ROUTINE - Game Review

My Steam review was 4,776 characters too long, so I'm posting the full review here.  

I originally did recommend this game, adding an explanation in my review of why I almost didn't.  However, after writing an extensive breakdown with a lot of suggestions on how it could have been improved, I decided to change my review.  I can no longer, in good conscience, recommend ROUTINE.  

It's not a bad game.  It's actually quite good, but because it failed to meet its potential in such fundamental ways I now feel that it is a lost opportunity.  It took my first review to reveal that to me.

The Good

When you buy ROUTINE you want to be scared, and you also want to be wowed by the original art style.  It does both of these things extremely well.  I'm always a fan of unique art styles (The Invincible, and The Witness to name just two) and ROUTINE really captures a unique retro "Ron Cobb's Alien" aesthetic, especially with the character's multi-tool.  Not only is the multi-tool a unique concept, it is also a constant anchor for the art style.  I.e. Every time you use it you're reminded of the type of world you're in.  It's iconic in that way.

The enemies are also terrifying, and provide a thoroughly menacing presence throughout the game. 

I was SO impressed by the original trailer that, having now completed the game, I can safely say that the game definitely delivers on what the trailer promised.  It has proper scares, with a fantastic and unique retro sci-fi aesthetic.  Nicely done.  I don't regret my purchase at all.  And if that's enough for you too, then fantastic.  I hope you have fun with it, just like I did.

However... 

The Bad

The gameplay is not what you think it is, nor is the story, and neither of these aspects were made clear in the original or subsequent trailers.   

The game embraces the fact that your character is a software engineer, so the gameplay is basically just a lot of puzzles, mostly finding four-digit access codes, and with absolutely no combat.  Then there is the story, which is very arthouse, but more on that later. 

Gameplay-wise, the game mechanics of ROUTINE are a bit of a mess.  For example, you get a flashlight that comes with an upgrade to your multi-tool, but the flashlight is secondary to the screen on your multi-tool.  This means that, when you use it, the tiny screen on your multi-tool is in focus, but the area that you're trying to see with your flashlight is out of focus.  This is incredibly impractical.  If you were a real engineer you would simply tape a flashlight to your helmet.  Job done.  (At no point during the game do you ever get a regular flashlight). 

The battery mechanic is also daft.  A battery has only three charges, which is absurd, but what's more absurd is that you don't have any pockets to put extra batteries in.  (If only I was an engineer that could find a practical solution to this).  

There are other game mechanics that allow the character to stretch high up on your tippy-toes, or crouch very low to the ground, and these actions are both incredibly under-utilised to such a degree that they are almost pointless, and I'm not sure why they're even included.   

Lastly, for a software engineer, you don't do anything that might have been what a software engineer would actually do.  For a start, you never give yourself admin rights, or bypass any security.  You don't even bring up a schematic of the base to act as a map, let alone do anything remotely.  By that I mean, it would have been nice to remotely close a door behind an enemy once it's been lured into a room, but everything the character does is all physical and requires direct input. 

The story is also not what you think it is, and it's not much of a spoiler to say that it is essentially a descent into madness.

Because the story takes this direction it allows the writers a lot more creative license to do what they want, and boy, they do.  As a result, if ROUTINE were a movie it would come across as an indie arthouse film more so than a straight-forward thriller/horror with a traditional 3-act structure.  Think more like Naked Lunch or Save The Green Planet rather than Moon or Apollo 13.  (I would have loved the game to have been more like Moon, but The Alters have already claimed that territory).  

A more arthouse story means the story is very conceptual, and "interpretive", but to me that just means that it leaves a lot of loose ends, and while that's arty, I guess, it's unsatisfying, for sure.  Judging by other reviews I've read, this story direction seems to have been a rather unpopular decision.  That's a shame because with a little extra work it could have been fantastic.  

What we're left with however are lots of things that aren't explained.  (More on this in the spoiler section).  

If you want an arthouse horror experience with a brilliant retro-lunar aesthetic then ROUTINE is your jam, and I'm very happy for you.  Expect it to be 15-20 hrs in total, but it's a one-off experience.  Once it's complete there's no incentive to replay it.  Again, it's worth the price just for the aesthetic, which is why I bought it.  The scares are just a fun bonus.  And I'll repeat, I very almost recommended this game, and I genuinely hope it does well.

Below is a deep-dive into the story for people who have completed it, so be warned, it's full of spoilers:  

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SPOILERS BELOW

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On the face of it we have the bare bones of a story, but because of the way it's told - as a descent into madness - we get very little payoff to any of the elements within it.  I.e. Nothing is really explained fully.  And it's not because we go mad before we figure out what's actually happened.  We don't work out any of the answers because they're just not there!  

For example, I wanted to know how the robots could have been affected by the creature.  What was the real reason why they turned?  Did a staff member go mad and purposely turn them on the humans?  (And why, as a Software Engineer, could I not reset them?)  What was the bacteria?  What was the flower?  What happened to the people who went into the Canal?  Seriously, what happened to them?!  This was a huge part of the story.  I also wanted to know more about how the creature came to be, and why it looked like a mutated human?  (I found it a little on the nose that the female creature died from choking on an apple as a way to clumsily re-tell the Adam & Eve story, but I digress).  There were so many questions left unanswered, but at the centre of this was the creature itself.  While it told an alien-version of boy meets girl, boy loses girl by choking on an off-world apple, it was all a little uninspiring.  

