DaRmaZat Thirteen years is a long time to keep a cosmic nightmare alive. But it’s exactly the amount of time after which Routine finally crawls out of development limbo as a first-person sci-fi horror experience set on a deserted lunar base imagined straight from an ’80s vision of the future. You explore, observe, and survive against unknown threats, armed with nothing but a pocket-sized piece of Space Race tech, in a lunar station that once bustled but now only whispers questions from cold white metal…
A Multifunctional C.A.T.
What happened here? I really wanted to know, and my curiosity, combined with my interest in space/lunar environments and hunger for exploration, powered those first steps on the moon. Unfortunately, before long, Routine’s survival elements began to undermine the experience for me.
Clearly, Routine’s earliest moments deliver the game’s strongest highlights. Union Plaza — the base station with its facilities, deteriorating corridors, and that stark sea of lunar rock outside the windows — builds atmosphere not through exposition dumps, but through restrained world-building. It’s definitely a cool idea — that mandatory facilities survey that prints an ID card after you rate the place, as if bureaucracy kept going long after everyone vanished. This kind of immersive realism carries over into movement as well. Standing on tiptoes to peek over objects, dropping fully flat to retrieve a fallen ID card, physically interacting with buttons and consoles — it’s all deliciously tactile. The puzzles follow the same principle: logical, grounded, never overly complex, but refreshingly off-center.
Your journey eventually leads deeper into the lunar station’s darker, eerier halls, but not before you discover the C.A.T., the Cosmonaut Assistance Tool — a wonderfully tangible gadget with its slide-projector interface and batteries to match. It unlocks doors, reads data, reveals fragments of backstory, and even doubles as a weapon — the kind of practical, believable tech that confirms some really smart people once lived and worked here. Their absence gives every click and whirr a haunting weight, an emptiness almost as beautiful as the sun outside. Until…
Robotic Loops That Crush the Fun
Once the Type-05 robots wake up, Routine collapses into your typical survival stealth-and-run game. These predatory chrome stalkers roam nearly every area, and once death reloads the checkpoint, they barrel straight back toward you, making the act of solving anything nearly impossible. There is hardly any breathing room. No space to think. No way to enjoy the clever puzzle design, because every discovery becomes a sprint backward to escape an enemy too stubborn to give up.
Stunning them with the C.A.T. only buys a few shaky seconds — enough time to realize you’ll need new batteries again. And again. And again. Yes, my progress immediately stalled as soon as these metal brutes entered the picture. Stealth offers no salvation, fighting is a joke as it merely stuns them briefly, and once cornered, a couple of violent smacks end it all. Frustration isn’t horror — and here it becomes the dominant emotion.
The abrupt disappointment is amplified by the fact that the game cannot even be paused. In a horror experience based on careful observation and slow tension, this actively undermines enjoyment. Routine whispered me a tempting promise of Alien: Isolation, but in practice it’s one without the intelligence that made its encounters terrifying yet still manageable, leaving me with tedious and exasperating moments instead.
Photo-Real, Physical Fear Exposed Too Heavy-Handed
Visually, Routine stands as a haunting marvel, though. Through grainy found-footage filters and sharp Unreal Engine assets, the retro-futuristic base looks absolutely photo-real. The absence of UI deepens the sense of immersion — apart from the robots, it’s just you, your breath, and the dark.
The atmosphere is also masterfully conveyed through pitch-black corridors, disturbed CRT screens, the metallic groans of pressure hulls, robotic footsteps pacing the void-like halls, and the huffing strain while crawling through vents. Yes, Routine nails the physicality of fear. That’s exactly why it’s all the more a shame that it too often wastes that fear by revealing its hand — an iron fist too eager to punch you to death right away.
Final Thoughts
Routine seduced me with a cold fascination lingering in every corridor of the space station, delivering a mood of isolation and implications larger than the game ever answers. When it succeeds in focusing on suggestion over confrontation, the game becomes truly gripping. Unfortunately, that state never lasts long before another chrome fist crashes into your hopes. Wonder, fear, and frustration walk side by side here — and, sadly, not always in the right order.
Additional Information
Release Date: Dec 4, 2025
Reviewed On: PC. Download code provided by the publisher and PR agency.
Developer: Lunar Software
Publisher: Raw Fury
Relevant links: ROUTINE on STEAM
