REVIEW ‘Neon Souls’ – A Bright And Shining New Platformer (XSX)

Neon Souls is a straightforward platformer and follow-up to 2021’s Color Souls by developer Pickles Entertainment and publishers Gorestation and Ratalaika Games. It’s a get from one side of the screen to the other type of game with one key twist: you can’t see anything. Not unless you either move your jumping bean of a character over it or you double jump, splashing neon color within a certain radius around you. Through 50 levels and 4 bosses, you’ll experience a huge increase in difficulty in this simple yet satisfying game.

It starts off simple enough. The world is black and a couple of gameplay instructions are all you can see on the screen. They’ll tell you how the buttons work and help you navigate the first two levels. I actually wish they weren’t there at all. The game has no plot and these instructions feel like they break the emersion of the world you’re trusted into. If you’re a regular player of platformers, you’ll get the gist of things pretty quickly and if you’re not, a menu explaining the controls would have sufficed better.

But besides that tiny gripe, things are pretty swell in Neon Souls. The first set of 15 levels starts you off easy. There’s a steady increase in the challenge, but the gameplay through your first boss encounter won’t have you sweating too hard. It’s a good gameplay cycle on every level. You can’t see anything to start, so you have to play with trial and error in mind. Jump around, splash some color, reveal platforms where you can, and be willing to fail to find the next foothold. The only things you can see in advance are enemies and certain special platforms like flipping spikes. Navigating each level requires increasingly precise timing, the use of double jumps, bouncing off enemies at just the right time, and many, many leaps of faith.

The bosses are interesting as well. It took me some time to crack the first one especially, just because it’s a bit astray from the rest of the gameplay. But once you get the gist of it, you’ll be dodging a few different attack patterns and trying to land blows fast enough before they start their attacks again. It’s not just as simple as dodging and attacking. You really do have to have good timing and not stray too far from the enemy in your avoiding their attacks, or get too distracted by smaller enemies on the field. You’ll end up too slow and need to wait for another cycle to attack. Fortunately, because death is expected so frequently, the restart time is basically instant.

Visually, everything is perfect. It’s an extremely low-pixel kind of game with an adorable goober of a character flashing constantly through the colors of the rainbow. The levels all look pretty as you slash them with color and the way the background looks like stars drifting by in a black field of space fits the atmospheric music that companies perfectly. The sound effects get a little gross sometimes, with a weird squishy sound that feels out of place as you slide around or slide down walls. Of course, the settings allow you to turn down music and sound effect. They also let you change how much or little you splash color when you jump, which can dramatically change the difficulty if you turn it off completely or up to full power. Other glowing elements, aesthetic and practical, are adjustable too.

Neon Souls is a great platformer with a nice difficulty spike. Its core gimmick doesn’t get old, instead really making the whole game. It gets quite tough after a while, but it always feels fair and creative as you go along.

Neon Souls is available now on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and PC.