Top Games of 2022: No. 5 - Neon White

5. Neon White, dev. Angel Matrix

We're halfway through this list and we're missing something. Where are the video game-ass video games?? I love narratives, I love interactive media, I love role-playing, sure. But at some point, I just want to hit the buttons and have some action. Preferably straightforward action without a lot of bullshit getting in the way. I look at the menus for things like Forspoken and get exhausted and depressed. There's all these systems and numbers and percentages and loot and maps full of dots for endless activities to grind out more things to make all the numbers go up. I just have enough at some point! Can I just play the damn game?? Does it all have to be such a damn project, a second job, a friggin' lifestyle?? No, I just want to have levels and things to shoot! That's it!

(Deep breath)

Neon White is an FPS platformer designed to give you the most basic arcade-y thrills of gaming. The game is over a hundred levels of high-flying action. And that's it. Just a tiny story around it, some speed-running options, and bonus levels, and nothing else. It is tiny morsels of good food prepared well; Neon White is filling but not gluttonous. It does one thing really well and pushes that idea as far as it can take it.

The experience starts fairly simple with some lush white towns over reflective seas, then Neon White slowly evolves into increasingly absurd cityscapes over bottomless pits. In the late-game, it becomes this wonderful aerial ballet like many of the best moments in Celeste. You achieve this glorious feeling of pulling off trick after trick in rapid succession, almost never seeing the ground, or even needing the ground. The enemies are stationary, mostly serving as tiny hurdles to make you look cooler. The whole game is about speed and flow, and a steady progression of mastery.

Neon White's brilliant idea is to mix up guns with various forms of jumping and movement. High-speed FPS platforming goes back decades, all the way to the classic rocket jumps of Quake, when you could fire explosions into your feet. With Looney Tunes physics, that would launch your dumb ass across the map. There are rockets in Neon White, and that trick does work. But every gun in the game also has an alternate use a movement mechanic. So your starting pistol can be discarded for a double jump. The rifle is a forward dash. The rocket launcher is a grappling hook. Neon White has a card mechanic, but this is not a deck-builder. The cards are just a way of stacking jumps until you need them. You might want to save a few bullets in your Uzis because they're also a shockwave ground pound, great for clearing thick bunches of monsters, or diving downward onto stacked TNT for an upward boost.

The story of Neon White is the weaker element. On the surface, it does have interesting ideas. Your character, of course named Neon White, has died and gone to heaven. Unfortunately heaven is a crappy resort. You and the other sinners are forced by the corrupt angels in charge to constantly slaughter demons in the various levels. Your reward is minor inane gifts like watching The Matrix at the cinema or just an ice cream cone. There's a lot of intrigue and secrets, which reminds me of Paradise Killer, a first-person mystery game I enjoyed a lot from 2020. However, the developers are obsessed with anime, as evidenced by hiring English VA legend, Steve Blum, to play the lead. This a blessing and a curse, as this game is riddled with typical anime cliches and horniness. There's beach levels, a very fetishized character who might be underage, and talking cats with New York accents.

Let's be clear, I am not anti-horny. Immortality is a much hornier game than Neon White. The problem is that Neon White's cutscenes all feel like the comedy cutscenes in a Persona game. Your mileage will vary here, but is just not funny enough, not particularly sexy, and often undercuts the actually interesting ideas the narrative has.

Eventually Neon White reveals that this afterlife is a conflict between modern Christian assumptions of divine rewards versus more ancient Biblical understandings. The old heaven has been destroyed and torn down to build a mediocre land of menial pleasures. It works as a symbol of true faith and desires for connections with God, being demolished by our world's puritan grifters. The game wants to be critical of people who have no interest in religion besides constructing systems of rewards and punishments for petty temporal grievances. That should be fascinating, but Neon White spends too much time posing the girl with big boobs in a swimsuit, or dealing with the quest for revenge against Neon Green (Ben Lepley), a one-note flat villain who steals the plot.

The various characters and their personalities actually come together better in their special bonus levels. Neon Violet (Courtney Lin) is this "cute psycho" girl obsessed with explosions and violence. So all her levels are trollish nightmares with spikes and explosions. In one scene she makes you ground pound through forty levels with the Uzi, but if you ground pound too much and lose count, you get stuck on "Idiot Island" with no escape and no way out except to reset or kill yourself. Neon Yellow (Ian Jones-Quartley) is a dumb bro guy, so his levels are built around just shooting things for the most part. Neon Red (Alicyn Packard) is elegant and precise, so her levels are advanced platforming challenges all about the movement abilities. These are great challenges, and I simply had to do all of them.

Notably, no other game in 2022 led me to get as close to hitting 100% as Neon White. I had to get a high score in every level, I had to find all the secret treasures, I had to beat every side level, and I had to get the secret ending only reachable if you complete a secret ten-minute long marathon in a level fittingly called Marathon. I'm really impressed how well Neon White works, even on Switch, where it ran flawlessly. Another first-person platformer, Ghostrunner, was just impossible on consoles, a downright cruel experience if you're playing without mouse and keyboard. Neon White is perfectly tuned for any method of play. I've been dreaming of a truly great fast-running FPS platformer since Mirror's Edge on the PS3 almost achieved it - but got tragically short of the mark. Here we are, over a decade later, we're finally here, with Neon White, the dream is finally achieved.