The day after a tense and expensive dentist's visit you want something that will help you unwind. I don't think Neon Prism, which looked to be one of those chill action-puzzle games with an EDM soundtrack and a fluorescent abstract aesthetic, was what I was looking for. The game's easy enough to describe: you are some kind of blue neon space croissant, tasked with making it to a blue goal circle (or several in tandem) to complete the stage and move onto the next. Often, this means navigating through a maze or past a number of hazards that are conveniently color-coded: blue is safe, but solid; yellow is bouncy; green is one-way only, and shuts down as you pass through it; and red is fatal. You can also "blink" - which teleports you ahead a specific distance and can pass through some but not all barriers - or slow down time, which makes some of the moving hazard patterns easier to maneuver past.

The chief issue with the game is that it has tank controls by default, which makes moving the space croissant far more cumbersome than is ideal. I did eventually discover that you can change the game's mechanics so that the space croissant always follows the mouse cursor, eliminating the rough turning cycles of tank controls that would otherwise cripple a twitch-action game like this where timing is of the essence. Why this wasn't the default is anyone's guess but it certainly made a lot of the later levels tolerable. Closer to tolerable, I should perhaps say. There's also the irksome matter of how your space croissant sticks to walls instead of sliding off, especially when the barriers are needle-thin - it disrupts the flow when you suddenly lose all momentum because your perfectly round ship can't seem to unstick itself from a solid wall without reversing and changing course. Add all that to some ambiguous hazard collision and it can be a frustrating mess.

Neon Prism aims for and just misses the sort of breezy, "in the flow", tough action puzzle experience you might get from a game like Flywrench or Bit.Trip Beat with its various technical shortcomings. It doesn't even work as a speedrun game, despite the in-game emphasis on alacrity and beating time-trials: a lot of each stage's moving parts are randomized, including which way windmills spin and the order that the goal circles show up in levels where there are consecutive rings to hit. It was often the case that, if you wanted a decent level time, you'd self-destruct until you received a beneficial dice roll. It has some smart ideas - the blink and slowdown would make a lot of games of its type far easier to navigate - but the complete package isn't quite there.

Rating: 2 out of 5.