Project Neon is a vertical shoot ’em up that started out as a homebrew Neo Geo game back in 2024, and this summer it landed on everything else: Xbox in July, then Steam, mobile, PlayStation and Switch through August.
There is no easy mode. There is no difficulty slider anywhere in the menus.
You get the game the way FULLSET built it, and it will kill you.
That scares people off, and I get it. But before you read a single tip, understand what kind of game this actually is.
Project Neon is a guitar solo, not a jam session.
It looks like a reflex test. It isn’t. It’s a memorization test wearing a reflex test costume.
You learn it one bar at a time. You fumble the same bar forty times in a row, and then one day your hands just do it and you have no idea when that happened.
Every tip here is built on that idea.
Know what you actually signed up for
A full run of Project Neon is five stages and takes about 25 to 30 minutes.
That sounds short. It is not short.
You are going to see stage 1 more times than you will see stages 4 and 5 combined, at least at first. That’s normal for this genre and it’s normal here.
Nobody sits down with a guitar and plays the solo clean on day one. You play the first four bars until they’re boring, then you add the next four.
Stop thinking of a run as an attempt to win and start thinking of it as a rehearsal.
Turn on tate mode if you possibly can
The game gives you tate (vertical) and yoko (horizontal) display options, plus CRT filters if you want that look.
Tate is the way this game was designed to be played. It fills the screen top to bottom instead of sticking a tall play area in the middle of a wide TV with black bars on either side.
Why does that matter for a beginner? Because a taller play area means more screen between you and an incoming bullet, and more screen means more time to react.
On Switch you can just hold the console vertically in handheld mode. On phone it’s already vertical. On PC, rotating a spare monitor 90 degrees is genuinely worth the two minutes of setup.
More vertical screen is free reaction time, and free reaction time is the cheapest upgrade you will ever get.
Three buttons, and rapid fire isn’t the answer to everything
You have fire, rapid fire, and bomb. That’s it.
Rapid fire is the one new players glue their thumb to for the entire run. It feels productive.
The problem is that holding rapid fire changes how you move and how you think. You stop making decisions and start spraying.
The bomb fires a heavy beam laser straight up the screen and it stays out for a few seconds, which makes it two different tools at once. It’s a panic button when the screen fills up, and it’s serious damage when a boss is sitting there tanking your shots.
Learn what each button does to your positioning before you worry about anything else.
Learn the power-up ring before you learn anything else
This is the system that separates people who improve from people who quit.
Power-ups show up in a rotating ring with three options cycling around it: main shot, wide, and beam. You grab one as it comes around.
Main shot is your straight-ahead damage. Wide covers more of the screen with less punch per bullet. Beam is your focused, heavy hitter.
For your first several hours, take wide. Full stop.
Wide forgives sloppy aim, and your aim is sloppy right now. Beam is stronger on paper but it demands that you sit directly in front of the thing you’re trying to kill, which is exactly where the bullets are.
Pick the weapon that covers your mistakes, not the one with the biggest damage number.
The greedy ring trick, and why you should ignore it for now
There’s a technique borrowed from ChoRenSha 68K where you park yourself in the dead center of the power-up ring and absorb all three power-ups in one go instead of picking one.
It’s real, it works, and it’s very tempting.
It also means sitting still in one spot while the stage keeps happening around you, which is the fast part of the solo.
Learn it later. Not now.
Stop treating your bombs like souvenirs
Here’s the most common way a new Project Neon run ends.
You die with a full stock of bombs you were saving for later.
Later never comes. Later is a boss you never reached.
Bomb when the screen gets busy. Bomb when you flinch. Bomb when a boss opens with a pattern you haven’t figured out yet, because the beam does real damage and a dead boss stops shooting at you.
A bomb you didn’t use is worth exactly zero points and zero lives.
Combos, and the ten-kill pink laser
Project Neon runs on a combo counter. Kill ten enemies quickly and a counter appears on screen, and your laser turns pink and hits harder.
It rewards you for pushing forward and punishes you for hiding at the bottom of the screen plinking away.
It will also get you killed constantly if you chase it too early.
Combo hunting pulls you up the screen and into places you have no business being, and a beginner up the screen is a beginner about to eat a bullet from off camera.
Survive the stage first. Score the stage second.
Set your lives and abuse your continues
You can set how many lives per continue you start with, and you get unlimited continues that drop you back in right where you died.
Use them. Use them shamelessly.
I see people grind stage 1 for a week because they refuse to credit feed, and all they’re doing is getting excellent at the part of the game they already know.
Continue your way to stage 4 and stage 5 tonight. Look at them. Get killed by them a bunch and learn what’s in there.
Yes, continues gut your final score. Your score is not the point yet.
Knowing what stage 5 looks like is worth more right now than a clean stage 1.
Course mode is your practice room
There are two ways to play. Normal runs the stages in a fixed order, and Course lets you choose the order of the first four stages yourself.
Course mode is where you should be spending most of your early time.
Got a stage that keeps ending your runs? Put it first while you’re fresh and your bombs are full, and drill it.
That’s the whole point of learning a solo bar by bar instead of always starting from the top.
Dodge small, not big
New shmup players move like they’re running away from something. Big sweeps across the screen, corner to corner, full stick.
Good players move in tiny taps.
The controls in Project Neon are tight and responsive enough to thread real gaps, so use that. Nudge two inches to the left instead of fleeing to the wall.
Corners feel safe and they are a trap. Once you’re pinned against an edge, you’re kind of screwed, because you’ve thrown away half your available directions.
Live around the lower middle of the screen and make small adjustments from there.
Should you bring a friend?
Project Neon has two player co-op, shared and split screen, and Steam supports Remote Play Together.
With a friend who doesn’t, it’s chaos. Two ships means twice the bullets on screen and twice the sprites you’re trying to track, and you’ll both spend the run confused about which ship is yours.
Learn the stages solo. Bring the friend once you can hold your own.
What getting better actually looks like here
Progress in this game is not linear and it doesn’t feel like progress while it’s happening, so here are some markers to aim at.
Clear stage 1 without using a bomb. Reach the stage 3 boss on a single life. Finish all five stages on unlimited continues so you’ve seen the whole game. Then start a real attempt at clearing it on one credit.
Each of those took me way longer than I expected and each one felt great when it finally landed.
You’re going to have a night where everything clicks and you get further than you ever have, and then you’re going to have three nights where you can’t clear stage 2.
That’s the solo. Go play the next bar.
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Images in this article are from the Project Neon page on Steam and used under Fair Use.