Recent reviews by Null Error

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

This game has great music and atmosphere, but that atmosphere is marred by the extremely poor writing, horrible fmvs, and shoe-horned in meta elements. It's like the developer managed to cram both the best and worst elements of Internet horror in a game. Great, oddly comfy horror vibes, and absolutely childish meta mechanics and philosophy.

I've been mulling over whether I would recommend this game since I finished it. There are some genuinely great aspects of the game. Why I ultimately lean no is the plagiarism. This game copies so much from other games that it, in my opinion, crosses the line from being derivative, to being ~plagiaristic, or something similar. It really is rather extreme how much of this game is lifted almost wholecloth from other games and not transformed in any creative way

Minor spoilers

I am posting this to literally beg that Supergiant does not change the difficulty of the Summit. It's my favourite area in ANY roguelike game because of how brutal it feels. It is the only moment in the two games that comes close to capturing the feeling of fighting something adjacent to a god (also after a few times it really isn't that hard, but the boss rush nature of it gives the feeling of what I described. Please, please do not change it.

The Cube commands I write a positive review, and I am not one to refuse. I in fact, would not like to be skinned alive.

Oh my god this is exactly what this game needed I'm not even joking. And it's free?? Paradox W for sure.

I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love Monster Hunter. I've been playing since 3 on the 3DS. The MH I've put the most time in was MHGU (probably 400 hours, I'm not joking). I played MH Rise when it came out on the Switch and enjoyed it a lot. I don't want to get into the whole argument between MH World and Rise. I enjoyed both a lot, for different reasons.

I love Rise, but it has a lot of flaws completely unrelated to it's actual game. You can still download the extra missions from online for Monster Hunter 3 and 4 on the 3DS, and yet they're already making some of the downloadable missions in Rise unavailable. What ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Much more egregiously, in a recent update where they changed the DRM to Enigma, it has completely bricked the support for Steam Deck. Imagine being so worried about someone decompiling your game you smash it's knees and cripple it so it can't run on linux or steam deck. They didn't even bother to check first.

So currently, I can't recommend this game. This review will probably change if Capcom fixes their ♥♥♥♥. But currently I can't recommend this game at all. Go buy a 3DS or PSP and play MH4 or Freedom Unite. There are also retro gaming handhelds that use the increasingly inexpensive ARM chips out there that can easily emulate the PSP. Or just emulate it on your PC. But don't buy this ♥♥♥♥, and don't give your money to Capcom.

Prologue: You are a developer at Blizzard, back in the 2010s. You're working on Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. The pressure is high, Starcraft Brood War quickly became the most popular esport and has continued to enjoy massive success since then. You didn't work on it, but some of your bosses did, so you trust their design chops. You work late hours, you see the progress being made. The map editor is extremely impressive. Both simple in use and filled with features. It feels like just a few steps below an entire game engine. "If they open up GalaxyScripting to the public..." you think. Warcraft 3's editor invented entire new game genres, and you can easily see someone creating an entire video game with this new editor. Crunch. Crunch. More crunch. There're issues with matchmaking that you can see won't be fixed before launch, but you know this project won't be abandoned, and you can see it's shining future. This might just be the new gold standard in the RTS genre.

Months pass...

You're working on Heart of The Swarm now, the first expansion for Starcraft 2. You hear some noise from your friends on the WoW team, they're adding a purchasable cosmetic mount, 25 dollars. It gets announced, and the WoW fanbase revolts. "This is ridiculous! You can't do this! This is going to ruin the integrity of the game!" they say, and you agree. It'll potentially lessen the in game achievements of players. You don't think it's a good idea, but you think it'll probably flop, and they higher ups will likely abandon it in the long term. They'll probably just raise the subscription price, that seems like the best choice. People who play aren't going to stop playing because of a $5 or $10 increase per month. It'll make it harder for new players to justify joining, but that seems like a problem that can be solved.

The sparkle pony is released. Things are quiet in work for a few days, not much noise. But then, you're talking to your boss, and he seems... flustered. Upset? Angry? Depressed? Worried? You're not sure, but you can tell something's wrong.

