‘Neon White,’ Player Fatigue, and Gaming Burnout

In 2021, I felt my reservoir of enthusiasm for streaming video games diminish into nothingness like a car running on fumes hours after the gas light had come on. As a result, I stepped away from streaming entirely for the better part of a year, steering myself to a rest area where I felt my love for gaming rejuvenate. Playing games without an audience was the break I needed to rediscover the joy that gaming had so often brought me – or so I thought.

In 2022, knowing that I needed boundaries around this hobby that streaming had turned into a bit of a job, I thought I had found a groove that would extend the lifespan of my gaming energy and interests. I blew through a dozen indies at the start of this year until Elden Ring took over my life for a month, spawning a newfound love for the Souls series. After Elden Ring, however, I have deeply struggled to rekindle my passion for gaming, and nothing seemed to draw me for months after its release. This dearth of excitement caused me to wonder if gaming is a hobby that I still have passion for.

The weeks trickled by until I noticed the release date of a game that I knew I would enjoy, Neon White. Published by the ever-interesting Annapurna Interactive, Neon White had released a playable demo that I had played and loved, despite the demo only lasting for around an hour of playtime. I knew going in that it’d be a win, but my experience with the entire package surprised me. 

Understanding Neon White

For the uninitiated, Neon White is the follow-up game from the makers of Donut County, which I have affectionately referred to as “reverse Katamari featuring trash pandas.” Unlike Donut County, Neon White is a first-person shooter of sorts where you speedrun through a series of stages. Each stage can take as few as 20 seconds if run tightly and precisely, or could take a few minutes if you’re figuring out the level design, enemy layout, and movement mechanics. These mechanics take the form of playing cards that correspond to weapon types. Whereas you start each stage with a pitifully weak katana, you immediately can pick up weapons ranging from shotguns to machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Each of these weapons has a primary fire ability to destroy demons as well as a discard effect which will launch you through the air in various ways to progress towards the stage’s finish line. 

The strength of Neon White’s design lies in the variation and gradual addition of intricacy to this card system, teaching you how to improve without stopping to hold your hand at every stage. Neon White also has an instant restart button if you make an error, get killed by an enemy, blow through all your ammo, or plunge off the map to your demise, meaning that there is zero friction between yourself and your next attempt. Learning, in other words, is not punished in Neon White – something that can turn me off from difficult games or stages quite quickly. Neon White allows you to approach each stage like a completionist or offers you the option to treat each victory as permission to move along and see what else the game has to offer.

The only true barrier you must overcome in Neon White is your own ability to respond to and memorize each stage in order to earn a quick enough time to advance through the story. In most cases, simple completion of the stage is sufficient. However, the addicting loop of this game comes in the form of earnable medals for better completion times. Depending on your level of quickness, you will earn a medal between bronze and platinum, with each tier being increasingly difficult to obtain. In order to rank up and move the story along, you must earn a certain number of gold medals, which means that the game gives you freedom to ignore some of the trickier stages and their harder times if you prefer.

Neon White‘s Gameplay Loop

Playing Neon White well felt inherently satisfying, but I truly enjoyed the precision in level design and the way Neon White scaffolds your path to improvement over your initial run of each stage. Completing the stage shows you what times you will need to earn the next medal – sometimes you might luck out with a platinum on the first attempt, but this happened to me maybe five times in the entire game. Once you earn a few more “insight” points, the game unlocks a leaderboard of your friends who play Neon White, allowing you to asynchronously compete with their best scores in each stage. The game also begins to show you a ghost version of yourself to gauge how you are doing against your own best times. Finally, once your insight approaches the maximum possible for a given stage, you will be shown hints throughout the level which are indicated by translucent, spinning Hamsa hand symbols. These little shortcuts allow you to see the stage with a fresh pair of eyes, circumventing the slower pathways towards the finish line, and encouraging you to stick around in each stage for the platinum. 

Initially, I was determined to barrel through each stage as many times as possible to earn that top-tier medal, the platinum. Not only were the stages themselves enjoyable, but the levels were tightly designed and quick enough to grind my way up the improvement ladder to where I didn’t feel like my progression was stalled by a completionist’s urge to perfection. I was addicted to the dopamine of my own progress, and each accomplishment truly felt like I was on the path towards a perfect or ‘true’ run through the game. 

