Video Game / Neon White

Be the best... or burn in hell.^note L - R: Neon Violet, Neon White, Neon Red. Not pictured: Neon Yellow & Neon Green.

"Hey, guess what? You died and God thinks you suck. Go kill some crap."

— Neon White, summing up his mission

Neon White is a "heavenly anime FPS for freaks, by freaks", developed by Angel Matrix, published by Annapurna Interactive, and scored by Machine Girl. The full game released on June 16th, 2022.

You play as Neon White, a sinner plucked from Hell to purge Heaven of a demon infestation. White and his fellow Neons have ten days to exterminate the forces of Hell, with one incentive: the best gets to enjoy the spoils of Heaven, while the rest of the competitors are cast back down. A lone wolf assassin in his mortal days, White is fairly sure he's up to the task. Only one problem: some of the other Neons seem awfully familiar, and he can't quite recall who he once was...

Gameplay is lightning-fast, stylish, and precise. By killing high-level demons, you receive Soul Cards, each corresponding to a separate ranged weapon and granting special movement abilities once discarded. Your performance per level is graded on speed, with rewards and Insight granted based on your time. In addition to the main missions, Companion Specific Sidequests are available by gathering gifts and delivering them to your fellow Neons, granting hints of your past together.

The reveal trailer can be viewed here.

