Neon Runner

If the latter half of the noughties showed any particular trend across fashion and music, it was for a return to the gaudy colours and synthesized sounds of the '80s. Previously seen as the runt of the 20th century decade litter, it seemed as if all that was needed to appreciate its charms was a little time.

Of course, video games have always been acutely aware of their recent past, and gamers have always looked back to the rudimentary pleasures of the 1980s with a sense of nostalgia.

Connect2Media understands this appeal as much as anyone, as evidenced by their publishing of the mobile version of Edge – a stylish arcade puzzler with more than a nod to the decade of bouffy hair. Neon Runner pushes the retro vibe even further.

Ostensibly a classically styled maze runner in the vein of Pac-Man or Snake, Neon Lights tasks you with guiding your triangular craft around a series of top-down mazes, collecting the necessary quantity of coloured nick-nacks to unlock the level exit. As is the case with the best modern casual games, however, prolonged play reveals a rather more complex beast.

This complexity comes with the variety of alternative colour modes that can (and indeed must) be accessed with a press of the ‘Okay’ / ’5’ key. Starting with the default blue – which moves at a nice sedate pace, allows you carve your own path through the level and to collect objects immediately adjacent to your position – you’ll gradually be introduced to other colour modes such as green, red and violet.

Red speeds things up considerably and makes it possible to smash through green barriers, while green enables you to plough through the enemies that roam some of the levels, but restricts you to movement within the pre-made access tunnels (or those already made by you).

Each colour has its pros and cons, but each (there are only two provided per level) must usually be accessed, if only to collect the colour-specific pick-ups that litter the levels.

Neon Runner’s greatest strength – the constant stream of new elements thrown your way – is also arguably its greatest weakness. It can become a little overwhelming and, yes, dazzling as new feature upon new feature is piled upon you (there’s also a whole heap of power-ups and level furniture to discover).

The stylish retro aesthetic can also work against your efforts, causing you to get lost in some of the larger pretty-but-abstract mazes as the timer ticks down. A small pointer when the exit is unlocked would have been nice.

But these minor faults are fairly easy to overlook when the overall package is so finely attuned to the sort of addictive, timeless gameplay that’s been keeping us amused for decades.