Neon White Review

Speedrunning to greatness

Some games are truly exceptional. It might be for their graphics, their story, their intensity, or their novelty. However, even among those exceptional games, few stand out for the pure brilliance of their game design. Today, I want to talk about such a game: Neon White.

Neon White is a first-person platformer/shooter released in 2022. It’s heavily inspired by speedrunning as well as card games like Slay the Spire. The core idea is simple: kill all enemies and get to the end of the level as quickly as possible. That may sound quite basic at first, but the genius of the game lies in the details.

Gameplay

Naturally, we need weapons in a shooter to get rid of the enemies. The weapons in Neon White are represented by cards. Each card can also be discarded to trigger a special ability. For example, the handgun card can be discarded to execute a double jump. We can get the weapon cards by defeating enemies, by picking them up from the ground, and by using special dispensers.

Naturally, the game…