Running and Gunning thru Heaven with Neon White

Before I get into the article proper, I’d like to repeat my previous housekeeping announcement: Blogger’s email update feature has broken, so I took the opportunity to start a new mailing list for Out of Left Field! This will probably be the single best way to follow updates here; my plan is to only send out something when I have a new article to post. Hopefully, I’ll get to test it out again soon, as I have both an End-of-the-Year Playlist and another Indie Game article in the works. You can sign up in the box below or in the bar at the top (and if you’d like similar updates for my baseball articles, go check out Hot Corner Harbor for that list!

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Ever since I finished this game a few months ago, I’ve been working on this article in fits and starts, alternating between bursts of inspiration where I had so many ideas I wanted to discuss and roadblocks both from writer's block and just personal life scheduling. After a while, I wasn’t even sure if it was worth finishing this anymore, as so many other writers found ways to talk it up. But in the end, I think there are just so many good things in this game that get overshadowed, since so much of it is fantastic, and now seemed like as good a time as any to finish it off, since it’s almost certainly my Game of the Year!

There aren’t many games that I’ve been looking forward to over the last few years more than Neon White. Way back in 2019, I played a fun little puzzle-and-comedy game called Donut County; if you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you might even remember me mentioning it back then in my Year-End Roundup. If not, it was a fun little game with a cute, cartoon-y art style about moving a hole around, and watching as it grew with each object that fell in. There’s more to it than that on the story side (it was pretty funny, as you might guess from the silly premise), but gameplay-wise, it was mostly just that rewarding little loop: move hole, swallow objects, get bigger, swallow bigger things, repeat until everything in the level is gone.

I loved the experience, and as I do when I like an indie game, I decided to follow the game’s developer, Ben Esposito. Sometime after doing so, he announced his follow-up project: a stylish-as-hell, fast-paced first person shooter about a colorful cast of assassins being allowed into Heaven as part of a demon-exterminating competition, developed by his new studio Angel Matrix. A bit of a shift in styles maybe (to put it mildly), but I had only good experiences so far, and it looked extremely up-my-alley, so I was all aboard the hype train from that point.

And holy shit, did Neon White live up to my hopes and dreams.



For those who need a little bit more of a description, Neon White is one part First Person Shooter, and one part fast-paced 3D Parkour Platformer; you try to complete every level as fast as you can, while shooting every single demon along the way. The main gameplay mechanic is an ingenious combination of the two sides: the guns in-game are represented by magical cards that you pick up as you find them in the level, sometimes dropped by defeated enemies, sometimes just laying about.

Each one works like a standard gun, with a set amount of ammo… but you can also choose to “discard” the weapon. That loses you a demon-slaying option, but gives you some sort of bonus movement in compensation, depending on what type of gun you’re throwing out. So, to provide a basic example, if you can take out all of the demons with five of the six bullets in a pistol, you can discard what remains of it for an extra jump, which you can then use to find shortcuts and improve on your level times.



From there, the game builds up its library of tools and obstacles, which become easy to learn and master over the course of a playthrough. You immediately pick up what each type of gun each card is, how much damage it does, how it fires, and what special movement it grants you. And you get a stable of demons to go with it, learning how they’ll attack you, how much damage they take, and the best way to dispatch them and move forward.

New Out of Left Field Mailing List!

I have a new post over at Hot Corner Harbor about this that goes more in-depth on this, and go check that out if you want more information, but in short: Blogger is no longer maintaining their site’s email service, which sent automated emails every time a new post went up on one of their sites. That service has finally broken and is no longer sending out new posts, so I went ahead and started a new mailing list over at ConvertKit.

I’ll probably be including sign-ups for this new list after posts or something, at least for a little while as it starts up. But as I said on the HCH post: for anyone concerned, I have no intention to make it paid or anything; this is just a replacement for the free Blogger email service.

My posting schedule here is fairly erratic, since this is just something I do on the side when I have an idea and time to write, so updates like this are probably the best way to see new things when I post them. And that’s especially so lately, since social media is looking rather precarious on the whole these days (not that my social media presence was anything major to begin with). So if anyone would like to join the new version of the Out of Left Field mailing list and get these regular updates use either the form below or the top bar of the site.

New Email List, since Blogger broke the last one!

