Episode 147 - Ghosts in Football - Neon White

Not bad for a dead podcast, huh? Welcome back to the podcast!
Today, we’re going to be talking about Neon White, a first person
platformer with a little bit of shooting in it. First person
platformers aren’t exactly rare, per se, but they’re less common
than the majority of other types of games in the genre, and so it’s
worth considering the intentionality of its choice when a game
comes out that uses the perspective. Neon White is maybe one of the
best uses of the genre that I’ve ever seen. Because of its focus on
getting fast times on each stage, the first person perspective
gives a real sense of speed that you can actually feel, making you
physically lean around when you play the game because of the focus
it requires. It offers precision in shooting, an element of the
game that feels less like eliminating threats and more like doing
tricks in a Tony Hawk game; quickly spinning around to pick off
some enemies after taking a shortcut or strategically shooting
something coming up in the distance to save a weapon card for use
later. The whole game gives a sense of continuing improvement and
trains you to see the lines each level has and then to look away
from them to find a faster route. The game has a less-than-novel,
but still very cool narrative which feels like Battle Royale but
set in Heaven, and characters that are easy to like despite falling
into certain tropes and archetypes. It’s serviceable, and serves as
downtime between the frantic action of the main missions. Neon
White is a very rad game that does cool stuff in an awesome way.
We’re going to be talking about the functionality of the gun/soul
card discard system and how it adds to the decision making in
gameplay, motivation to do better and whether it comes from the
game or from within yourself, and we do some classic shipping of
characters. Thank you for listening today! Neon White was one of
those games that seems like it’s going to be intimidating, but then
ends up being surprisingly accessible. If you got through the game,
did you feel like it could have been harder and offered a more
robust challenge, or was what’s there more than enough to keep you
entertained? Did you try to push your scores as low as they could
go? Let us know over in the Discord, or in the comments below! Next
time, we’re entering into Mystery May, but not like the old Mystery
May where we did mystery games. Now, we’re taking a bunch of games
that have been on our various lists of games to play for years that
we never seem to get around to and putting them on a table and
letting dice decide our episode. The first one selected for this
month is Braid, the classic puzzle platformer, so we hope you’ll
join us for that.