Steam reviewers love Neon White despite its horny anime nonsense, or very much because of it

pcgamer.com:

The Steam reviews for Neon White(opens in new tab) are «Overwhelmingly Positive,» but within those positive reviews is an unusual amount of division. Almost everyone who's reviewed it loves the first-person platforming and shooting levels, but only a portion of those players also want to be stepped on by an anime character. It's nice when two groups find common ground, isn't it?

Neon White's story is advanced through visual novel-style conversations, which is either a main attraction or just a wrapper for its FPS platforming levels, depending on your perspective. I'm digging the platforming. It's hard to resist the urge to replay a level until you take the top spot on your friends leaderboard, besting someone you met in Team Fortress 2 a decade ago for reasons it feels impossible to explain. Several of my Steam friends have clearly spent some time replaying Neon White levels, striving for a perfect run. Early levels are as short as 10 seconds, but with more effort and ingenuity, maybe that can be 9.8 seconds?

It's a lot like one of my favorite games, Lovely Planet(opens in new tab). Your goal is the same in both: Run and jump toward each level's finish line as fast as you can without leaving any enemies alive. The big difference is that Lovely Planet equips you with a pellet gun, whereas you can pick up new weapons, represented by cards, as you move through levels in Neon White. The cool part of that twist is that discarding a weapon card activates a special move. You can sacrifice a pistol to jump in mid-air, for example, and reaching certain ledges requires tossing multiple pistols aside. As another example, a rifle called Godspeed can be chucked to dash horizontally across gaps and through barriers, but you're going