The Sparkle Pony, that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pony. It made more money in a day/a few days than *all of the revenue combined* from Starcraft 2 WoL. That doesn't seem possible, but it's true. That ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pony made more money from those stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ losers playing WoW than Starcraft 2 WoL did. All your work seems pointless. You know the guy who made the pony, he made it in a day. None of those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiots playing WoW could resist buying that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pony. Some of them lie and say they didn't when the really did. An absurd amount of money.

Disgusting. The average gamer is disgusting. It's not just whales. That's a lie the average gamer tells themselves to justify their spending. "I'm not a whale, so it's fine". ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. ♥♥♥♥ these people. You can already see it. Gaming is ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Pandora's box is open. Publicly traded corporations have a legal responsibility to their investors. Not including some form of this ♥♥♥♥ in games might literally be *illegal*. Everything's ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Today:

Diablo 4 is a Microsoft Activision Blizzard King game. What a name for a company.

It's quite a good game, actually my favourite ARPG. It strikes an extremely good balance between simplicity and complexity. People will obviously compare it to Path of Exile. Path of Exile is essentially inapproachable unless you are willing to read a build guide. In which case, you are just opting to not engage with the puzzle/tactics side of the game where you learn about your abilities, the stat systems and damage calculations, and other systems and how they interweave and how you can exploit them to create powerful builds. I'm positive if I put the effort towards it I could dismantle the build system of PoE and create some cool builds, but that would take a lot of work, that I much better put towards understanding more compelling games with consequences other than "numbers go brrrr".

I vastly prefer to approach video games without a guide (a practice which seems to unfortunately be very uncommon nowadays). This is what I think Diablo 4 does really well with. I have not read any build guides or any external material. I have spent time experimenting and figuring out how to build builds for each of the classes. Say we could define a unit of measurement to describe cognitive effort, let's call it CEP (cognitive effort points), as well as a unit of measurement to describe joy, hedonics, or valence, which we'll call VP (valence points). In Diablo 4, for every 1 CEP I receive 1 VP. Whereas in PoE, for every 1 CEP I receive .01 VP.

I've noticed this in other games as well. For example, I feel as though Slay the Spire does and extremely good job with this. If I play the game somewhat mindlessly, I have some fun. But my enjoyment and skill at the game rises greatly the more thought I put into it. At some point, there's a drop off, where the increase of enjoyment doesn't rise with CEP as much. Some people have put effort towards mathematically solving Slay the Spire, which is fascinating, but I am not as smart as those people, and I think that it would be more difficult than enjoyable for me to work on that problem. They research is fascinating to read, however.

Diablo 4, without guides, has a decent CEP/VA curve *for me*. There's too much grinding to pay attention fully the whole time, which is why I typically play while listening to a video/podcast/book, but that's expected for the genre. I suspect a lot of players who dislike the game have not tried playing the game without following a build guide, and instead trying to figure it out on their own instead the whole way through.

The art style is great, so much better than Diablo 3. The story and sidequests are great, also much better than Diablo 3. There are so many little details in the world that add to the world-building, and foreshadow future events in the story. This is the best thing the game does that I wasn't expecting. I was really surprised at how satisfying it was to explore the world and the towns and the people and their stories.

The music is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing. Even if you don't buy this game, go ahead and listen to the sound track. It's excellent. I'm a professional violinist, and I would absolutely love to someday play some of the quartet/chamber music from this game. It's excellent.

Now to the elephant in the room.

You know what? I can't blame Blizzard for adding in cosmetics. I'm tired of people just blaming the corporations for this ♥♥♥♥ being games. Yeah, Bobby Kotick is a greedy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who [[censored so I don't get in trouble]]. But also, it wouldn't be added if people didn't buy it. And it's not just a few people, it's a bunch of you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Take your sparkle pony. You earned it.

Diablo 4 is worth it. It's the best ARPG out currently. I haven't even touched Lost Ark, or how one of the most outspoken people against Diablo 4's monetization (Asmonbald) has spent more money in Lost Ark than some of his audience makes in a year. "Oh but it's for" shut up. Literally nothing justifies spending tens of thousands of dollars on a pay-to-win videogame, and any justifications are just deflection or a defense mechanism.