Like Hades, but in heaven and you kill demons

What happens when your first game has found fame thanks to its vibes and seriousness? Where do you go from there? What do you do after? Why, you are making a quick play on killing demons in the afterlife, of course. Obviously.

When you think about Donut County, a puzzle game that presents you as a bottomless hole, a series of light descriptors probably come to mind: charming. Cute. Serious. Adorable. Among a crop of capital-W Wholesome games that populated the 2010s, Donut County was arguably one of the healthiest (and arguably the most hole-some). But the follow-up of developer Ben Esposito, Neon white, is about as far from Donut Countycontagious healthiness as possible.

“You know the meme that is [of] Princess Daisy talks to Princess Peach and she says, “Are you tired of being nice?” ”Said Esposito. Kotaku on a Zoom call the other week. “It was kind of my moment.”

Neon white, which is slated for a Switch and PC release this winter, initially appeared during a Nintendo Direct earlier this year, how much everyone in Kotaku‘s Slack did “Oooh” and “Ahhh” and “… hmm wait wtf is that … is it?” Also: “What’s the name?”

After a screening in a Annapurna interactive showcase (Neon whiteeditor of) last month, we now know that Neon white is a first person shooter. And a role play. And a platform game with a bunch of parkour elements. And a sandbox designed for speedrunning feats. And a visual novel, in a way. It’s also a bit of a dating simulation. Oh, and there’s good faith in deckbuilding, with the card-collecting mechanic (which we’ll get to in a second).

Your goal, like most first person shooter games, is to kill everything in your path and get to the end of the level. Each level lasts from 10 seconds to two minutes, depending on Esposito, depending on your level.

The main gadget in play is a mechanic called “Soul Cards”. Each card has both a weapon and a traverse ability. Holding the card lets you use the weapon pictured, while throwing it lets you use the ability. Let’s say you have a handgun card with the “Elevate” ability. By throwing it, you can perform a double jump. Or maybe there’s an SMG that lets you do a Yoshi-style ground pound. Or maybe a bolt action rifle that gives you a burst of speed.

So, of course, it’s not quite deckbuilding in the sense of, say, Gent or Kill the arrow, but yes, the cards are very much at stake here. See it in action:

Neon white is, in short, a whole bunch of things going on at once, a Skip’s Scramble of Cool Shit® of the last decades of gaming. But there’s one ubiquitous descriptor that’s decidedly not part of the recipe for this game: a roguelike.

You would be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that Neon white is yet another roguelike. After all, the game shares a lot of DNA with another indie darling, a smash hit story called Underworld. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?) Both take place in the afterlife. Both feature striking character designs. Both are imbued with sensual undertones. Both put the player in death or death situations rooted in fast-paced gameplay. Both are created by independent developers with dedicated fan bases. There are undeniable similarities, yes, but Neon white is not a roguelike.

“The game really found its personality once I started removing the randomness and removing the deckbuilding and keeping it really, really simple and straightforward,” Esposito said. “It’s a hundred hand-crafted levels that are meant to be replayed a bunch of times.”

In Neon white, you play as a so-called Neon – someone, usually with a violent past, who wakes up in Heaven. Each is named after a color and has a corresponding color mask. Neons have a chance to enter a demon slaughter competition. Whoever wins can stay in Heaven for good. You play as White, hence the name of the game.

“The energy that powers this game is the energy of the teens,” Esposito said. “This is what I would have thought was the coolest thing ever as a teenager, inspired by, like, the Any2K era-anime and The matrix and all that stuff.

It’s a cool concept, but born from a really cool sounding phrase that came out of nowhere. As Esposito said Kotaku, the name of the game is not a chicken or egg situation. The egg very clearly came first.

“One day, [my wife Geneva] turned to me … ten minutes after we woke up and she just said, ‘Neon white. ‘ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ She’s like, ‘Neon white. That would be a really cool name for a game. ‘ She was right.”