Future Racer 2000 Review – Can you beat my high score?

Future Racer 2000 is the newest racing game I had the opportunity to get my hands on. The game cleverly combines rhythm game mechanics with high-octane street racing, where you match the beat of the catchy theme to speed past opponents. As if I needed to say more to sell you on Future Racer 2000, the game came FREE. All I had to do was answer a call from the Census Corporation, and now my entire apartment complex is hooked on the game.

Jokes aside, Future Racer 2000 is a psychological horror game created and published by solo developer Tim Oxton. This little inexpensive romp into cosmic horror is filled with some genuine scares, a phenomenal atmosphere, and an interesting and creative narrative delivered with a unique storytelling device. The game is ripe with an amateurish feeling, which is both to the game’s credit and the source of some of my biggest criticisms.

In this review, I’m going to do my best to explain where the game works and where it gets a little weak while trying not to spoil the story. If you want to experience the game yourself, I recommend you stop reading here and go check out Future Racer 2000. It’s only $5 and will take you about an hour to complete. Going in blind will definitely help you enjoy the game’s palpable tension all the more.

Future Racer 2000 opens up in your small studio apartment. The game quickly and effortlessly paints the picture of where and who we are in the first few minutes; A somewhat poor, single (or at least living alone) dude in a run-down apartment building, currently under quarantine because of the breakout of a viral infection. Relatable much?

A strange call leads to you and your entire apartment complex receiving a free video game console, featuring one game, Future Racer 2000. Quickly, your character becomes addicted to obtaining the game’s high score. Becoming the Future Racer 2000 soon becomes all our protagonist cares about, as the world around shifts more and more into the bizarre.

In the first half of the game, you wouldn’t be able to tell that Future Racer 2000 was developed by one person. The game looks phenomenal, the writing is unique, and the tension is thicker than syrup as you slowly start to get ahold of what’s going on. The worldbuilding is presented in small, natural-feeling set pieces that quickly build a sense of intrigue around the so-called Parascaphism infection.

Spoilers: Future Racer 2000 is based on a series of posts on r/NoSleep created by the developer. You can read the first of which here.

Future Racer 2000 maintains its incredibly creepy atmosphere throughout most of the game. The game will scare the hell out of you and doesn’t need any cheap jumpscares to do so. The strongest tool the game has for scaring the player is setting up a creepy scene — like showing the player a dark, damp basement or hearing voices just outside a door — and allowing the player to walk away from it, only to tell them moments later they have to head straight towards it.

The gradual increase in tension and degradation of the player’s psyche is done incredibly well, especially given the short time frame. I’m especially impressed by how the game makes you feel the way the protagonist’s mind is slipping away. You get to see the irrational way the player character responds to the story and groan as you realize you have to do things no sane person ever would in the situation.

Between the scares, you’re treated with some genuinely good absurdist humor. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I didn’t include Peter S. Peterson’s movie posters in this review.

Near the end, however, Future Racer 2000 starts to lose its tension and the scares fall off pretty hard, at least they did for me.

Without spoiling anything, but explaining in a way anyone who played the game will understand, I felt like the tension began to slip away right after you turn the power on for the last time. The friendly face you see after is also, consequently, the first time I realized just how cheap the game was, which isn’t a bad thing, just something I realized in that moment.

From this point on, the game’s narrative somehow gets more convoluted and wraps up at the same time. Some of the choices for set pieces on the way to the ending confused me, and painted a strange picture of the eldritch infection that toyed with the pieces I was starting to put together. Stepping out of the game knowing how it ends, I can say a lot of these set pieces are kinda confusing and felt a little like they were put in for shock value, but maybe I just didn’t get it.

The biggest tension killer was the game’s use of darkness as a puzzle piece. There’s a point near the end of the game where you have to navigate a pitch-black hallway maze, with some kind of scare in the middle you’re supposed to want to avoid. However, on my first way through the maze, I found any fear of the spooky set piece fading and felt brave enough to walk right up to it. After stumbling in the dark for a while, any fear of something to come vanished and I was just kinda frustrated.

I found out after a while that the game has a sort of night-vision mechanic called “closing your eyes” that highlights walls and helps you navigate this part of the game. However, this was never prompted by anything and I only figured it out through the pause menu. Also, I feel like this sort of undermines the scariness the scene was supposed to have, but I digress.

The game closes with one more phenomenally presented scene with the Future Racer console, followed by a sort of confusing segment and then an ending that felt satisfying and creepy, though it did raise a few questions about the world I mentioned earlier.

If I had to summarize Future Racer 2000, I’d say the game is a phenomenal cosmic horror story that the author struggled to think of an ending for. While the game fumbles a bit in the last quarter, it in no way fumbles hard and it doesn’t detract from the phenomenal experience of the early game. If anything, the majority of the game is done so well that it makes the slight dip in quality more noticeable, making the otherwise ok ending harder to ignore.

All things considered, Future Racer 2000 is a strong opener for developer Tim Oxton, and I hope to see more psychological horror titles from him in the future.

Future Racer 2000 was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Future Racer 2000 is available on Steam.