DigiTamerRiley's Digital Hub

Neon White

Neon White is one of my newer hyperfixations, seeing as the game only came out in 2022. Neon White is an FPS Speed Game, comprised of 121 levels giving you the goal to beat each one as fast as you possibly can, trying to achieve a time that'll earn you an Ace Metal. But it turns out that's not where the game stops pushing you to go faster. When I was first playing through the game the fall after it came out, I looked back at my times on all the levels, and at one of the levels I said "Hey, why's there a red timestamp on this level?" It turns out that every level in the game has a secret fifth rank of medal you can achieve called Red Medals, secret times that turn out to be the game devs best time on that level, and that don't show themselves in game until you manage to beat them. That led me on a frantic chase to try and learn the times I needed to beat on each level, then learning new routes to beat the levels fast enough to get these special Red medals, the highest measure of skill the game had to offer. After a couple of months and about 60 Red Ranks, I ultimately burned myself out on the game and accepted that I wasn't going to get every Red Rank in the game, but that I was proud of how close I had gotten.

Then in July of this year, I decided I missed having a game to speedrun and decided to get back into playing Neon White, and fully commit to speedrunning it this time. In the spirit of that, I joined the community discord for Neon White speedrunning and downloaded the mods that are allowed and regularly used for speedrunning the game. Then I went back to the level screen to start practicing again, and I found myself asking the question "Hey, why's there a green timestamp on this level?" AS IT TURNED OUT. Alongside all the quality of life features in the mods I installed, there were new, higher skill medals created by the community to push themselves even further than the Red Medals had pushed them before. Now I had Emerald, Amethyst, and Sapphire medals to start collecting, and I realized that as good as I had gotten last year, the ceiling for how good I could get was miles above me. And honestly, that's my favorite thing about this game! The floor for skill required to make you way through the entire game is really low, but the ceiling is unbelieveably high. Neon White is an incredible game to introduce people to the concept of speedrunning, every single thing about it is designed to make the players fall in love with the idea of playing the game faster and faster, always wanting to shave off just a few more milliseconds from their overall time, and even though I've mostly given up on trying to climb the leaderboard any further, this game is always going to be something I love with all of my heart.

Oh yeah also at my peak I was one of the Top 150 players in the entire world :P