Neon Abyss - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers]

Three runs deep, I had a troubling realization: Neon Abyss wasn't winning me over. There are other roguelites I dropped faster than it (Legend of Dungeon, Sublevel Zero), but I wasn't itching to plumb its depths the same way I had with Spelunky, Dead Cells, or Crypt of the Necrodancer. On one hand it's unfair to compare it to the genre's greatest, but on the other hand Neon Abyss has the chops to contend with the best: it's smooth, flashy, meaty, and has a sardonic charm that helps it stand out. But even after besting its managers (both regular and cursed), I still find it... lacking in a lot of ways. Succinctly put: Neon Abyss is a fun game, but I don't think it's a good game.

Or perhaps I should specify that it's not a good roguelite, as my issues mainly stem from Neon Abyss's poor balance run to run. As a game it can be quite captivating, handing you quirky weapon and item combinations that will bathe your monitor in bouncing lasers and cascading explosions. If there's something you can expect from Neon Abyss, it's bang for your buck: there's a staggering amount of enemies, items, characters, oddities, and unlockables here, ensuring there's something new to contend with each run. Despite my playtime clocking in at over twenty hours, I've only laid eyes on 75% of the power-ups available—and what I've currently seen is more than enough to check a box labeled "variety" multiple times over.

But the byproduct of having a mountainous heap of options is that a certain portion of it is destined to be junk. And the garbage isn't on the periphery either: there's a myriad of common power-ups that range from mediocre to detrimental. Even items that could be useful under certain conditions (like spite-producing power-ups) are all but useless unless you can proc them consistently (so pray Animosity falls into your lap). I think a big part of the issue is that while certain guns or items are fine to run into, the really good ones (Lipstick, Forbidden Mask, Most Wanted List, Howard Reactor, Divinity) are so invaluable that it's frustrating when you're deprived of them, instead offered rubbish like Matchbox and Black Rum. The worst is the entire subset of melee power-ups—melee is a risky, impractical, and sloppy alternative to simply shooting your problems away from across the room. I mean come on, a huge amount of enemies and bosses are airborne!

Weapons sadly fall prey to this disparity too, although you'll have a better chance of encountering at least one decent one in a shop. Unfortunately, your starting weapon will always suck with no exceptions—which makes finding a new firearm a top priority. Gun upgrades can help transform an anemic firearm into a capable one, but some weapons (Phantom, Thunder, Noise, Deathray, New Type) will always stink compared to their kin. Meanwhile armaments like Famine, Animosity, and Vortex are so devastating that you can stand still and decimate encounters—including some of the toughest boss battles! 

Anyone that's played The Binding of Isaac knows that imbalance is sown into the roguelite turf, but player skill usually helps buffer that annoyance. Namely, that Isaac (and Gungeon and dozens of others) are played as a twin-stick shooter, where good positioning and sharp reflexes can counterbalance some of the worst loot drops. But Neon Abyss is more in line with a run'n'gun, cutting the second dimension out of your movement. This makes it notably harder to dodge enemy attacks, especially when they warp in right above you like in arenas. And there's no floaty ScourgeBringer physics or Dead Cells dodge mechanic to assist in avoiding attacks either—the best way to dodge is to kill your enemy ASAP, or pray you find a rare flight-granting item (which then trivializes the rest of the game!)

You'll learn quickly that there are very few comfortable middle grounds in Neon Abyss—victory will either come easily or feel impossible. Nothing embodies this better than the arena fights, a trio of tight encounters you're encouraged to beat without taking damage. Victory will reward you with a much-needed gun upgrade—but if you've brushed against a single bullet, you'll receive a consolatory bomb/key/nickel instead. Fights don't really scale past the second level either, meaning that if you can best your first few arenas you'll basically snowball your way to victory. Yet on occasion you'll encounter an arena where you simply need to dodge a predictable laser, a task so straightforward that your weapon upgrade is guaranteed upon entry.

And stuff like that is pricks me about Neon Abyss: it leans into randomness too hard. Sure, thematically the game gels with chaos like chocolate does with marshmallow, but so much of the game is RNG stacked atop RNG. There are so many sources of randomness: shops, eggs, crates, chests, bricks, arcade rooms, Smirk counters, roulette machines, roulette doors, roulette boxes, roulette rooms, roulette stages... hell, even the gun upgrades that drop from bosses will randomly cycle between 1-3 random powerups! I know RNG is the lifeblood of roguelites, but Neon Abyss fixates on gambling to the point that it stacks random rewards inside of its random rewards, like a self-propagating matryoshka doll. Anyone that's gone through a room full of chests, tried fishing, or suffered through a clown room will know exactly what I'm talking about.

I know I've been relentlessly trashing on Neon Abyss, so let me at least clarify that there are definitely some cool things about it. One of the most appreciable touches is how much the player can customize their experience; beyond difficulty and character selection, you can choose from a handful of items to start with and remove upgrades, items, and even enemies you don't like! Plus the power trip Neon Abyss sends you on can be as fulfilling as it is ludicrous, with entire rooms melting under your gigantic, wall-piercing quintuple laser. And considering how there's two items per treasure room, wisdom & violence rewards, and a shop on every floor, it's pretty hard not to cobble together a winning build (at least on Normal.) The game is fairly laid-back once you get used to its eccentricities.

The problem, however, is that even with these eccentricities accounted for, Neon Abyss continues to feels unbelievably sloppy. Every run devolves into a landslide of visual chaos, making it impossible to tell where attacks are coming from or what's happening most of the time. Endgame fights like Hal, Zeus, and Athena are a collage of colors that will not only obscure incoming attacks but are guaranteed to obliterate most of your pets (RIP pet builds.) Yet what's weird is you don't really need to know what's happening either; should a Basketball Jersey, The Towel, or a decent weapon be in your possession, you can tank those bosses like nobody's business. It was only on my fourth Prometheus kill that I finally understood what the hell was happening during phase 2!

What really put the nail in the coffin for me and Neon Abyss were the damn wisdom chests. To reach the true final boss, you have to traverse either the path of wisdom or violence—which just means opening up a bunch of their respective chests. But a major problem is that wisdom chests that take damage turn into violence chest—and not the other way around. So on more than one occasion I failed to reach Cursed Athena due to a wisdom chest taking unavoidable damage from an enemy on the other side of the room, with no way to prevent it! Hard mode bafflingly compounds this issue too, occasionally making it impossible to reach Cursed Athena/Ares due to not enough chests spawning. Why? Why allow me to make it so far through the game just to shrug and go, "Oops, try again!"

In some ways, one can argue that Neon Abyss succeeds with flying colors—brilliant, blinding, and absurd flying colors. But for me it's just too sloppy, noisy, and undignified to warrant returning to. Team 17 feels more concerned with content than balance, addicted to designing new roulette wheels for the player to waste their time on. Again, I can't deny that I already played a ton of the game and had a lot of fun doing so, but boy howdy was I wrong in assuring myself that its peculiarities would become palatable if only I stuck with it.

At the end of the day, perhaps it's just a difference of opinion. Whereas Enter the Gungeon sought to make Binding of Isaac more serious, Neon Abyss zips off in the opposite direction at full speed. Neither is the "right" or "wrong" approach—I just find Gungeon to have more of a substantive and balanced game to it compared to Abyss. If a zanier, less coherent Binding of Isaac sounds like your jam, then Neon Abyss might be right down your alley. Just be wary that the flashing lights of this neon alley might be all there is to it.