You wouldn’t believe this from reading its reviews on Steam, but Neon White is squarely a T-rated game. Seriously, people, keep it in your pants!
Released last week for Switch and PC, Neon White is a first-person puzzle-platformer-shooter-speedrunning-dating-sim with card-collecting elements. (Yes, it’s a lot.) You play as White, an assassin, or “Neon,” temporarily brought up from hell to purge heaven of a demon infestation who suffers from a plot-convenient bout of amnesia. Between bite-sized missions, you chat and hang out with a crop of fellow Neons, all of whom were acquainted with White during his pre-death life.
It’s a colourful cast of characters: There’s the demure Red, who regularly flirts with White and hints at a previous relationship between the two. Violet is an unabashed sadist in a low-cut crop top. Yellow is a laid-back bro who loves beer and crushes at billiards. But they’re all overshadowed by Green, shredded and shirtless and supposedly tied to White on an inextricable level.
Neon White plays out like a week of band camp, except with more animal-shaped masks.
There is, to say the (very, very) least, a ton of suggestive subtext abound, alongside a smattering of domtext. This seems to have ushered in a wave of praise. Of the roughly 1,400 reviews on Steam, 98 per cent are positive — and plenty of them appear to profess some degree of attraction, either performative or genuine, to the game’s cast of characters. (After some Googling, I learned some words I wish I could unlearn.)
But folks have a lot of positive stuff to say about Neon White itself. Some say the platforming is a blast, or the card system is unique AF. Multiple fans cracked the same joke about receiving a “free” game alongside your “new Machine Girl album.” (Machine Girl, an offbeat but popular Brooklyn-based electronic act, did the music for Neon White. I can confirm: The OST is awesome.) Even the handful of negative reviews tend to couch their downward-facing thumbs in praise for the game, whether it’s an acknowledgement of how tight the core gameplay is or how gorgeous the visuals are.
Here’s Neon White, as told by the equal parts surprisingly and unsurprisingly sordid realm of Steam reviews.
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