Aside from the grade you receive at the completion of each stage, most levels have a “gift” that you can find hidden off the main path. These gifts function as optional puzzles that, once obtained, will reward you with an item to give to the game’s many characters – largely other “neons,” or souls summoned back from the dead to compete in the game’s Heavenly tournament. As with the platinum rewards, I sought out each gift for the first several stages. I enjoyed finishing a chapter of stages – the game has twelve in total – with all the gifts because each will unlock the next stage of your relationship with the other characters. The game presents this gift system of social simulation as completely optional, but, as a veteran of games like the Persona series, where maxing out character bonds is synonymous with success and rewards, the dialogue-based vignettes and occasionally unlocked bonus stages and memories were enough to justify the extra hours that gift-seeking was tacking onto my playthrough of Neon White. 

A Completionist Approach to Neon White: Gifts and Platinum Medals

For the first ten hours of playing Neon White, I took this completionist path, earning platinum medals and seeking each gift. Somewhere around the game’s first boss battle, however, I found myself cutting a few corners. I started becoming satisfied with gold medals, which kept my neon rank increasing, and I stopped worrying about missing a gift here and there. Part of my change in approach to the game is due to how Neon White allows the player to replay stages at any point once unlocked. So I figured that I could return back with a refreshed level of energy if I got stuck or desired to progress any given relationship further. Another reason for my change in player ethos was brought about by the tedium of some more protracted levels, stages that felt drawn out and started fatiguing me as I replayed them for minutes at a time.

I felt guilty at first, taking shortcuts to progression. But the reward that I felt when shaving a few seconds off my best times dwindled considerably, no longer giving me a rush of satisfaction. Furthermore, I quickly noticed that the characters of Neon White aren’t very likable – something that I am decidedly of the opinion is an intentional choice by the game’s writing team. I couldn’t connect with a single character in Neon White, even if I enjoyed the fanservice and flirtation with Red and Violet, two women in the game. The hairbrained, lore-heavy story also didn’t compel me to spend any more time with the plot beats than the story required me to.

Perhaps you could say that my approach to playing Neon White followed that of how the game was designed. That is, I started speedrunning my way through the story in the same way that the game wanted me to speedrun through its many stages. But as has happened before when playing games and burning out on them, I realized quite quickly that I needed to start taking breaks from Neon White. Whereas my first play session was a happily uninterrupted five hours of blistering runs, I soon grew exhausted by the game by about an hour of playing it. The first half of my 20 hours with Neon White rushed by, and the latter half trickled by agonizingly. 

Once I noticed my feelings towards Neon White change, I started to question whether this change was to be attributed to the game itself or my feelings towards games more generally. Ultimately, having seen the credits roll and saved Heaven, I think this shift that I experienced is an even mixture of both factors. 

Burning Out on Neon White

Let’s start with Neon White and why it lost its luster during my playthrough. As ungrateful as this will sound, I think Neon White is too long of a game for what it sets out to accomplish. I don’t think any of the stages are unfairly or poorly designed, nor do I think the mechanics fail to hold up during the 20 hours I spent with them. Rather, my draw to Neon White was in the loop of learning and mastery. I felt that this loop was at its tightest and most responsive when mechanics were being introduced and at its weakest when levels lengthened. Especially towards the middle and back half of the game, weapons were seldom introduced, causing each level to feel more like a thematic remix than a genuine new way of looking at the game and its world. Furthermore, Neon White’s levels tended to creep in length from what felt like 20 seconds in the beginning to three minutes by the end. The effort and tedium incurred if I had stuck to my completionist impulses would have no doubt ballooned my total playtime by double, so I am decidedly glad that I bailed when I did and started beelining towards the credits. I imagine you could trim about 20% of the stages from Neon White and it would feel like a tighter experience for it.

