Recent reviews by Null Error

I love the little ACX/SSC reference :)

Very cringey at times, but it's okay. The gameplay is extremely good so far

I love this game, but holy ♥♥♥♥, it runs so poorly it's nuts. Most of my playtime has been on PS5, but I've tried playing it on my laptop as well. They need to hire someone to optimize the game. It's such an excellent game, I really wish I could give a positive review, but with the performance somehow getting WORSE in the last few months, not better, I have to leave a negative review.

This game is a 5/10, maybe a 6. We'll tackle the positive first.

AUDIO:
The music is pretty good, not amazing, but the sound effects are really great. The music itself does fit the era the game is shooting for, which aides the general aesthetic cohesion.

VISUALS:
The visuals are also great. I'd say the default CRT filter is way too much, but that's fine since it's super easy to change it. I love how the hands in the first person POV while driving have a very choppy animation while driving, emulating a very real element of early 3D game programming (sometimes it's just easier to have 12 pre-programmed positions for the hands already modeled instead of dynamically animating the hands to have a smooth motion while turning). There's tons of little stuff like that where you can tell the developer was really thoughtful and creative about the vibe they were trying to capture.

I also grew up in a place where we would get a ton of snow, and unless it was June or July the sky was gray, s I found the weather extremely comforting and beautiful. Red and orange taillights on a car in a snow storm just look amazing.

GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay is very enjoyable. I love low-stress trucking sims + Animal Crossing so the gameplay perfectly appealed to me. The truck handling is also very well implemented. No crabwalking, you aren't going to be spinning out on a turn, in general the truck feels like a go-kart. It's enjoyable to try to push your speed as much as possible without losing that last item of the delivery that hasn't fallen out yet.

WRITING / LUDONARRITIVE:
Uh oh.

Do you know the old writing adage to "write what you know"? Unfortunately, this is what happens when you try to write what you don't.

I'll try not to be mean because this is clearly a passion project, one that deserves praise. However, this game badly needed a harsh but supportive editor.

The game loosely pulls on a few different threads, but pulls on none of them successfully because it understands none of them.

One of these is the concept of an American company town, a phenomena in the USA where citizens of a town were reliant on the company that runs the mines to such a degree that they weren't paid in money, but instead paid in company scrip, which they could use to buy products back from that company. These are rightfully pointed at as examples of how an unregulated free market can create situations where people are incentivized (from a game theory perspective) to make decisions that benefit themselves in the short term, but harm themselves and everyone else in the long term.

The issue is that the developer does not understand what makes a company town unique. If you remove the "Easy Co." branding and replaced it with "USSR" it would be the same because the developer has only understood the broad strokes. The game doesn't even use American architecture, but rather commie blocks, one of the foremost symbols of communist oppression. In contrast a game like "Papers, Please" gets extremely specific with its understanding of what life is like in a post-soviet country, and how they have uniquely different issues and systems compared to a company town, even if at a big-picture level they are both places with people who have had their agency drastically limited by the social and economic systems in place.

Do not mistake this for political whining or "how dare you criticize capitalism!!!". I'm saying that different societies have different issues and if you're going to trying to represent the issues of company towns, you should do a lot more research.

The next thread the game pulls on is AI. I really, really wish it wouldn't. I understand that AI is a thing starting to affect more lives and that everyone feels like they are entitled to an opinion on it, but as someone who has worked in the field and cares very much about AI safety, you have no clue what you're writing about. I'm not saying this to be mean, or just to say "I know better", but rather to say that this aspect of the game will be horribly dated in less than 10 years. It is very dated now to someone who is familiar with the topic, and in 10 years it will come off as an atomic-era sci-fi novel to the average person.

I really am not trying to be mean. I understand that this aspect of the game is inextricable, that it can't be removed, so I'm going to provide some feedback about what can be done to resolve these issues. This game doesn't suffer from an issue of there being too much dialogue, it actually suffers the inverse. It needs more text. More conversations, more emails, even text logs that you can find would all be great additions.

If the developer/or anyone reading) wants to learn more about company towns, there is an excellent book called "You Had A Job For Life" by Jamie Sayen. If you are interested in the future of AI and AI safety, check out the most recent book by Nate Soares.

Ultimately the writing is what kills the game for me. Right now the game and its messaging come out very muddled. If the game is trying to communicate that beauty and connection can be found in mundanity and despite circumstances out of your control, which very much seems to be the point, then adding in little pessimistic quips about capitalism/AI doesn't help you at all because it makes your messaging come off as insincere.

Eh, it's not great. Sorry :/ In particular I think the crest system kinda sucks and wasn't very well thought out.

The slopification of Rain World. Made by people who did not understand the base game, both in gameplay and in story (and in how those two things intermingle). I genuinely would not suggest this if you enjoyed the base game, outside of financially supporting the developers.

Edit after release:
AHHHH THEY ADDED HONDAS

This game is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good. I'm 40 hours in and still have a ton left. Plus there is new game+ and hard mode... I love this game so much. It is my go-to comfort game nowadays, and I was surprised with just how much content the full release added. If I ever get a PS5 I'd absolutely buy it at $50. This game has a crazy amount of content at this point.

