Routine Review

I have played Routine. Not only have I played it, but I have finished it. They are words that for a long time I thought I’d never say, let alone write, given WellPlayed didn’t exist when Routine was first announced 13 years ago. Yet here we here, 12ish hours later. I’d be lying if I said that Routine has changed my life, but what Lunar Software has created is an incredibly immersive first-person sci-fi horror experience that is committed to its design, for better or worse.

Set in 1999, you play as a software engineer who has been sent to a lunar resort base known as Union Plaza to fix a malfunction with the security system. However, upon arrival you find that the station is abandoned, and the robots that once helped the residents of Union Plaza are now hellbent on eliminating anything they perceive as a threat, including you. Your task quickly becomes to survive and find out what happened to the colony.

While it’s not necessarily groundbreaking, it’s an intriguing setup for sure, even if I didn’t fully grasp what was happening every step of the way. There’s plenty of lore and backstory to uncover if you read through the emails and diary entries that can be found on terminals scoured across the facility, as well as tape recordings, notes and reports. In the back half of the game, the story changes direction somewhat, adding some supernaturalism to the mix, but if you read enough of the above, it is a little predictable and not quite as interesting as the story first promises. Still, I found myself poring over every note I could find to learn more about the facility and the decline its inhabitants suffered.

Hopefully it’s sleeping

One element that Lunar Software has nailed is the 70s/80s retrofuturistic aesthetic and immersive atmosphere. Depending on when you were born, exploring Union Plaza will be like stepping into a time machine or visiting a museum. CRTs are littered throughout the facility, with usable terminals rocking DOS-like operating systems that require you to use an on screen mouse, and there’s even a VHS store that might either remind you of Friday nights at Blockbuster or Video Ezy, or prompt you to Google what a VHS is. Lunar Software has done an amazing job of making every space of Union Plaza feel lived-in – even with the murderous Type-05 Terminator-like robots stalking the hallways. There are loads of intricate details in the environments, from the placement of items or equipment to how battered and worn things look, with Unreal Engine 5 doing a stellar job of bringing it all to life visually. Plus, the sound design, which is often simply silence accompanied by your character’s heaving breaths and cumbersome footsteps, has been meticulously composed to ensure that you feel like you’re the only one there.

Nothing showcases the retrofuturistic design than your main tool – the Cosmonaut Assistance Tool (commonly referred to as C.A.T.), which is incredibly tactile to use. It features a small hazy screen that can suffer from electrical interference, but luckily there’s a button to degauss it on the side – a function you likely won’t use much but adds another level of detail and immersion to the experience. The C.A.T. has a slider to change its function, from WiFi connectivity that lets you connect to projectors and terminals, to a general use that also allows you to fire off an electrical blast and stun your robot enemies ever so briefly. There are also two module slots that you can affix upgrades to, one being an ultraviolet light and weak torch, and another being a security interface module that unlocks doors.

Using the C.A.T. to switch between its modes is a manual task – there’s no shortcuts to speed it up – and players will need to press buttons by hovering over them, which can be extremely tense and nerve-wracking with an enemy hot on your toes. Most importantly, it needs a battery to operate, with a full battery giving three bars of juice. Each function will use varying amounts of the battery – an electrical blast will use one full bar, while others will use a smaller amount or nothing at all. You can’t carry more than the battery loaded in the device at any one time, but thankfully they’re not in short supply and are strewn all over Union Plaza, which does take most of the fear away of running out in a key moment. On the flip side, given that the C.A.T. is used for solving puzzles, you’ll never need to trudge the halls for a battery. But in saying that, the C.A.T.’s use seems to boil down to being a door unlocking tool in the second half of the game, making the device and its modules feel a little underutilised overall.

The C.A.T. of all trades

Routine’s gameplay does not hold your hand – a badge of honour it openly wears on its Steam page. There are no waypoints or yellow paint to guide you, instead, moving forward relies on exploration and intuition, forcing you to figure it out for yourself. There’s a lot of merit in this design, especially for a horror title, but where Routine shoots itself in the foot a little is the lack of a hands-on tutorial, instead requiring you to read through a brief manual about how to use the C.A.T., something which I clearly didn’t do. I’m not proud to admit that I got stuck in the first area for about an hour because I didn’t realise you had to connect to a projector, and there were a handful of moments like these throughout the game, where objectives or puzzle solutions felt a little too vague.

The only way you can see your objective is by connecting to a WiFi Access Point, which also allows you to save your game. These are purposefully spread out across the game, and you won’t go too long without coming across one. For the most part, puzzles are logical – almost too logical in fact, as one asks for your ID number, which you can find by simply looking down at your chest, and I bet a high amount of people spent longer than they would admit looking for it.

All of this must be done while avoiding the Type-05 robots and enemies that are eager to end your existence, and this part of Routine is genuinely terrifying, at least at first. Much like other games of the same ilk (Soma, Alien: Isolation), Routine is a hide-and-seek stealth experience where you have no way of defending yourself. The Type-05s will search the hallways for you, even opening doors if they suspect you’re there. If you remain out of their way for long enough they will go to sleep, but sneaking past these machines knowing that one could awake at any moment is truly heart-pounding stuff.

Say cheese and stun

Eventually though, you start to learn how to avoid them with relative ease. There are rooms that they can’t or won’t enter, and they won’t follow you under desks if you’re out of arms reach or inside vents. If one does happen to catch you, it’s not game over, as it will throw you a safe distance away, giving you a chance to escape. But if it does grab you a second time in a short span of time, you’re done for. As mentioned, the back half of the game changes things, and while there are moments that might make you wish you were sitting on a toilet, you adapt and can avoid being spotted.

One gripe here though is that the game has a live pause menu, meaning that you’re never actually paused and are vulnerable to attack if you’re not in a safe spot. I understand why Lunar Software has chosen this design but I don’t think it’s necessary in a linear single-player game.

Final Thoughts

The expectations on a game 13 years in the making to deliver are unfairly high, especially given that Lunar Software had to start from scratch again at some point. But Routine shows very few, if any, signs that this is a game that has suffered any form of development challenges, with the studio clearly committed to its retrofuturistic vision. It doesn’t always pay off, but I enjoyed it and was impressed at how immersive and detailed the atmosphere was, and despite the story’s vague and somewhat unsatisfying ending, I still wanted to know all I could about Union Plaza’s residents. No doubt fans of sci-fi horrors will find a lot to love, while others may find its design frustrating, but Routine is a trip to the moon worth taking.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s review policy and ethics