19/07/2025
Neon White – Unity Slop
Neon White is the opposite of punk rock. Reeks of Kickstarter stretch goals and discord community outreach. Slippery movement and floaty jumps. It's fast because that looks impressive on a Nintendo direct. This is more product than art.
Yes, I like the fast movements. It itches the brain nicely. There's a Gary’s Mod freedom to the way the character slides around the world completely tractionless. Controls feel completely uncoupled from the world as you move ghost-like through its levels. For about five seconds, you feel like a genius. Then you realise you only feel cool when you’re doing exactly what the level designer meticulously designed for you to do. Deviate even slightly from their imagined ideal and you’ll miss a demon you needed to tick off your checklist to have the level end. Don’t you dare try and sequence break or you might miss an important card that you need to get through the next section to get the next card. There is no creativity here. Only compliance. The game asks you to act their script without letting you read it.
You know that feeling when a game lets you break it, when you stumble onto some janky but brilliant skip that feels like you outsmarted the designers? Can’t do that here. It wants to pretend it's a speedrunner’s dream, but really it’s a Mario Kart Lakitu in anime cosplay, bringing you back onto the track every time you make a jump that didn’t look possible. It’s so obsessed with precision that it forgets joy. This game loves rules. It demands you should too.
I swear it's not a world of men. It's a world of clock watchers, bureaucrats, officeholders what it is, it's a fucked up world there's no adventure to it. Near the end of the game Neon White politely opens your cage and lets you skip enemies and segments if you can. This part is what the game feels like it should have been. But making levels is hard and if you move through them too fast the game won't be worth the hour to pound ratio. The game is strapped down to make its length acceptable for word of mouth critique when it enters a Steam Sale.
This writing is atrocious. Written by people who the only scripted dialogue they’ve ever heard comes from dubbed anime. It reads like a Tumblr post about an anime you’ve never watched written by someone who’s never been spoken to in real life. It’s tropey, anime is generally tropey fine but at least do something that isn’t entirely predictable or make those cutscenes shorter. There's a faux Persona social link mechanic here that relies upon replaying levels to collect gifts for these squinted eyes in the fog representations of almost a character. The designs of these guys were designed so perfectly to be loved by Corpse Husband red bedroom LED strip having TikTok watching ironic anime fan 14 year olds. Truly a gross aesthetic.
Visually, it’s sterile in a way only Unity games can be. Everything is single coloured untextured stucco floating constructions. It’s the kind of visual design you get when instead of installing Blender you shop exclusively at the Unity Asset Store The worst thing you can call an art style is serviceable, unlike a story existing because you feel like it should here the levels have textures because I guess they should. I’m sure they set this game in Heaven as an excuse to not have to open paint to texture these white walls.
I think I hate this game because I could love it. There is a rhythm here. There is a skill ceiling. You can feel the bones of a good idea beneath the smirking tone. But it’s too buttoned up. Too rigid. It lacks the looseness, the generosity of design that lets a game become yours.
So yeah. Unity slop. It just wants you to be good. To do it right. The whole time the game feels like it would be having more fun if I just took my fingers off the keyboard and loading up a TAS.