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

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You’d 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 runaway success story called Hades. (Maybe you’ve heard of it?) Both take place in the afterlife. Both feature striking character designs. Both are steeped in sultry undertones. Both put the player in death-or-more-death situations rooted in fast-paced gameplay. Both are made by independent developers with dedicated fanbases. There are undeniable similarities, yes, but Neon White is not a roguelike.

“The game really found its personality once I started to remove the randomness and remove the deck-building and keep it really, really straightforward and simple,” Esposito said. “It is a hundred hand-designed levels that are meant to be replayed a bunch of times.”

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In Neon White, you play as a so-called Neon—someone, typically with a violent past, who wakes up in heaven. Each one is named after a color, and has a correspondingly colored mask. Neons are given a chance to compete in a demon-slaying competition. Whoever wins gets to stay in heaven for good. You play as White, hence the name of the game.

neon white neon violet and neon red have a conversation in neon white
Screenshot: Annapurna Interactive
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“The energy that powers this game is teen energy,” Esposito said. “This is what I would have thought was the coolest thing ever when I was a teenager inspired by, like, Y2K era-anime and The Matrix and all this stuff.”

It’s a cool concept, but one born as a result of a really cool-sounding phrase that came out of thin air. As Esposito told Kotaku, the game’s name isn’t a chicken-or-egg situation. The egg very clearly came first.

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“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.”