Neon White is a bizarre, unique, and overall amazing game. It’s a speed-run time-trial movement-focused first-person-shooter puzzle-game that’s also a turbo-cringe anime visual novel about the afterlife.

Let me start with the good. The actual game part is spectacular. As stated: it’s a movement-focused FPS. Your goal in every level – most of which are bite-sized, sub 60s – is to get from the spawn point to the finish line, kill all the demons along the way, and do so as fast as possible. Completing a run shows you the target times for bronze/silver/gold/ace medals. Completing higher medals unlock hints, time-trial ghosts, and collectables.

Instead of getting “normal” guns and ammo, guns are represented as big cartoony “cards” you pick up in world. Each card pickup instantaneously hands you that gun and confers a set amount of ammo, and you can only hold two types of cards at a time, and 3 cards per type. Cards can be used two ways: shoot to consume ammo, or ‘discard’ to use an alternative ability, usually some kind of movement tech. Like the card “Elevate” is a basic pistol or you can discard it to lose your ammo but get a single charge of a double jump. The card “Purify” is an automatic rifle, but you can discard to shoot a sticky bomb which you can use as a bomb, or to rocket jump, or both since there’s no self-damage.

For a game about movement, your intrinsic movement kit is pretty limited. You run at a fixed speed, you’ve got a big floaty jump, and you get a speed boost if you’re running through a shallow channel of water (which are all over the place). All other movement tech is limited to what cards you pick up on your way, and you’re forced to strategically choose between using a gun as a gun or as movement. The game doesn’t play like any kind of normal FPS, it really plays more like a first-person-shooter-shaped puzzle game. You’re almost always moving as fast as possible, burning abilities to zip around the level, plow through enemies, blast through walls, rocket jump off walls, blasting demons… and then it tells you “nah man you need to find a way to shave 5.73 seconds off that time”. So you go back to the start and try to figure out how to cut a corner or deviate from the “obvious” path in a way that still lets you get all the demons.

But then there’s the other part. The story part of the game is told through the most cliche cringe anime visual novel imaginable. It oozes industrial levels of highly-enriched cringe typically reserved for Anime Club Skits or AO-rated trash on Steam. It’s a terminally unoriginal story of a gang of assassins with color-coded names who were all killed in heist-gone-wrong. Now they’re in heaven and have ten days until they’re judged! Oh no! Will the Bleach OC kill enough demons! Will he confess to his waifu or will the purple-haired yandere girl murder him first?!?! It’s unbelievably bad. It is exactly as cringe and trite as the rest of the game is spectacular and original.

But good news: Any time you’re not zoopin around at the speed of sound you can smash the fast-forward button and miss nothing of consequence. I highly recommend doing this. Just like I highly recommend this game. There’s nothing like it.