It’s like a clock: a game comes out with a robust competitive component … and is instantly flooded with players reaching the top by nefarious and unpunished means: cheaters, in other words. The latest victim is Neon White, a multi-genre speedrunning game developed by Angel Matrix and published by Annapurna Interactive.
The funny thing about this scourge of cheating in Neon White is that there is already an official way to seriously reduce your time, no cheating. Neon White, apparently a first-person shooter, but probably more of a dizzyingly fast-paced puzzle platformer, is structured around small-sized levels that complete in a minute or less. Your goal is to run to the finish line as fast as possible, killing all the enemies along the way. If you go fast enough, you will get an “ace” medal, revealing the online leaderboards of this level.
It’s pretty simple, but most levels have a built-in shortcut: if you use the right weapons at the right time, you can skip entire segments, shaving according to valuable of your time. Part of Neon White’s joy is in playing levels to find and run shortcuts. (If you missed it, take a look at Zack’s claim on why it’s so fun to find them.) These shortcuts are the reason you sometimes see disparities (gaps of 5, even 10 seconds) between your rankings in the leaderboards and those at the top. . Getting a place on the top rung requires knowing the one-level shortcut and nailing it perfectly.
These shortcuts are not, however, behind the atypical extremes that catch the attention of players.
Last week, a few days after the release of Neon White, a player said that each ranking at the top of the leaderboards was occupied by a player with a run time of 0.06 seconds (impossible for any level of the game). Another noted that a player named Nosee suspiciously set a similar time of 15 seconds for all levels of Neon White’s eighth mission; for one of these levels, there is a 16-second difference between Nosee’s first place and the rest of the people among the top ten. There is virtually no way to get that score using official shortcuts; if there was an official shortcut, it’s likely that players would have already discovered it and shared it everywhere. In the Steam forums, a group of speed racers lamented how many players have supposedly impossible times and how they prevent legitimate players from securing well-deserved world records. (One quoted the adage, “If there is competition, there are cheaters.”)
It’s not clear how some players are cheating exactly. But even if you knew, I wouldn’t say it. Until Angel Matrix implements a solution, telegraphing the exact method to cheat would probably only stimulate imitators.
The problem of cheating has been saturated to the point that the player base recognizes it and has developed community-driven mosaic solutions with the best players in the game, recalibrating their ranking to fit the cheaters. In this clip, for example, a player makes 26.85 seconds at the “Forgotten City” level. Although the Neon White leaderboards officially list them in tenth place, the player (rightly) claims ninth place because the person in charge has a time that could only be won by cheating.
Angel Matrix representatives told Kotaku that the study is investigating the problem of Neon White traps, but declined to comment further. In the meantime, I think I have a solution: folks, don’t cheat, go!