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Examples:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: In the final chapter, you gain access to the Book of Life soul card, which immediately teleports you to any enemies within line of sight, regardless of distance. Furthermore, it can be used infinitely.
• Animal Motifs: While White has a mask of a demon's face, the other heroic Neons each bear the mask of a different animal: a bunny for the cheery, cutesy Violet, a kitsune for the suave, aloof Red, and a goat for the headstrong, outspoken Yellow.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Medal times are significantly more lax in the Switch version compared to the PC release, accounting for the general imprecision of a controller compared to a keyboard and mouse.
  • Tutorial cards you've already read are moved out of the way, so you can still read them without them bothering you during a run.
  • The explosive red barrels, the bombs from the Purify card, and the rockets from the Dominion card always send you in an upward direction, even if they explode above you.
  • On reaching Gold Rank, a hint sphere will appear in the level drawing the player's attention to a shortcut that should give them the boost they need to reach Ace rank. This can be disabled should the player want to figure things out on their own.
  • Orange wall tiles typically appear near sections requiring rocket jumps to ascend, and cyan tiles tell the player where to shoot their grappling hook.
  • White can take two normal shots before dying, and health drops appear in levels to ensure that taking a couple of glancing hits won't end a run.
  • Vending machines dispense additional Soul Cards. These are typically too slow to help when going for a good time, but they help first-time players avoid getting stuck and the cards are often needed to find a collectable.
• Air-Dashing: Two variants.
  • The Godspeed card is a more traditional air dash, quickly propelling you forward horizontally.
  • The Fireball card is not limited to the horizontal plane, but is slightly slower and affected by gravity. Both variants will destroy all enemies and obstacles in its path.
• Bad Guy Bar: The Neon Bar, a bar ignored by the rest of Heaven where the sinners hang out. Too bad Heaven took all the real booze.
• Beach Episode: One Heavenly Delight reward is being allowed to spend time on the beach, complete with Red and Violet in swimsuits.
• Betty and Veronica: The cheery, fun-loving Violet is head over heels for White, who has eyes for the serene Femme Fatale Red. In a twist on the trope, both girls are shockingly violent, with Violet being outright Cute and Psycho. Subverted when it's revealed that Violet had just been playing White the entire time to get him killed and was actually in love with Green...until Green decided to dispose of her.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Book of Death ending has White finally get his revenge on Green by condemning him to Hell for everything he did to his crew. However, God decides not to write White into the Book of Life with his friends, as He feels that White is not yet ready to ascend. On the more optimistic side, God doesn't condemn White either, so White has the opportunity to rejoin his friends in the next Day of Judgment.
• Broken Aesop: The story makes a fairly large deal of forgiving one’s abuser as a means to let go of hatred, with White being passed over for ascension should he choose to use the Book of Death on Green. However, God seemingly doesn't have a problem writing Violet down in the Book of Life despite her having gone out trying to kill Green for using her, and there are no real indications that she's posthumously forgiven Green. The only justification that could be made for this is that Violet tried to kill Green through traditional secular means, while White in the Book of Death ending took the role meant for God and passed judgment over Green.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: Heaven has lobbies, kiosks, put-upon secretaries, strict regulations, and long waiting times. White remarks on it after the first mission:
  White: Look, I expect this much from the DMV, but I'm not waiting four hours for my stupid mission in HEAVEN.
• Central Theme: Forgiveness plays a major part in the story, especially near the endgame. Rather than simply absolving someone of wrongdoing, forgiveness within the story is more focused on how it can free the person doing the forgiving of their guilt and hatred.
  • Green choosing to stew in his hatred over Blue's treatment of him rather than move on is why his mental state deteriorates.
  • Meanwhile, White hangs on to his guilt for inadvertently leading all of his friends to their deaths because of Green's influence over him, which allows Green to continuously provoke him. White only achieves inner peace and manages to put Green's transgressions behind him in the Book of Life ending where he absolves Green of his sin and grants him ascension, while him giving in to his hatred and condemning Green to Hell in the Book of Death ending results in God considering him not yet ready to ascend.
  • Lastly, Red bringing herself to forgive White for vouching for Green and leading to all of them to their doom was what allowed her to pull White out of the Sea of Glass at the start of the game, overcoming the guilt that kept him from ever actually breaking the surface. Thus, White's entire redemption arc began with an act of forgiveness on Red's part.
• Character Title: Neon White is a game where you play as, well, a character designated as Neon White.
• Chest Monster: Mimics are a type of demon you will encounter. Instead of giving you a helpful card like normal treasure chests when broken, they will shoot out a circle of bullets that instakill any and everything around them. That includes you if you don't dodge fast enough.
• Colorful Theme Naming: All the Neons are named with colors that correspond to the color of their hair and clothes. Neon White has black hair, but he's fully monochrome and wears a white suit.
• Company Cross References: One of Violet's preferred gifts is a Tattletail toy, a nod to the game of the same name, which lead developers Ben Esposito and Geneva Hodgson previously worked on.
• Cool Mask: Enforced by Heaven. Neons are to each wear a special unique mask to identify them. They're also all rigged to explode should they be taken off or if the Neons wearing them fall out of line.
• Deliverance from Damnation: Whichever Neon wins the ten-day competition will receive utter forgiveness from God and a place in the heavenly host. Or so the Believers claim. In reality, any Neon who wins the competition is instead enslaved by the Believers, as was the fate that befell Green.
• Did They or Didn't They?: The epilogue of Red's relationship concludes with the implication that Red and White rekindled their relationship and fades out on them becoming physically intimate in White's bedroom.
• Discard and Draw: Activating a weapon's movement ability will consume it. The gameplay revolves around continuously picking up new weapons to make your way through the level (and shoot demons along the way).
• Double Jump: The Elevate Card grants an extra jump in the air.
• Exploding Barrels: Red barrels blow up and destroy anything in their immediate surrounding when attacked. The explosion doesn't harm you, an instead serves as an elevation boost.
• Explosive Leash: The Neons' masks are rigged to explode whenever the wearer falls out of line or if they're taken off.
• Fate Worse than Death: Mikey swore allegiance to the Believers after so many other angels he viewed as more capable than him died in the battle against them. He regrets that decison as he not only wished to join with his fellow angels in death, he also ended up hating working for the Believers.
• Fictional Counterpart: Red is stated to be a fan of the Henchmen series. White despises how they were constantly plastered over every bit of merchandise.
