[DCB] Neon White

8 5月 2024

im fucking cringe

but im………free

The World to Come

There are a number of ways to embrace your cringe or chuuni, but they all fall into two main camps: reveling in the masochistic pleasure of never being understood by your peers or everyone is on the same page.

The former is older and classic: the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games reveal that, through circumstances beyond human comprehension, you have been cursed and blessed with special powers. Demons and other influential beings envy your outsider position and they don't ever see you as someone whose agency is worth respecting. You can only make a pragmatic alliance with the demons you recruit and fuse them into stronger beings to try to survive the odds. But that's okay: You have the power to ultimately decide the fate of the cosmos. The wisdom you've gained on your travels makes you better equipped than any of the ideologues you've fought. In many respects, it evokes a kind of power fantasy that you know what's going on and the others don't. You are the Neo Anderson who has seen everything and can decide the fate of others, regardless of other people's feelings.

The more modern variant involves people not giving a shit because they're all cringe. No one has the right to criticize others for being silly because everyone is wearing belts and keychains and saying badass lines to each other.

The difference, then, is in their approach to self-awareness: the former recognizes the prejudice of being cringe and wants to overcome it while the latter indulges in the fantasy that everyone is bombastic and larger than life.

Guess which camp Neon White falls under.

House of Cards

White wakes up in a heaven populated by demons. He and his motley crew of former assassin friends have been given twelve days to clean up the mess, but only one person will have the privilege of living to see another day.

The game starts with the action and little setting explanation: the player is told to get going and reach the goal. "Movement", the first stage, is simple: there are no demons to kill, so you just have to go fast. Faster times mean better medals, with aces being the best story-related medal you can get. I decided to stay a little longer to get used to the movement and try to grab my first ace.

I learned that skating on the water was faster than walking on the ground. There were also shortcuts I could take that didn't always align with the "natural" path the level design suggested at first glance.

Later, I found Soul Cards, which work like your standard FPS weapons, but they are also stand-ins for the game's unique movement options. The first card I was introduced to is a yellow Elevate card and it shoots like a typical pistol. But its real purpose comes from discarding it: you get a double jump that is slightly higher than your normal jump.

I quickly realized that Neon White was about understanding the level design, deconstructing it, and breaking it.

Aim for the Heavens!

And if you want to do that, you need to become White.

You have to be as swift as him to succeed, and everything in the game is designed to help you embody his coolness. The flashy UI puts you in his headspace: the bottom left of the screen asks a rhetorical question about who deserves a place in heaven while the Soul Cards on the bottom right are large and inescapable to show how much he relies on them for movement.

My partner, who has a better grasp of UI design than I ever will, disparagingly described the screencaps I shared as something like a TikTok graphic design tutorial. It's easy to understand that when we consider aesthetic heavyweights like Cruelty Squad. Neon White's UI feels like it's trying to be ultra-cool and hip.

However, I find its poser-like vibes quite interesting. The game's art direction shamelessly recreates the flair of Suda51's games, vaporwave album covers like the iconic Macintosh Plus, and Gainax and Trigger favorites like FLCL and Kill La Kill to create a surreal, maximalist vision of White traversing through the skies.

The soundtrack made by Machine Girl hammers the point further: the music feels ethereal in "Glass Ocean", but it can also go hard in "The Wicked Heart" . The instability in the soundtrack creates strong contradictions: it's both cool and uncool, serious and chill, relaxed and tense all the same time, which is the perfect description of White.

White is an assassin who has moments of greatness and cringe. Whenever the player aces a mission, he throws out a one-liner about how he didn't break a sweat. But when he talks to Red, an ex-colleague and ex-lover, he's emasculated and told he's a cute babyface. There is no transition between the Cool White and Uncool White because they are all the one and only White.

And this reflects in the gameplay: you have access to a variety of Soul Cards that allow you to move around the stage. You can blast through enemies with the blue rifle card, fire a shotgun across the stage, or stomp with the green SMG card. Enemies are also color-coded according to the colors of the cards they drop. However, it will take some time for players to adjust to the demands of the stage and the game's control scheme. Sometimes I would get stuck on some unfortunate level geometry. Sometimes I would misclick and find myself falling down the stage. And sometimes I would just forget how the stage went.