The AI is definitely improved compared to the Early Access, and I think certain drivers even drive/fight differently. Some are way more aggressive and some drive super clean.

The game is definitely a bit better optimized now and it's really cool that they added DX11 support which makes running it on MacOS super easy. The game still has a weird bug where the FPS tanks for a second when you start driving backwards, but besides that I usually get around ~70 fps on Steam Deck with the defaults that look great. If you decide to mess with the graphics settings just be warned that turning lighting/illumination to high will have the biggest impact on FPS.

Original review:
I am unbelievably impressed with Genki for how well they have retained the spirit of this series after so many years. This game is pure, undiluted vibes.

In comparison, Forza Horizon has really great gameplay, like 9/10 imo, but completely cringe vibes that feel so inauthentic. Whereas TXR has like 8/10 gameplay (it can be a bit repetitive, but I honestly enjoy the flow state I get into while I'm playing this) it has 11/10 vibes. Considering that I primarily play games for the vibes they communicate through the gestalt of their art (writing, visual, music, game feel), TXR 2025 has quickly become one of my favourite racing games.

My only request is that I wish there was an option to increase the amount of traffic. I imagine this would be complicated in terms of programming the opponent AI, so I understand if they don't. But it would be really cool if that was an option.

I'm guessing a ton of people are going to be checking out this game after a recent video from a popular Youtuber. I'm here to say that, as good as Void Stranger is, System Erasure's other game, Zero Ranger is *even better*. You don't need to have any prior skill at shmups, it's very easy to get into. It is absolutely amazing, and I hope some people will head on over there too!

Edit: The issue with the egg has been patched <3 thank you!

My feelings on chapter 3 and 4 are incredibly mixed, and not because the game is uninteresting or meh. This is the failure of a decent chunk of indie games, they don't have enough of a budget to flesh out their ideas and their ideas aren't compelling enough on their own, more limited form, and so the games end up being quite neutral, not bad or good. Deltarune is some of the highest highs of Toby Fox's creative output, as well as by far the lowest lows. Certain sections are SO BAD that I almost gave this a negative review, but the game swung back from that so hard I'm left dazed and confused.

The swing back is so positive, so excellent, that I'm ultimately left with a serious question, is Chapter 3 really supposed to be this frustrating? I understand it's supposed to be frustrating, but some aspects of that frustration, specifically the absolute bonkers amount of backtracking/replaying portions of the chapter, seem unintentional. Additionally, I encountered what might even be a bug that prevented me from acquiring a secret item, that required me to play the entirety of Chapter 3 AGAIN, after I had already reset the chapter so many times I've lost count. Most players, unless they are playing with a guide (and maybe even if they are!!!) will need to play the entire chapter up to 3 times, and at least 2. There is no way you are full-clearing the chapter without playing it at least twice, along with all the times you need to redo board 1 to get S rank . There's a way to bypass this, but I had no idea until later, and most people will also not know this until later.

It's incredibly easy to lock yourself out of getting the egg in Chapter 3. I had done the steps needed for it when I realized what I had to do, it was honestly a really cool moment, realizing the connection, then I did something else (I got the shadow mantle) and that locked me out of getting the egg I'm honestly not sure if getting the shadow mantle was the trigger or if simply going back to the green room is . I saved my game after that, and now I was locked out of getting this item. There's no reason why doing the one thing should lock out getting the other. Both are equally obscure and optional elements of the chapter. I'd call it a bug but it seems like it was explicitly programmed to be this way. Maybe this means there's some super duper deep lore connecting the two, but I don't give a ♥♥♥♥. It's ridiculous to ask the player to redo the ENTIRE CHAPTER because they did two non-optional things in the wrong order.

If getting to the green room is the trigger, that's even more annoying, because when In realized the two TV screens were connected, I physically walked all the way back to the previous one, which took like 5 minutes. Then I noticed there was a teleport door nearby, and tried that out, realized I could go back to the green room now, and teleported there. Going to the green room absolutely should not lock you out of getting the egg, I don't care how super secret it is. It would be better if the egg was more hidden, so you don't deprive players who solved the puzzle on their own of the reinforcement. It really sucks to have solved this on my own and then accidentally locked myself out of the very last step

Frustration in a video game is useful for catharsis. The problem is that a large chunk of the frustration from Chapter 3 (playing it and trying to get all of the secrets) doesn't have any catharsis. It feels unrealized, the game doesn't do anything with it. And so, I'm just left with many hours of my playthrough that were incredibly frustrating and meaningless, I feel like my time was wasted.

And yet! The game is still ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great. In the end, I think it's worth playing. Since I first played Undertale many years ago, I've gotten really into shmups, and so I have a lot more to compare Deltarune's combat against, and Deltarune absolutely demolishes most bullet hell games in terms of spectacle and innovation. The secret boss of chapter 3 is my favourite boss of any Toby game, it's so cool, and so fun. If every shmup out there was this creative, shmups would be a mainstream genre.

If I hear one more complaint from a child about lore I'm gonna lose it. Go play FNAF or something, not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Rain World