Neon White

Neon White features a group known as Neons, sinners taken from Hell in an annual competition to clean up demons in Heaven for a chance to stay there. Neons are required to wear masks that explode if they disobey orders, remove the masks, or break the rules given to them. Each of the hundred Neons in the competition contend against each other for the position of top Neon. The player takes the role of the titular Neon White, an assassin who is competing for the first time. White receives daily missions from the angel Mikey, and meets up with old crewmates of his, all while dealing with amnesia that prevents him from recalling his past life.

The game is composed of several missions, each made up of multiple levels. To complete a level, the player must defeat all the demons present and reach a crystal-like goal, which additionally grants the player experience "Insight" which can unlock the ability to see alternate routes and hidden items in levels. The player traverses the level by running and jumping, collecting Soul Cards lying about in the open or obtained from defeating demons. Soul Cards can be used as weapons with each card having a standard firing mode and an alternate special ability that is activated by discarding it.

The amnesiac Neon White awakens in Heaven alongside other sinners who have been chosen from Hell. They are informed by the Believers, a group of beings who claim to speak for God, that they are "Neons" whom God has judged "most unfavorably". Their only chance at salvation is through the Ten Days of Judgement competition, held annually to cull the demons infesting Heaven. The Neon who can kill the most demons by the competition's end will receive a mechanical halo that will allow them to stay in Heaven for a year.

White and the other Neons are given weapons and masks that if removed, will explode. The Believers can also detonate the masks to execute any Neon who steps out of line. As the competition begins, White meets fellow Neons Yellow, Violet, and Red, all of whom vaguely claim to have known him in his past life, and the angels Mikey and Gabby, who manage the Neons' assignments.

Lead designer Ben Esposito created an initial prototype of Neon White as a first-person shooter in 2017 while he was finishing development of Donut County as a distraction from that work. Once Donut County was released in 2018, Esposito returned to the prototype to continue its development. Around that time, the roguelike deck-building game Slay the Spire had just been released and created a wave of card-based games in the indie games space. Esposito has said the decision to use cards instead of actual weapons in the game is one of the game's design goals stating that players should look at cards not as weapons, but instead as resources that allow greater movement.

The card idea concept led to the game being what Esposito called a "card-based arena shooter with a lot of randomness built in". However, he found that randomly rewarding the player with cards made the game more difficult, and instead decided to fix what cards the players would get, which led to the game to be more about speedrunning. Esposito said that speedrun videos influenced these ideas, as "super-high level [speedrunning] becomes a little bit less about your execution and more about solving a puzzle to shave off some time". He wanted to make sure that players had one obvious route to complete each level but had clues that encouraged the player to look for shortcuts or alternate uses of the cards.

Neon White received "generally favorable" reviews on Windows, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 5, according to review aggregator website Metacritic.

Eric Van Allen of Destructoid praised the game's angular aesthetics, philosophical story, speedrun-incentivizing level design, and endearing characters and voicework, writing, "[Neon White]'s a blood-pumping, speed-infused anime shooter with style and a decent bit of heart." Eurogamer's Oisin Kuhnke recommended the game, lauding its story, themes, and anime influences while primarily praising its speedrunning-centric core gameplay loop, stating, "Neon White has some of the best level design I've ever played in an arcade-style game...the adrenaline I felt when I squeezed in that first place time within less than a millisecond wasn't like any I'd felt before." Blake Hester of Game Informer wrote, "Neon White is my favorite game I've played all year – by a large margin...It's one of the most fun games I've played in years," and cited the "top-notch" level design, "stupid-but-charming" story, "precise and intricate" gameplay, and Japanese action game aesthetic akin to Killer7 and El Shaddai as the game's strengths.