I would often restart the stage, fully aware of how terrible my attempts were, and knowing that I could do better. I knew I had to practice and remember the level design better if I wanted to get an ace medal. The game doesn't really require you to ace many stages, but it does feel good to hear White's corny lines about how nobody's going to beat his time.

And I would say it's not even that difficult to ace a stage if you try. Each stage has several medals you can get, but the most useful medal you can get is a gold medal. Not only does it increase your rank to clear story obstacles, but it also unlocks a shortcut you can use for your ace attempts. These shortcuts sometimes trivialize the stage, but most of the time they require a bit more tricky execution and let you skip content altogether. They are indicated by level hints, yellow orbs that appear at the beginning of the shortcut and then show the trajectory where you need to land next to make the shortcut work. Most of these level hints are easy to find, but there are a few that require you to explore and internalize the map to discover the optimizations. And even if you take advantage of these shortcuts, it's not like you're home free -- you'll still have to beat your ghost from previous runs and earn the ace medal yourself.

I like this shortcut design philosophy because it teaches you that you can get an ace right away if you're paying attention. Maybe, you don't feel like grinding for a gold medal. Just look around for gaps and create your own route. You might ace the stage on your first run and get White's unique one-liner in return.

But it also makes you feel like you're speedrunning a game. Of course, the actual speedruns for Neon White look nothing like casual play (even if you're aiming for ace times). But since the shortcuts let you skip some sections, the illusion of speedrunning the game feels strong, especially when you're getting better times than your peers.

This is what it means to be White: you're always going back and forth between fumbling through interactions and gameplay to being a master gamer and the coolest guy in the celestial skies. It's a fun dynamic because I felt like I was destroying the game and being destroyed by it. There's always a surprise or two around the corner, so I'm always surprised when I get over it and feel like I'm actually a goddamn genius.

Virtual Paradise

White is not alone in speedrunning through the game. Each time you complete a chapter, you will be taken to a hub map where you can interact with the inhabitants of Heaven and the Neons who are in the same rat race as White. Something I didn't realize while playing the game is that each chapter updates the hub with new voiced dialog from characters and NPCs, so there's a lot of effort into making Heaven feel alive.

There is a decent cast of main characters with some very good voice actors behind them: Red likes to toy with White's feelings for her, Violet is a young girl who loves explosives and guro, Yellow is a bro who will give up his left nut for White, and Green is the big baddie who taunts White every time they cross paths. The side characters like Mikey aren't too bad either.

That said, I recognize I'm in the minority. I've read some reviews and even comments from people I talk to who can't stand the dialog by Aavee Bee and Ryann Shannon. Too anime, too cringe, etc.

But I think their writing slaps. It taps into the pulse of how people today talk, kayfabe, and argue in internet communities. I wonder if the criticism boils down to the dialogue being too "real": the contemporary slang, the things they talk about, and the attitudes they have don't mesh well with what people generally want from escapist fiction. When White talks about how "you can never be a true gamer if you only ever play on easy mode" or Red reflects on how "when you're a broke teen, all that sustains you is window shopping", it feels less like they're characters and more like the people I talk to on Discord and elsewhere.

You're not just vibing with your pals. The more White interacts with his former accomplices, the more memories he will regain. The game adopts the structure of modern Persona's social links except that you must build their relationship through gifts and side missions.

Gifts appear in each level after you complete the stage once. They are usually hidden in secret locations and require you to save Soul Cards to get them. Initially, I found them interesting because they show off the player physics and parts of the level not used for the main game.

However, I found them grating as the game progressed. Levels get bigger, and some of these gifts are sometimes placed at the end; a good chunk also involves saving cards and going back to the location of the gift to boost yourself up to get it. I probably approached this mechanic the wrong way because I ended up reading guides on how to get these gifts, but I also felt like I wouldn't have done it if it wasn't necessary for a better appreciation of the story.

