Cracking sci-fi horror Routine escapes a decade of development hell as a great reminder that patronising game design can do one

There’s a bit early on in Routine where your progress is blocked by a blinking computer terminal demanding your personal ID number. I was stumped; maybe because I’ve been so coddled by modern gaming’s frequent insistence on eradicating all but the most minor of friction points that – without a conspicuous Post-it note secreted in the immediate vicinity, a blatant on-screen objective marker to beckon me onward, or (sigh) a chatty companion ready to spit out the answer four seconds in – I wasn’t sure how to proceed. And then it hit me. Not 20 minutes earlier, I’d explicitly printed out my own ID card and pinned it to my chest – all the game wanted me to do was look down.

I might have been an idiot at that moment, but Routine is a wonderful reminder of how satisfying games can be when they’re not treating you like one. Not that there aren’t plenty of modern games that have faith in their audience. Rather, Routine has a particularly old-school, just-get-on-with-it vibe that feels especially uncommon these days; one it’s tempting to ascribe to its decade-plus time in development hell. Lunar Software, you might recall, first announced Routine back in 2012, before the first-person sci-fi horror succumbed to frequent radio silence and countless delays. But honestly, its hands-off approach feels reminiscent of an even more distant past, and is so deeply embedded in its bones, so intrinsic to its soul, it’s far more likely this is just the old-school spirit Lunar Software always had in mind.

It is, though, hard to talk about Routine without referencing some of the things – specifically the game-shaped things – that have happened during its lengthy development. Aside from its obvious movie touchpoints – the occasional psychedelia of 2001: A Space Odyssey and its clear debt to Alien – it also echoes everything from the grimy, psychological sci-fi of Frictional Games’ 2015 horror SOMA to, most notably, Creative Assembly’s stellar Alien: Isolation.

Partly, it’s the vibe; Routine’s familiar tale of ancient influences and rogue AI takes place on a retro-futuristic lunar resort where lo-fi 80s tech lends proceedings an anachronistic flavour that feels displaced in time. This is a world where sleek transportation trains display adverts for VHS recorders on chunky CRT screens, and where Terminator-like robots exist alongside game arcades. But more than that, Routine shares Isolation’s specific love of physicality, its panicked pursuits, and its deliberate mechanical precision. But it’s to the game’s credit that, for all its familiarity, it still generates an ambience that feels of its own.

And, yes, a lot of that comes down to its approach. There’s a flow to its events – to the way it’s willing to present its spaces and then just let players use their initiative to muddle through – that feels wonderfully organic. Routine isn’t, to be clear, a sandbox game or immersive sim, but even so, progress along its tightly prescribed path still manages to feel personal. Early on, for instance, you encounter a roadblock requiring two specific pieces of information. A bit of additional investigation reveals you’ve access to two distinct locations: the mall and the resort’s residential quarters. How you proceed from there is up to you.

That gives Routine a strong exploratory focus, and bit by bit, as you scour abandoned personal effects and computer terminals loaded with employee emails, you’ll hone in on recurring motifs and insinuations that form a gentle breadcrumb trail. Sure, progress remains strictly linear, but by opting for suggestion over heavy handed urgency, there’s a lovely sense of reward. And more than that, it contributes to Routine’s keen sense of verisimilitude. It’s sterile, sci-fi spaces might be eerily liminal, but they still feel lived in, while its email conversations are authentic, and the occasional voice work is naturalistic in a way that brings Still Wakes the Deep to mind. And its strong sense of physicality takes that even further. I adore its convincingly fussy crouch animation, for instance, and the lumbering, somewhat uncontrollable gait of your run. But Routine’s real star is the Cosmonaut Assistance Tool.

Your C.A.T. is just fabulous, a gun-like maintenance device whose various buttons and modules require frequent physical manipulation. You’ll need to manually degauss its tiny screen when it succumbs to magnetic interference, and you’ll slide levers and flick open flaps to switch between its functions. On this front, you’ve an electrical pulse used to overload machinery, a security interface for opening doors, and more, all utilising its laggy, lo-res viewfinder, whose feeble torch proves to be the perfect tension-heightening contrivance when the lights falter. And it also serves as a vital – if comically impractical – PDA, whose save functionality, objective reminders, and information archive are only accessible after connecting it to one of Routine’s relatively infrequent projection screens. It’s fiddly in a way that feels designed to stop it from becoming a crutch, and also means it can’t be abused when the horror comes.

And yes, Routine does horror well too. Admittedly, I’m not finished yet, and its latter portion feels different enough that its scare mechanics might well evolve – but its opening hours are wonderfully, unbelievably stressful. In another echo of Alien: Isolation, this time in its Working Joes, your primary foes are the lunar resort’s security bots. These hulking machines are a relentless presence, their clanking footsteps reaching a frantic crescendo once they get you in their sights and take up pursuit. They’re a bit dim, yes – they’ll immediately lose interest if you hide under a table – but they contribute to an opening half absolutely defined by teeth-clamping tension and panic as you creep and careen around unfamiliar locations, desperately trying to make a mental map for exploration. And the fact you’re left to your own devices to figure out how to deal with them is even more intimidating.

Right now, I’m somewhere new, juggling an expansive navigational problem that frankly feels far too big to fit in my brain, and I’ve resorted to doodling my own map with notes to keep track of it all – something I’ve not felt compelled to do outside of an intentionally obtuse puzzle game in a long time. Routine isn’t obtuse (although I did fail to realise a sequence was bugged for over an hour because I’d assumed I was overlooking something), but it’s hands-off in a way I admire and slightly miss. Am I masochistic enough to demand we purge video games of all modern-day niceties? That we jettison objective markers, mini-maps, and more? Absolutely not, but Routine is a lovely throwback and an unexpected breath of fresh air.