Was it really 2023 when I looked at Future Racer 2000 for Destructoid? Yeesh. Time has lost a lot of meaning for me. I actually double-checked because I couldn’t remember if it came out before or during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Turns out; kinda after.

I wondered because Future Racer 2000 is extremely evocative of the pandemic lockdowns, a fact that didn’t really register at first glean, as obvious as it seems now. You play as someone who is quarantined in their apartment during what seems like a world-ending octopus infection. You heard me.

OCTOPARASITES

Your apartment sucks, by the way. Even turning on the TV results in the breaker for the whole building flipping. Does your landlord know you have a hotplate? Pretty sure those aren’t allowed. Worse, you can’t leave, because there’s disease outside your building, and you don’t want it.

Thankfully, someone anonymous has dropped a hot new game into your mailbox (and everyone else’s mailbox in the building), and playing it provides a decent distraction as everything around you spirals into madness. I don’t know how else to describe it except that the people around you progressively become more awful.

Tying this together is your broken heart. It’s suggested that your girlfriend went missing recently, and like the reasonable person you are, you just assume that they dumped you. Thankfully, a voice in your phone says that maybe she misses you.

I’m not explaining this very well, but Future Racer 2000 gets by mainly on vibes. It’s sort of just a fever dream situation. You can almost feel the sweat gluing your clothes to your body.

GRODY TO THE MAX

Speaking of my write-up for Destructoid, 2023 was a different time. I don’t think I clocked that it used AI-generated assets for posters and such. At that point, I didn’t realize how weird things would get with it. How it, as a technology, seems like such a net negative for society. How its existence is making the world a more miserable place. I didn’t realize how much a bunch of AI-gen posters bothered me until, in 2024, I played through it again, started a review for Maximum Utmost, and shelved it when trying to mention the AI assets just sent me into an anxious spiral.

Developer Tim Oxton maybe didn’t realize the implications of generative AI either when he created Future Racer 2000, because he recently updated it to remove all those assets. Thanks, guy, I feel much better now.

But he went beyond that. Already in 2024, he had tweaked certain aspects of the story, and while in the process of ripping out the grody gen-AI, he changed things again, and now they’re actually quite a bit different. And, honestly, the changes are a bit give and take. Not all of them are for the best.

LESS OCTOPUSSY

One thing to understand is that this is short-form horror. Aside from playing the titular in-game Future Racer 2000 and a sequence where you can actually die, it’s mostly just a walking sim that lasts around an hour.

There are a few changes in this update that stick out for me. The first is that, in previous versions, Future Racer 2000 came in this weird, octopus head-shaped console. This was replaced by a simple cartridge for an Atari 2600-looking console your character already owns. And while the cartridge makes more sense, it’s less unique, and I have difficulty believing that everyone in your apartment block owns the same console.

The original version didn’t have the heartbreak sub-plot. I think it was implemented, but still vague, the second time I played it. But for the most recent update, it’s pretty front-and-centre. While it ties your character to the events in a more personal way, I don’t love it. It’s presented sort of nebulously, which makes it difficult to really care.

However, more importantly, I think both those things I listed shift Future Racer 2000 a few notches too far back from weird. At the beginning of the previous versions, the game opens with a bizarre call from the “Census Business,” which gives you the choice of “A new video game, a new hit VHS movie, a brand-new Italian hoagie, or a year supply of medicine.” The updated version has a creepy, but more direct message that asks, “Are. You. Lone. Ly?” The original was strange, funny, and a smidge whimsical. And that smidge of whimsy was sprinkled throughout, being felt even in the bizarre octopus-themed infection sweeping the nation. The most recent version is more straight-faced, which I think damages the identity and makes its flaws a bit more noticeable.

WHIMSICAL HORROR

Certain facets of the changes suggest that Oxton was trying to patch the game’s fridge logic. That’s not something that’s necessary in whimsical horror. If you plant yourself in the ridiculous, strange lapses of logic don’t really stand out. And besides, the changes don’t get the job done.

One thing that stands out to me is the fact that the romance frames your character as female. You were always assigned the name “Sam” which is a unisex name, so I’m down. I’m pansexual and have had to subsist on a diet of heteronormality in media for most of my life, so every lesbian relationship is a plus. However, in dialogue with your friend, he sometimes refers to you as “man.” Now, as a woman, it’s not uncommon to be referred to as “man” or “dude.” It’s sort of genericized, like referring to a group as “you guys.” But, I think, in this case, it’s just because it’s still using the original dialogue and wasn’t updated. It’s not a huge issue, but I have a point that I’m getting to.

Future Racer 2000 has always been a little rough. It has been buggy. I think my initial playthrough back in 2023 omitted the first few scenes, which forced me to start over. And the current version still has a lot of weird edges to it. Mostly scene transitions that have a gluey snap to them. The text contains errors and sometimes doesn’t match the dialogue. Nothing tragic. It’s just weird to me that after so much revision, one constant has been those edges.

The changes don’t make things more cohesive. Certain scenes play out a lot better, and they tend to demonstrate that Oxton is really effective with close-ups and strange imagery. I love that Xs appear over mailboxes in the lobby signifying residents who have been infected. There are some areas that are a lot more successfully uncomfortable after the changes. But there’s still a lot of roughness.

FUSSING

I think Future Racer 2000’s latest update doesn’t make it significantly worse. It’s mostly that I don’t think anything was really solidified or improved with it. It’s still rough, just rough in different ways. And the major downside is that I feel some of the personality that I, personally, connected with has been sanded down. It’s lost a degree of playfulness without excising it completely.

I get it. I wrote a similar story in 2011 about a guy who couldn’t leave his apartment because his front door suddenly led to a frozen wasteland in a constant blizzard. It was sort of an allegory for depression. I was trying to understand this awful mental illness that has weighed me down for my entire adult life. I’ve thought about re-writing it to my current standards, but doing so would be an entirely new project, because I’m so far removed from that time. I moved on, leaving it as a depiction of the headspace I was in at that time.

My point is that, eventually, you need to stop fussing with a project. My understanding is that Tim Oxton was new to game design when he released Future Racer 2000, and as he gets more experienced, I’m sure the imperfections – even the ones unperceivable to the rest of us – glare much brighter. And that’s part of the process. Your standards always change, and hopefully improve, but it’s a strength, not a weakness, that you show your first shaky steps to demonstrate how far you’ve come.

Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I appreciate that the gen-AI art has been ripped out, but the rest of the experience should have been left alone. Still, as it stands, should you play Future Racer 2000? Yep. It’s short, it’s relatively cheap, and it still manages to be a unique horror experience in many ways.

6/10

This review was conducted on a digital Steam version of the game. It was paid for by the author.