The old subscription service doesn't seem to be working anymore, so if you'd like to receive emails when a new Out of Left Field post goes up, sign up here!

We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

Built with ConvertKit

And if you didn’t check out the Hot Corner Harbor post but would like my baseball posts sent to you as well, use the form below (they’ll be separate lists, so if you want everything, sign up for both!):

New Email List, since Blogger broke the last one!

The old subscription service doesn't seem to be working anymore, so if you'd like to receive emails when a new Hot Corner Harbor post goes up, sign up here!

We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

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Thank you for indulging this momentary programming notice; hopefully, I’ll have another longer video game article and my normal year-end playlist in the coming weeks (and I’ll notify the list when either goes out!).

Summer 2022 Playlist Update: YouTube Playlist Now Available!

I have a short update on last week’s Summer Playlist post. For those who don’t use Spotify, I now have a YouTube playlist version available!





Just like with the Spotify playlist, there were a few songs that I could find official versions of (and I’d like to stick to those when possible, both to help those artists when possible and to minimize the chance of videos being taken down and affecting the overall list). 147 out of 153 songs on my list had something available. For the other six:

-Polite Fiction: “Arrow” and “Suzerainty” have SoundCloud uploads by the artist. The newer song, “Drive”, has an official upload though.

-Witch Cafe: The same situation as the last time. “Pumpkin Prince” and “Purikura” are on SoundCloud, although “Cauldron Bay” is still only on the artist’s Bandcamp page, as far as I can tell.

-gloss: “Secondhand Beauty Queen” has been uploaded to the band’s YouTube page, however nothing else from that EP (including “Daydreamin’”, which made my playlist) has been. I believe their Bandcamp page is still the only place that has any of those songs?

I’m not going to re-post the full text of last time, since it got a little long; if you want to read any of my thoughts while you listen, go check out the original article!

A Pair of Petite Platformer Recs: Transiruby and Flynn: Son of Crimson

I have an idea for another fairly-large article in the works. However, the writing on it has been going slowly (in addition to some real-life delays), and I wanted to do something in the meantime. It’s been a while since I did my last round-up of smaller recommendations (my two-parter on 3D Platformers way back in November and December… wow, it does not feel like those were that long ago…), so why not another one of those?

Once again, I’m looking at platformers, but today we will be remaining firmly in the realm of two dimensions and red-themed names, with Metroidvania title Transiruby and kinda-sorta-Metroidvania-like Flynn: Son of Crimson.



Transiruby (SKIPMORE)

I’ve said in the past that the Nintendo Switch is a great platform for indie games, but this was even more true early in the console’s life. It was much easier for a small but well-made game to stand out in the eShop back when there just wasn’t as much on the console. One of the big beneficiaries of this was Kamiko (which you may recognize from waaaay back in my 2017 year-end round-up), a title by solo Japanese developer SKIPMORE that was released about a month and a half after the console launched. I had heard basically nothing about it when I saw it while browsing the eShop for new games to try. There weren't a ton of bigger games overshadowing it yet, it wasn’t expensive, and it looked solid, so I gave it a shot and enjoyed myself.

I hadn’t thought much about it lately, until I was browsing upcoming games and saw Transiruby. Once again, it looked like a cute little 8-bit Metroidvania. Of course, given the current crowd of the eShop, that wasn’t enough to just give it a try on a whim; so I looked into it a little more, at which point I went “Oh shoot, this is the Kamiko guy!”, which was enough to convince me (although for those who don’t have that past experience, there is also a Steam demo you can give a whirl to see if it’s your thing).

Music Monday: Summer 2022 Playlist

It is once again that time of year, the point late in the summer where I decide “yeah, that’s a good enough cut-off” and build a loosely-defined playlist of what I’ve been listening to lately. There’s a lot to cover in this year’s version; I feel like I spent a lot of time browsing new music the past few months, and I had a lot of thoughts to write out about some of it, so let’s dive right into things.

(As a note: not every song I included here is on Spotify. The iZme songs can be found here, here, and here. Meanwhile, two of the Witch Café songs can be found here and here; however, I think “Cauldron Bay” may only be publicly posted on the artist’s Bandcamp page?).

9/21 Update: There's now also a YouTube Playlist version, for those who would prefer that:

It's still missing the Witch Café songs, as well as one of the gloss songs and two Polite Fiction songs (although those can be found here and here).

