It’s rare that a game makes me feel as conflicted as Neon White does.

On one hand, it’s a slick little indie speed-shooter that feels instantly readable: point, shoot, jump, go fast, retry, go faster. On the other, it’s a time-shaving obsession machine with enough depth to make you stare at a route and think, “If I burn this card here, I can save 0.382 seconds… but then I’m short a dash later…” It’s shallow in the best way—pick-up-and-play simple—and deep in the worst way—one more run until your eyes dry out.

And then there’s the story and dialogue, which crash into this otherwise immaculate flow like a shopping cart with one broken wheel.

Neon White is a contradiction you can’t quite explain to someone who hasn’t played it. So let’s Fireball right in.

Who Deserves to Get Into Heaven?

You play as the titular White, yoinked up to the pearly gates with zero memory of who you were or what you did on Earth. You wake up masked—marked as a Neon. Thus, you are Neon White: a name that sounds like a discontinued energy drink and a brand of drywall.

As you stumble through this weird afterlife bureaucracy, you meet the other Neons—Red, Yellow, Violet, and later Green—each with a color-coded personality and a concerning amount of familiarity with you. You don’t remember them. They definitely remember you. And they will not let you forget that you forgot.

The rules are simple, in the way a divine ultimatum is “simple.” The beings running Heaven’s front desk—Believers—tell you the Neons are the worst of the worst, and the only way to earn a spot in heaven is to work as an exterminator. Demons have infested this shining, minimalist paradise, and you’ve got ten days to clean house. Kill enough. Impress God. Get in.

Oh, and your mask has a fun secondary function: step out of line and your head goes pop. Neon Green, meanwhile, wears a sweet green halo—because Heaven loves nothing more than a visible scoreboard. Don’t think about it too much. Don’t look into it. Just accept that this is how the afterlife works.

Conceptually, it’s a solid hook. The problem is the delivery.

I’m going to be honest: the dialogue in Neon White is some of the roughest I’ve personally heard. It has that aggressively anime-inspired cadence where every exchange feels like a performance of a performance of human interaction. I fully understand there’s an audience for this brand of off-putting, tsundere/yandere/weeby melodrama. And I respect Angel Matrix for committing to the bit so completely. They never flinch. They never apologize. They never step back and go, “Wait, would a person say this out loud?”

But for me, it got to the point where I started skipping scenes—not because I don’t care about the story, but because I could physically feel my face trying to fold in on itself from cringe. Thankfully, the game lets you skip. That’s not a footnote feature here—that’s accessibility.

The soundtrack, though? Absolutely nails it.

Machine Girl brings the perfect kind of frantic momentum: fast, sharp, and propulsive without being so overbearing that it wrecks your focus. It slides into the game’s vibe like it was forged in the same neon furnace. Even divorced from the game, it’s a strong album. In the game, it’s rocket fuel.

Not Bad for a Dead Guy

Each “day” is split into several bite-sized levels, with the number of stages shifting depending on where the plot wants to drag you next. The structure is simple: pick a level, run it, get a time, chase a better time, repeat until your brain starts speaking in stopwatch.

The first thing that hits you when you drop into a level is the look. Everything is wickedly bright—white buildings stacked against bright blue water, like someone took early-2000s color saturation and glued it to minimalist geometry. It’s lower-poly than a lot of modern games, sure, but it’s also clean, readable, and occasionally gorgeous in that “this would make an excellent wallpaper” kind of way.

And then you move.

The baseline loop is easy to grasp: blast demons, zip through spaces, hit the exit gate. White starts with a sword, and over time you collect an arsenal of weapons… but Neon White isn’t really about the guns as guns. It’s about the guns as movement decisions.

Weapons are picked up as colored Soul Cards: Yellow is a handgun, Red is a shotgun, Purple is an assault rifle, and so on. Each card gives you limited ammo, but the real magic is in the discard system.

Discarding a card triggers a special movement ability tied to that weapon: double jumps, dashes, fireball bursts that smash through walls, zipline-style movement that turns you into a human projectile. You can hold two gun types and stack multiple copies of the same card, which means every level becomes a tiny deck-management puzzle stapled to a speedrun route.

Because here’s the trick: discarding is powerful, but it costs you the card. So the game constantly asks you to make tiny, deliciously painful decisions:

• Burn a card now to gain verticality… or keep it for the dash you’ll need later?
  
• Take the safe route… or gamble on a line that saves time but punishes mistakes?
  
• Use the discard to shave off fractions of a second… or conserve for the final stretch?
  

This is where Neon White goes from “fun shooter” to “oh no, I’m optimizing.”

You can feel your brain degrade in real time. Your thoughtful, strategic, adult mind gets shoved into the passenger seat while your reptile hindbrain grabs the wheel and starts chanting:

Bad run. Try again. Faster.

The medal system feeds that loop beautifully. You’re graded on time: bronze, silver, gold, Ace, and Dev. Better medals unlock more level insight—shortcuts, gifts, and secrets that push you to rerun levels with fresh information, which pushes you to rerun levels even harder, which pushes you to rerun levels because the number could be smaller, which—

You get it.

For my run, I landed gold across the board with a handful of Ace medals. I didn’t chase Dev times because I’m not a psychopath. Also, I’m bad. I did grab all the gifts, though, because the game dangles that “good ending” carrot and I am, fundamentally, a creature who wants the shiny completion checkbox.

Replayability is baked into every seam. Levels are short, restarts are instant, and even when you screw up, the friction is low enough that you rarely feel punished. It’s the ideal “one more attempt” game.

There is one late-game level that runs over two minutes, and I almost hit a wall there—mostly because two minutes in Neon White feels like a marathon. When the whole game trains you to think in bursts, long stages can feel like the game suddenly asking you to hold your breath underwater. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it was the one time I felt the design briefly drift away from its biggest strength: quick iteration.

Heaven is a place on Earth

Despite my issues with the writing, Neon White is doing something special mechanically—something clean, addictive, and immediately satisfying. It’s a game that welcomes you in with simplicity and then slowly reveals the depth hiding under its neon paint. It’s a speedrunning playground without requiring you to be a speedrunner. It makes you want to improve, and it gives you the tools to do it without making you feel like you’re studying for an exam.

The level design is tight. The movement toolkit keeps expanding just as your brain gets comfortable. The soundtrack keeps your pulse up. The aesthetic stays crisp and readable even at full sprint. And most importantly, the game respects your time: attempt, fail, restart, learn, improve. That loop is pure.

The story? The vibe? The dialogue? For me, that’s the limp noodle next to the steak. But the steak is so good—and the game is so merciful about letting you skip the noodle—that it doesn’t ruin the meal.

That’s why Neon White earns a WOTS Top Shelf Game Award.

Because when it’s in motion—when you’re flying through a level, discarding cards like a gremlin, landing a perfect route, and watching your time drop by a ridiculous sliver—it becomes one of the most fresh, dynamic, “just one more run” experiences I’ve played in a long time.

And then a character opens their mouth, and you remember: even Heaven has problems.