incredibly addicting. In spite of being a single-player game there is an undeniable communal aspect if you're playing with friends, since the PC version compares your scores to those of your Steam friends - a lot of the appeal to me is running levels over and over again to try and best your friends' scores. The levels are gorgeous, intuitively designed while remaining complex enough for optimization, and over in less than thirty seconds. The music is fantastic and the presentation (my distaste for the VN format aside) is spectacular.
Thus comes the elephant in the room: the writing. Abysmal on every single front, an endless fount of regurgitated memes originating from the "Anitwt" community on Twitter only to be reposted and recycled onto the countless cesspools of Reddit. You can't go twenty seconds without hearing a buzzword or in-joke, and in the rare moments without talking about characters' breasts, making John Cena jokes or name-dropping Naruto characters you'll find it hard to take the characters and their dialogue seriously for the simple fact that nobody talks like this. If anything it's only accentuated by the fact that the voice acting is really great (Steve Blum voices the title character!) and the actors are giving it their all with every line, struggling to wring emotion and depth out of dialogue that simply has none to offer.
I don't have anything to say about the plot because I don't care and I'm probably going to skip it from here on out. The only comment I have about the dating sim elements is that the Persona series and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Overall a really fun game if you skip the cutscenes and pretend it's just a bunch of floating levels in a void with no context or narrative presentation!