not everything has to be a massive, perfect masterpiece. creative people want to make creative things, but creative people also just want to make things. sometimes those things take inspiration from other things, or aren’t quite as mechanically or narratively deep as their contemporaries. and that’s okay!

i feel like people take “pretty good” as an insult sometimes. just because something isn’t some transcendent experience doesn’t mean it’s not fun, or not worth your time. not everything can be some amazing, life-changing experience; you need some solid, nothing-crazy titles that are just fun without much more behind it. neon abyss is that kind of game. its style isn’t unique, the gameplay is sometimes a little off, but at its core, there is a fun game here. i don’t go back to think about it a ton, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. i still had a good time with it, i just didn’t feel compelled to go back to it again.

neon abyss is a 2d roguelike dungeon-crawler, with a variety of different guns, characters, and perks to play around with. there’s a pretty large variety of stuff to vary up each run if that tickles your fancy. there are 7 floors per run, with each floor being a separate dungeon with its own boss at the end. there are lots of different special rooms, chests, shops, and challenges to find and conquer, and each floor has a couple of interesting things to do.

there are an absolute ton of guns to play around with, some much more broken than others. i kind of respect the developers for not even bothering to balance a lot of the guns here, because it allows for a whole lot more goofiness. sometimes you spend 70 coins on a gun, just to realize it does -2 DPS and your run is just boned. each run isn’t long enough for that to be a huge deal, so i usually just laughed it off and moved on.

you can get those guns through either the shop or any of the chests lying around. each one’s unlocked using crystals dropped by enemies in levels, or grabbed in other chests. you can only carry 5 crystals at a time, though, so you may have to choose between unlocking a crystal-locked door or opening a chest. it would be a significantly more interesting decision… if you couldn’t just go back and pick up the crystals from prior rooms.

alongside the guns, each floor has a couple of different room styles. some have this angelic, yellow-clad podium with 2 different abilities to choose from. others are quick challenge rooms to unlock rewards, or getting to access new chests. there’s lotteries, and quick unlockables scattered throughout. the environmental changes are really neat, and make each floor a lot more distinct than they could be otherwise, even if the actual mechanics in themselves are nothing too wild.

one of the game’s more unique mechanics, at least to me, is its eggs. some rooms reward you with an egg; they take a couple of rooms to hatch and often create some slight changes to your run. they’re nothing too crazy, typically, but it’s something to make this game stand out outside of the different rooms. my only problem is that they fail to hatch far too often, so sometimes you’ll have a bunch of eggs and just get nothing out of them. it’s pretty sad to have 4 eggs and reap no benefits, even if you did nothing wrong. either way, it’s some more spice to add outside of the different room styles and guns.

all that variety is really cool, but unfortunately, the normal, non-special rooms aren’t all that interesting. the regular enemies are pretty easy to take down, and there’s not quite as much variety in the enemies as there is in the rooms. there are some really cool room layouts, but those tend to be outnumbered by relatively bland rooms.

what separates a good roguelike from a great one, at least to me, is how consistently engaging it is. you’re playing a ton of very similar rooms over, and over, and over again; a good roguelike will ensure that something significantly changes, whether it’s your abilities, enemy placements, something. when i play enter the gungeon or hades, rooms are rarely boring. repetitive? sure, a bit. but rarely ever would i call a hades room bland, even after a couple dozen hours.

neon abyss has rooms that i think are genuinely boring, because a lot of the variety the game has isn’t ability-based, it’s gun or environment-based. its variance is mostly new rooms, or different guns; while being fun to play around with, those don’t change your run all that much, at least on a room-to-room basis. by the end of each floor, i was pretty consistently bored of said floor.

luckily, each one has a bossfight, and they’re one of the highlights of the game. each one is based off of a different “modern obsession”; social media, fast food, stuff like that. are they obnoxiously corny? yes. but my god, they’re a blast to fight. fun patterns, pretty neat designs, a moderate challenge, they’re the highlight of the game, for sure.

the progression between runs here is pretty standard. there’s a large skill tree, focused on new movement abilities, extra perks, new rooms and machines, and small changes to luck. some of the new stuff is pretty neat, but nothing makes too crazy of an impact on runs outside of the new rooms. the small changes to luck and the weapons available are cool, but not all too noticeable in the long run.

both visually and musically, neon abyss takes obvious inspiration from the 80s-inspired indie hits of the last decade. once again, this isn’t a bad thing; not at all. the aesthetic is extremely nice, and the songs chosen for the soundtrack are excellent. it just furthers the idea that this game isn’t trying to go above and beyond.

i think that’s the best way to put it. this game isn’t trying to go above and beyond, it’s staying in its lane and it knows that. i admire the developers for just doing what they want to do, but it also makes any errors much less forgivable, at least to me. small issues, like the general rooms being boring, are made more obvious by a lack of fresh mechanics to back them up. but who really cares? at the end of the day, the developer’s goals were to make a fun, no-nonsense roguelike. to me, they succeeded.