On the other hand, I found the side missions to be fun. These levels, especially Violet's, reflect the psyche of the characters and have different gimmicks that are not present in the main game. They are challenging and will result in many frustrating but interesting game overs. I enjoyed these levels so much that I thought it was a shame that there was no reason to revisit them except to have a better optimized time. Hell, I personally consider them to be the best levels in all of Neon White.

The reward for gifting White's friends and completing their levels is a tantalizing piece of backstory. We learn how White hung out with his friends, where his beef with Green came from, and how he felt guilty about his life of killing people. I found this to be deeply emotional because the more I roleplayed as White, the more I wanted to know how White felt about things. These memories were profound and gave me new insights into what these characters have and lack.

This mechanic also made me appreciate what the game prioritizes in its story. No one is going to write home about how original their take on Heaven is, even if there are some fun little twists in their worldbuilding. The game knows that its charm lies in how White relates to other characters in his goofy but loving way. He wants to do good, but he feels he can't. White wants to atone and love his friends once more. The game has nothing new to say about redemption, but it doesn't have to: what we see of White is enough, and I really like it.

The Wicked Heart

I therefore believe Neon White is at its best when it knows when to fold and call it a day. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case as the game sometimes feels too long.

Using ace times as a metric, many missions in the game hover around 20 to 40 seconds. Anything longer feels slow and muddy -- and there are some few notable missions, especially the boss fights, that take much longer.

The idea behind the boss fights is solid: you finally get a chance to take down Green, and you have to go through scripted sequences to get closer to him. The tricks you have to perform are visually impressive and make you feel like you're in a battle shounen anime fight because you're going around a large map.

However, these missions take minutes: the most egregious mission on the PC version has an ace time requirement of just under four minutes -- you could complete several missions in Neon White in that time!

Not only does it take forever to get a successful attempt, but there's a lot of dead air in these scripted sequences. Your first few playthroughs (without speedkill tricks) will be quite boring as you try to understand what the game wants you to do and slowly make your way to triggering the next sequence.

The game also feels like it's starting to lose its ideas once you finish the first set of levels with the Dominion Soul Card. The tricks were still fun to execute, but there were no new challenges to take on. It felt strange to see levels starting to take on the appearance of chores.

I found myself rather exhausted by the time I reached the final set of levels. These also present a unique set of problems, but suffice it to say that I was more than happy to get bronzes and stop playing the game before I started disliking it even more.

Not Bad for a Dead Guy

Still, I love Neon White. It's a charming and funny game that makes you feel skilled, and the story got to me at the very end. I enjoyed grinding for aces when I was still motivated, and I was proud that I had 96% overall game completion.

Finishing the game felt like an accomplishment, not only because I did so much, but also because I felt like I helped White atone for his sins. I've seen what White is capable of, both in gameplay and writing, so it's just rewarding to see him blossom into someone who can be redeemed.

And I still fondly remember White and his ex-colleagues as I write this article. They feel like my oomfies from another planet. They allowed me to be cringe and therefore allowed me to be free. I could, for a few hours a day, enjoy the Internet banter in a harsh world different from my planet and pretend to be a badass speedrunner.

It was an unfamiliar, liberating experience. I didn't know I could be so cool and cringe at the same time. Perhaps, that's the nature of all forms of authenticity: there's a little bit of admiration and there's a little bit of disgust. Everyone in the game is ultimately cool and cringe at the same time and that's why I find them so memorable.

Neon White connected with me as a person who thinks about games and subcultures. It shows that being larger than life is all about not giving a shit about how other people think you're cringe or/and cool.

And that's the attitude I have when I write my own articles about subculture media: what's the point of worrying when there's so much cool and cringe stuff out there to play?

The game is available on Steam and many other PC storefronts like Humble Store, which is where I got it. It is also available on modern consoles. This game was recommended by Redylo as part of the [#jp_media community backlog](../posts/2024-04-10-The Discord Community Backlog.html).