Let’s start with the big guns: my pick for Album of the Summer is The Kick, by Foxes. I listened to her debut album Glorious back in 2014, and it was fine. I didn’t revisit it a ton, so there’s a lot of it that kind of faded from my memory, but there were definitely stand-out parts, like the dramatic timpani rolls and stuttered vocals of “Youth” and the layered, Florence + the Machine-like vocals on the chorus of “Holding onto Heaven”. But I ended up missing out on her 2016 follow-up, and probably would have missed out on The Kick had my brother not sent it to me.

I kind of really regret not checking out All I Need, though, because I really did not see her swing into Carly Rae Jepsen-style dance-y synthpop on The Kick coming, let alone her skill at the style. This really is exactly what I want out of a summer album, just non-stop sing-along choruses and sparkling synth hooks for days.

Every one of these could be a standout single on a normal album, and it makes the 40-minute album breeze along. I could run on a loop without getting tired of it (and I suppose I have, to some extent), and I could pick any combination of three songs for it (my unofficial limit on a single album’s representation for these lists) and not feel bad (although it was difficult to ignore the pulsing excitement of opener “Sister Ray” or the absolutely cathartic drop in the bridge of “Potential”). With Carly pushing her next album into October, I am so glad this was here to pick up the slack as my soundtrack of the summer. And in the meantime, I definitely need to go back in her discography and see what I missed.

 

Nobody Saves the World Is Another Notch in Drinkbox Studios' Belt

I’ve wanted to write something about Drinkbox Studios for a bit now. I played their Guacamelee and Guacamelee 2 back-to-back a few years ago, and genuinely enjoyed both of them quite a bit! But I never really got a handle on what I wanted to say about them.

They were both good games, solid Metroidvanias with well-designed maps and strong beat-em-up mechanics for combat. Maybe they weren’t the best entries in either genre, and there wasn’t really anything revolutionary about anything they did with either system. But they did genuinely do two things really well, which is no small task! I considered making another Genre Mash-up article, but never quite gathered enough other material, so I settled for praising them in my year-end review instead.

Maybe I couldn’t think of what to write then, but I knew I wanted to check out whatever they did next. Which happened to be this year’s new release, Nobody Saves the World, their first title since Guacamelee 2 four years ago. Nobody is a Top Down A-A game, with the notable new mechanic being that the titular Nobody is a shapeshifter who can jump between over a dozen forms. Each of those comes with its own handful of abilities to learn, and about a third of the way through the game, you get the ability to mix and match them across forms.

Haven: Love on the Run Beyond the Stars

There are a lot of indie games that I’ve been meaning to try and just putting on the backburner; there are just so many titles out there nowadays, and stuff will slip through the cracks, but I do make an effort to circle back around to things on occasion. Such was the case with The Game Bakers’ late 2020 release Haven; I had been curious about their previous game (2016’s Furi, a boss rush game) before deciding it wasn’t for me, and after seeing a lot of praise for Haven, decided it sounded more up my alley.

But I sort of forgot about it after that, until a few weeks ago when I was itching for something new to try, and it popped up in my feed thanks to a recent update. That seemed like as good an onboarding point as any, so I gave it a shot. And after that, I was so enthralled that I basically ended up shotgunning the game in under a week.



Haven is also a weird game, because it feels simultaneously very difficult and very easy to describe. On the one hand, at its core, it’s one of the oldest story archetypes in existence: that of the star-crossed lovers, just set in a far-off sci-fi world. Yu and Kay are the main pair here, young adults from some sort of interplanetary empire known as The Apiary, fleeing their arranged marriages to live together. The game opens with them having recently settled on Source, a far-off shattered world hopefully outside of The Apirary’s purview, following a daring escape from home.

While deciding what to do next, their new home, an RV-esque spaceship Yu fixed up called the Nest, sustains heavy damage from an earthquake, stranding them in place. And so begins the game proper; you guide Yu and Kay around the fragments of Source, searching for replacement parts, foraging for food, fending off wildlife, and dodging The Apiary’s search efforts. There’s constantly stuff to do to keep this loving couple up and functioning, and it gives the game’s story an almost episodic, cliffhanger-heavy approach that is well-executed and addicting.