Personally, I would have preferred the creature to be a more realistic rendition of what a lunar creature might actually be like, instead of the rather generic horror creature that we got.  For instance, how about a subterranean hivemind bacteria that could change its form, and sometimes mimic our form, but is also psychic? This would explain why it's a hivemind, and how it has been defending itself against the humans after its underground lunar environment was disturbed.  Not only would this have made more sense as to what has happened, allowed the story to go in more directions, and be more fun to discover the creature's origins, but it would have been FAR scarier just because it's more believable.  Instead, the creature we ended up with was good for jump scares, but it was also a bit silly-looking.  Goofy, even.

(A subterranean hivemind bacteria could have put itself in the shape of a large puddle that you find yourself standing in the middle of.  So many possibilities).    

Getting more satisfying answers was essential for the player, especially since that was the sole purpose of us being there.  It was literally our character's job to find out.  This is why I think ROUTINE missed many opportunities to do some truly amazing things.  By making more courageous decisions with what it did with its story, and how they told it, Lunar Software could have set things up where you were a detective, but also an unreliable narrator.  Think: Shutter Island.  Not knowing what to trust, but using your technical skills to work out what was actually true.   

However, for a story that is essentially a descent into madness, it only did the bare minimum to convince us we were going mad.  While there were plenty of abstract liminal spaces to creep us out with, this does not make a satisfying or convincing unravelling of the mind.  There were no rug-pulls, no twists, no questioning of my own reality.  Nothing!  (With the single exception of a Yes / Yes option on a terminal).  

For instance, I wanted to have elements of the game that I previously came to rely on suddenly and completely collapse on me.  Imagine this:  The creature is behind me, chasing me, and I run to a terminal that is in a safe area.  I arrive, out of arm's reach from the creature.  Safe, but shaken.  I turn to the terminal and when I lift up my multi-tool I'm holding a skull.  It's a human skull!  My head screams and I black out.  I wake up in a small empty room.  In front of me is a locked door - Security Level: Death.  What does that mean?  I use my multi-tool.  It matches!  The door explodes outward!  The sudden vacuum yanks me and the door into the cold emptiness of space.  I float aimlessly, breathing fast, until I come to with a gasp, in front of the terminal I was originally trying to operate, but now my multi-tool is in my hand.  (No skull this time)  The creature is no longer right behind me.  Silence.  What just happened?  Was the creature behind me at all when I originally ran here, or was I just hallucinating it?  Is there a creature at all, or am I just going mad?  How can I get proof I saw what I saw?  Is there video footage, and if so, what will it show me?  If there is a creature, did I just suffer a psychic attack from it?  THAT'S the stuff I'm talking about.  

I wanted my mind to be rough-housed like this.  If I'm going to go insane I want to go proper kookoo for cocoa puffs insane.  

(In my version, you eventually discover a small empty room with a skull in the corner of it.  No body, just the skull.  The body is found later, but on the other side of the map).

Imagine the game purposefully trying to confuse you:  Go down a corridor only to have the corridor lead to a different room than it did before.  Doors move from where I thought they were originally.  I'm unsuspectingly locked in a repeating sequence where I keep walking down the same corridor like the game/demo PT.  Not forever, of course, but a few times, and then have it inexplicably return to normal.  I wanted to have miscellaneous objects shift places or disappear entirely when I look back at them, and then have them reappear when I look back a third time (like The Stanley Parable).  Twist my reality.  

One more:  I'm tripping out while the creature is psychically attacking me, but when I zap the creature with my multi-tool, suddenly I can see things as they really are.  The same happens when I take a photo with my multi-tool.  I get a literal snapshot of reality to help me work out what's real, similar to the flashlight in Fard.

Perhaps we work out that the creature is averse to high levels of electromagnetism, which explains why some areas of the base are safe, like around the terminals.  And the areas of the base that shift around on us the most (because we're being psychically attacked) means the closer we are to finding the creature's central nervous system.  It's only once we've worked out ways to prove something is real or not is when we can confront the creature, and...  Move it to a new location?  Kill it?  Communicate with it?  That would be up to the player.  

After I wrote out a bunch of these ideas I then had to reflect on what ROUTINE's story actually was, instead of what I would have wanted it to be, and that's why I changed my mind about my recommendation.  

The changes/suggestions I've outlined might add up to nothing more than a mod, or perhaps a semi-substantial update, or DLC.  I.e. It's perfectly do-able.  None of the above ideas would change the overall structure of ROUTINE, but it would make the overall experience more satisfying as a whole.  For whatever reason, Lunar Software decided to take things in a direction that I believe lacked the depth I was hoping for, and made decisions about its lore that could have been easily improved.  When I see a game that is technically outstanding, but doesn't reach its creative potential for nothing more than the decisions it's made with its story, I can't help but feel, "If only...".