• Foreshadowing: Violet having affection for Green is foreshadowed numerous times. For example, both of them are the only characters that speak in smallcaps, Violet is seen clutching Green tightly in the Neon group photo, and Violet never explicitly says who her crush really is. While White and the audience assume its him, hindsight makes it clear that it is really Green.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Raz, Gabby and Mikey are all angels, and thus, if anyone is knowledgeable with angelic lore, they're closer to an Eldritch Abomination than a Winged Humanoid. This gets reinforced when the crew draws Mikey, they range from childish doodles to an almost Digimon looking one, while Raz himself draws him accurately.
• The Ghost: Despite being the source of Green's erratic disposition that would lead him to throwing away the lives of his crew, the most Blue gets to an appearance is Green standing over his corpse in a single flashback. The dialogue box covers Blue's body up so quickly that it's quite easy to gloss over him entirely.
• Golden Ending: Collecting all the memories and using the Book of Life on Green in the end finally allows White to put aside his hatred for Green, while Green is left to ponder his former protégé's decision as he fades into the light. God writes White's name down into the Book of Life, allowing White to rejoin his friends. After the credits, a flashback to a party before their fateful final heist is shown, revealing a more affable and even caring side to Green not seen anywhere else.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Dominion card when discarded fires a grappling hook that rapidly pulls you to the attached surface/demon.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Green's downward spiral was a result of his resentment towards how Blue treated him, making Blue this.
• Happy Flashback: The Stinger of the Book of Life ending is this. While most of the other main flashbacks had an undercurrent of tension as the truth behind the core casts' deaths is slowly revealed, the after-credits scene instead shows an instance where the whole team behaved more like a dysfunctional but nonetheless close family. Even Green, who has been shown to be nothing but callous and controlling everywhere else, is more affable here, indicating some truth to Red's suggestion that he was once capable of kindness.
• Hell of a Heaven: White remarks that Heaven is both exactly as he thought it would be, and incredibly disappointing. It turns out to be foreshadowing for the realm's true nature and how it has become warped by the Believers. In reality, where White wakes up in is actually Sheol, a waiting room in Heaven where deceased souls await God's judgment. The Believers, being an entitled bunch, were incensed by this and hijacked the realm, turning it into their own personal paradise.
• Interface Spoiler: Looking at White's Journal shows a list of the characters you can find gift for including outlines of those you haven't met yet. This makes clear that Green is going to have gifts and unlocks despite none of them appearing until late in the game.
  • Averted with the relationship tracks themselves which carry on going after the character dies and only show a short way into the future so you can’t see you won't have any more discussions.
    • Conversely, this is played straight with the specifics of the tracks, particularly in Yellow's relationship. He's the only character in the game who's tracks eventually become a straight shot of Sidequests with occasional Memories. The eventual absence of Dialogue moments suggest that Yellow won't be present to have them, and if you're diligent with your gift collecting, this change begins to manifest not long before his eventual death. At the same point in the story, Red and Violet's tracks continue alternating for much longer, spoiling the fact that they're likely to survive into the endgame.
  • It's also impossible to unlock any sidequests that involve the Book of Life Soul Card until you obtain it in the story.
• Katanas Are Just Better:
  • White's default Soul Card is a katana; Yellow gushes at him about how cool the "freaking anime sword" is (and bemoans how lame their own cards are in comparison).
  The attached note reads: "According to our records, White's ideal weapon is a 'totally sick samurai sword'."
  • The final item at the Heavenly Delight Kiosk is a new katana, which White looks forward to put his hands on. It's not an actual katana, but a keychain, much to White's dismay.
  • Lucky for White, in the Hell Rushes, unlocked after beating the game, the player is given the Miracle Katana, which can be discarded at any point for a full heal and any other card in the game, even the Book of Life.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: When they first meet, Yellow calls White his "Sasuke, the darkness to my light"... and then says he was just messing around.
• Marathon Level: The final regular stage is an extended gauntlet requiring the player to use each different Soul Card while catapaulting themselves through the air with a teleport Soul Card. Getting the collectable extends it even further, requiring you to reach the end of the level normally then ascend a high tower, with a single mistake forcing the player to do the whole level again. Appropriately, the level itself is titled "Marathon".
• Mundane Afterlife: Heaven resembles nothing so much as a kid's funfair whose residents play mini-golf and stuff themselves with junk food all day. It used to be more spiritually significant, but the entitled, childish Believers usurped it and turned it into the "bougie" Paradise they wanted.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In the first mission, Violet pretends that she forgot how to use a gun in order to entice White to... ahem, teach her.
• Puzzle Platformer: Finding the hidden gifts, particularly in later stages, can require some out-of-the-box thinking to get the weapon cards needed to reach them.
• Rank Inflation: Beating a level will net the player a Bronze, Silver, Gold, or an 'Ace' medal that is colored platinum. There exists a further Red medal that the player can achieve. These are based on the personal records of the developer, the times are not shown until the player has unlocked them, and they thankfully are not needed for 100% Completion.
• Rocket Jump: Explosives (either from bombs, rockets or Exploding Barrels) will propel you into the air unharmed. Mastering explosive jumping is required to make your way through several levels. In addition, the Dominion card acquired late in the game is a straight up Rocket Launcher, which lets you play this trope completely straight by bouncing off your own shots everywhere.
• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: The cover art for the first part of the soundtrack, "The Wicked Heart", has Violet aiming a gun to the viewer.
• Shockwave Stomp: The Stomp card quickly propels you to the ground, creating a shockwave that destroy all demons and obstacles on contact.
• Shoot the Bullet: Totally possible, and rewarded with a brief speed boost.
• Shout-Out: Absolutely overflowing with them:
  • White's favorite movie is The Matrix, which he watches with Mikey during one of the Heavenly Delights.
  • When the two sing karaoke, Violet sings Welcome To The Black Parade, while White sings Bullet with Butterfly Wings.
  • Before White heads out to The Old City, Red warns him against it, and White concocts an overly optimistic scenario where he survives. At that point, Red comments how similar the conversation became to a session of Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Several Violet side missions are called "Resident Saw", referencing both the Saw and Resident Evil movie series (more specifically the Laser Hallway featured in the first one).
• Skewed Priorities: As Green goes on his ramapge through heaven, one Neon in Believer's Park says that while he's aware of the gravity of the situation, he's gonna take the chance to try out the Cloud Nine Mini Golf course because of the chaos.
• Undeathly Pallor: All the Neons, former damned souls from Hell, have stark white skin.
• Wham Line:
  • At the end of Chapter 6, Violet reveals to White why Green is so fixated on White.
  Violet: Green was our old boss.
  • This line by Green during the Book of Life's Stinger flashback manages to shed light on another side of himself and seemingly confirms Red's previously baseless claim that he used to be kinder.
  Green (To White): Just make sure to take it easy. We've got a big day ahead of us.

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As above... so below.

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