Neon White Interview: Ben Esposito On Making A Speedrunning Game For Freaks
When Neon White’s gameplay trailer released last year, creative director Ben Esposito introduced the game by saying “it’ll be a game for freaks.” The game, which combines deck building, speedrunning, and first person shooting with a theological, visual novel-infused tale of cleansing Heaven of its demons, seems to be living up to that billing as its planned 2022 launch date approaches. I sat down with Esposito for a one on one gameplay demonstration, and asked him how a game for freaks is developed.
“There's a little bit of an uphill battle to justify putting a story in a speedrunning game,” Esposito says. “I said it's a game made by freaks and for freaks, because we know it's not necessary to combine these two ideas of having rich, interesting lore, and campiness, [but] also a speedrunning game that’s all about going as fast as possible. Naturally, most people would say, ‘don't have any story that stops me, let me just zoom through this’. For the people who want to do that, that's totally fine. They can skip past everything and they don't have to engage with it. But to me, it was really important for a few reasons. One, I just love having a justification for why I should really care about the universe. Also I think it's really important for the pace of the experience as well to have not only be hardcore speed running that never stops you, but also this whole other component where you're exploring the world, you're talking to angels and getting a sense of why is everything so screwed up.”
Related: Neon White Is Hades Meets Titanfall 2
Actually readers, I must apologise. I didn’t ask Esposito about any of that. In fact, across our entire 35-minute interview, I asked two, maybe three questions. As Esposito demonstrated
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