Neon White is the indie game of the moment. Designed by Angel Matrix, it's a blindingly stylish first-person action game about slaying demons in heaven to earn salvation. Yes, you shoot guns, like most other games featuring a first-person perspective. However, guns are just one tool to help you achieve the title's most important goal: speedrunning through these abstract divine trials as swiftly as possible by sprinting, jumping, and bouncing off of foes.
In other words, Neon White challenges you to pull off a lot of first-person platforming. Developers have chased this particular genre mash-up for years, since the concept sounds so cool in theory. Who doesn’t want to see through the eyes of a parkour master? Yet, even in the best examples, focusing on free-running in a first-person shooter always ends up a little awkward.
Blinded by the Light
To be clear, from what I’ve played on Neon White on PC, it is indeed one of the best examples of first-person platforming I've experienced. The game wants you to master its levels. To unlock new chapters, you must complete previous stages fast enough to earn gold medals. So, the controls need to give you the precision you need. Movement is crisp, not sluggish. You have a lot of air mobility. I successfully landed jumps that felt impossible before I attempted them. The freedom also abandons realism to make platforming much more forgiving. The brief levels feature numerous twists and turns, but you basically follow a linear path. As a result, there’s no need to mess with the camera too much to look behind you.
Although the development team deftly executes on what it set out to achieve, Neon White doesn't feel fully comfortable to me, and not just because I have no patience for the story. The biggest gameplay gimmick revolves around the dual uses for each weapon you find. A pistol can fire a few shots, but you can also discard it to get an extra jump. Toss a machine gun to turn it into a bomb that kills multiple enemies at once, with an explosion that launches you upward. You must kill every demon to beat the level; you can’t just run past them to the end. So, just as the guns augment both combat and movement, you must also efficiently combine those two concepts to break your old records.
When it clicks, it’s great. After all, Neon White is a game about perfect performance. But for me, even when setting gold-medal-worthy times, I still felt like I was bumbling around trying to get a grip on these systems. Keeping track of firing weapons, switching weapons, and discarding them doesn’t sound like too much. However, combining all that with a blistering pace meant that I fumbled a lot.
On top of that, you must also stay aware of your contextual movement options, how many jumps you have left, or if you need a bomb to blow through a door. These aren’t useful power-ups to help you, but essential, level-beating tools. If you use the wrong move in the wrong place, the game tells you that you’ve gotten yourself too stuck to complete a stage. Fortunately, levels are so short you don’t lose much progress. Still, as much as Neon White feels expressive and fluid, it also pushed me to memorize exact actions to solve the platforming puzzles. Maybe I’m just bad at it, but considering how closely this mirrors my experiences with other first-person platformers, I suspect there’s more to it than that.
Shifting Perspective
On paper, first-person platformers should be the coolest, sickest, raddest video games in the world. The intimate viewpoint makes you feel what it’s like to be a backflipping ninja or a swinging Spider-Man in games like Cyber Hook or Vertex Swing. However, platformers depend on situational awareness, how fully you understand the world around you, and how to best navigate its tricky gauntlets. You have a lot of awareness when you can see, say, Mario’s entire side-scrolling body. Traditional 3D platformers games even let you see your character’s prominent shadow on the ground to judge jumps (something Neon White does, as well). In first person, though, you lose so much of this natural guidance.