I’m not a part of the speedrunning community. I don’t derive pleasure from playing the same game hundreds of times in order to optimize my play for the extra fraction of a second, hoping to improve my personal best or beat a friend’s time.
And yet, here I am playing Neon White, a speedrunning game that is, in the words of the developer, “for freaks”. I guess that makes me a freak because I’m all in.
I’m astounded by how this little indie title has been making huge waves in both game critic circles and my immediate friend groups. The most common factor in that has been the Friends Leaderboard. Everyone that I know who has gotten seriously into Neon White has a “villain” on their friends list that they consciously or subconsciously compete against for the best times. For me, that’s my friend OrangeCreamsicle.
Even if I don’t beat his times, which is often because they’ve posted some really strong ones, knowing that someone I personally talk to can get times in that range gives me the added confidence when going for Ace times that I can do it, that a human being can reasonably get that good.
It helps that the stages are also designed with the idea of getting played and replayed multiple times, often with multiple routes shortcuts baked in for players to discover after multiple runs. Though the game does call for some level of precision, I find that the barrier of every is lax enough where I can make a couple of small mistakes and often still hit an Ace time if I’ve got my route down perfectly. And should a run go pear-shapers, the quick restart key means I’m back and ready for another run with limited downtime between. If there was any amount of loading for that, then that fiction alone would be almost deal-breaking.
An all-round excellent game like this doesn’t come out too often, but when it does it is so sweet.
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