As for my own subjective hindrances, I think my first mistake was taking for granted that revisiting the levels would not be an endeavor unto itself. The ability to revisit completed stages for gifts and platinum medals feels open and enticing until you load up the stage and realize your muscle memory and navigational intuition have diminished in the few dozen intervening levels you have since played. It was a much higher barrier to entry than I would have anticipated, and the resulting effect is that I had to pause, tab out, and watch YouTube playthroughs to feel like the effort required for these bonuses was truly worth my patience. This vicarious approach to relearning the levels is far from ideal, and I would caution all players of Neon White from taking it. Instead, I think the ideal approach to this game – if you are aiming for completion beyond a simple credits-roll – is to grind through each level bonus on your first go-around, and save those YouTube walkthroughs for the ones you absolutely cannot find through brute force and organically scouring around. 

Even if I neutralize the issues I had with Neon White and my shifting approach to playing through it, I think the fatigue would have set in anyway. I watched as the leaderboards of my Steam friends dwindled until I was the only person in my friend group who had reached certain stages and chapters. No longer was I racing for bragging rights, I was trailblazing through yet another chapter, lurching my way through cutscenes and not knowing when the finale would arrive. The fact that so many of my friends dropped off around chapters seven and eight speaks to the aforementioned observation that Neon White would have benefitted from fewer stages; it proves that I was not the only one who needed a break from the game after its surprisingly involved halfway point. 

I also think that Neon White’s precise design is intrinsically exhausting, meaning that the act of playing it is so demanding that my brain felt similar to that of needing a breather after a cardio workout. The frenetic loop of twitchy precision is not the same sort of casual gaming fare that you may expect from indie games. Towards the latter half of the game, when every stage’s cards are sparingly placed throughout the level, one tiny mistake means a full restart – and that loop drained my energy and enthusiasm quite quickly each session. In the second half of my playthrough, I could never play more than a single chapter of Neon White before moving onto something else to decompress. 

Neon White is Fantastic, So Why Did I Struggle With Playing It?

If, however, I set aside my own troubled relationship to Neon White, I certainly think it would be a compelling game of the year contender for 2022 – on my list and more broadly. Neon White is one of the most unique gaming concepts in recent memory and I think the polish on the overall experience is such that it will hold up for many years to come. Especially in the third year in a row where basically every major game has been delayed yet again, Neon White comfortably stands out as a highlight of my gaming summer. But it’s jarring to feel that kind of critical fondness when my experience of playing it was personally so wearisome. 

So I have been faced with the aporetic task of reconciling the fact that Neon White is a great video game, one that I even enjoyed, but the moment-to-moment experience of playing it was one that constantly exhausted me, causing me to take breaks from it for days and weeks at a time. I can’t say that about Elden Ring or many of the other 2022 releases that have, however briefly, captivated my attention. 

Gaming Burnout and Idiot Island

My inability to reconcile these feelings led me back to a place of gaming introspection: “Is this burnout,” I asked myself, “or am I losing my love for gaming? This game is clearly excellent, so why am I struggling to enjoy my experience with it?” While I am tempted to point to burnout since I can count the amount of games I played this summer on one hand, I hesitate because there are, in fact, games around a similar period that have captivated me for hours without interruption – like Stray and We Are OFK. There are also upcoming games that I feel excited for like A Plague Tale: Requiem, and I plan to follow my annual ritual of taking a few days off work to celebrate and enjoy the release when it drops this fall. Clearly, my love of gaming remains, but perhaps the degree of intimacy has changed.

Overall, this experience with Neon White returns me to the streamer burnout I experienced last year. In the same way that I felt an obligation to stream and the intrinsic guilt of not meeting that self-set expectation, I have begun to feel as though I have been neglecting my duties to Epilogue as our lead writer. But as I learned in college, you can only write as much as you read – or, in this case, play. The input determines the output.

Reckoning with burnout on one of my favorite hobbies is a bizarre experience. Perhaps this is a lesson to take breaks and take things with moderation, or perhaps I shouldn’t psychoanalyze myself so deeply with regard to my enjoyment of things. Above all, I don’t ever want my relationship to gaming to feel forced. So even if the articles slow down, even if I stop chasing new game releases like a dog after a mail truck, I will be wrestling with my hobby, perennially digging into why I fell in love with it in the first place. 

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