ROUTINE has been a long time coming. Not that I would have known, or at least realized. Watching old trailers from its 2012 reveal didn’t help me remember whether I had seen the trailer at the time (at first). In the decade-plus since Lunar Software put out its first trailers, I had entirely forgotten about them and ROUTINE’s development when I started playing through this new-old horror game.

Needless to say, I had a lot of questions when I started. First of which being ‘what took so long.’ According to Aaron Foster, ROUTINE’s art director and project lead at Lunar Software, in an interview with IGN, it was just personal reasons. They had to stop working on the game, and only came back to it in 2020, eight years after ROUTINE was one of the highlights of Gamescom 2012.

Lunar Software also essentially had to start from scratch. It couldn’t exactly keep making the game in Unreal Engine 3 if it wanted to stand out on modern platforms. So the decade-plus since reveal isn’t down to development hell, just regular life reasons, and then needing to essentially restart and overhaul the whole thing. Altogether, you’d probably be more accurate in saying ROUTINE took about six or seven years, instead of fifteen.

But anyone who does remember the 2012 Gamescom trailer has been waiting for fifteen years. So, has it been worth the wait? Well, I can’t answer that question because even after eventually remembering that I did see the trailer when it first debuted, I haven’t spent the last fifteen years wondering where ROUTINE is. So, from where I’m sitting, I’m just so goddamn glad we have another horror game shooting for, and frankly, nailing, all of the same targets Alien: Isolation was aiming for.

I’m not going to spend the entire review comparing ROUTINE to Alien: Isolation, but the comparison is, at least partially, unavoidable. Part of this comes from how both games strive for a retrofuturistic aesthetic, with ROUTINE showcasing the best VHS-era designs Lunar Software makes pass for technology capable of bringing you to the moon and maintaining a base there for years.

Besides some of the practical facts like both games forcing you to hide from all manner of enemies and both games featuring robots, what invites the comparison to Alien: Isolation is the unique ways in which Lunar Software builds a dense, rich atmosphere in ROUTINE. Little details like how you seamlessly transition from looking around to interacting with the many terminals you’ll need to use to read the emails and diary entries that contain the core of the game’s storytelling make the world feel all the more real.

Or how the game takes the very old-school approach and gives you absolutely no help at all. No waypoints, no map markers; you can’t even use the only tool you have in the game while crouched, which also means you can’t use a flashlight. You’re meant to slow down, to remember your limitations, and try to use your own common sense to solve the many, many puzzles that you’ll have to work your way through across six chapters.

It’s almost funny in a way that ROUTINE arrives over a decade later than it would have if Lunar Software didn’t have to pause for personal reasons, and in that same year, Rouge Faction tries to front the same ‘no hand-holding’ philosophy for Hell is Us. And ROUTINE does it better in almost every way. I’d still say Hell is Us might be the better game overall, but there’s a simplicity to ROUTINE that makes its environmental guidance work so well that I was never truly lost.

I’m getting ahead of things here. Backing up a bit, ROUTINE opens with you waking up on a lunar base to find that everyone is gone – or dead, and you have to figure out which it is if you don’t want to end up the same way. Once you get yourself situated with how to bend down and grab something on the floor (a mechanic that is singled out in the early game and grossly underused afterwards), upon walking out your room door, you notice there are some pretty heavy-duty robots walking around.

These are Type-05s, or ‘T5s’ for short. You learn through the aforementioned emails, diary entries, and more than a few voice recordings found at key intervals that these robots used to help run the base, and now they’ve started killing all the humans in it for some mysterious reason.

I’m not going to get much deeper into the plot for spoiler reasons. Not because the plot is central to the core experience. Unfortunately, I found the general plot of the game difficult to follow, not just because of the disjointed way in which it was told, but because you’re liable to take well over an hour in any given chapter, and because you can’t go back and re-read/re-listen to the emails, diary entries, a voice notes that tell the story, it’s easy to forget where you are in it.

It’s especially easy to forget all the little lore details that are trying to clue you in on what’s going on underneath the surface. It’s all very interesting, and I’m looking forward to playing ROUTINE again to pay more attention to these aspects, but it’s difficult to keep track of in a first playthrough, because you have to keep track of all the practical elements you see.

You begin to learn your way around the base and the few levels you get to see of it, since you’ll be running around them enough times, hiding from your would-be killers at every corner. The constant game of hide-and-please-don’t-seek-me in the circles you create in each area as you solve puzzles to unlock new elements of the environment actually felt a bit overwhelming at times. It can also create a frustrating loop where you can’t figure out where to go next because you don’t have time to look around and you don’t have time to look around because you’ll get caught and die if you’re focusing on looking around and not hiding but if you want to survive you have to hide but then you’re not looking around and not figuring out where to go etc.

But you only stay in that loop for as long as you allow yourself to. ROUTINE is balanced by the fact that anything looking for you will give up relatively easily if you hide, and while there are many robots to be found in the abandoned base, only one of them is active at a given time, so you’re not just bombarded by enemies you can’t kill. The second method feels cleverer than the first, especially because it’s something you have to figure out based on the robot’s actions, but both together get the job done, so no complaints there.

Finding your way around is only one of the puzzles you’ll constantly be asked to solve in ROUTINE. This game is filled with puzzles, but some of the smaller, more contained puzzles are far more interesting than their large-scale siblings, and most of those bigger puzzles that involve multiple steps are more about tedium than they are interesting puzzle-solving.

At least there’s a lot going on as you run back and forth between terminals to try and unlock a specific door because, my goodness, this is such a thrilling horror game to play. ROUTINE is a tense game, for almost every second you’re on the moon. It’s a huge amount of emotional pressure to sustain for ten hours, but its unrelenting nature without being overly drawn out is what makes all ten of those hours the most tense you’ll feel from a horror game in 2025.

As a horror fan, I can’t help but feel electrified by just how terrifying ROUTINE is. Its jump scares are thoughtfully placed, its visual design is wonderfully retro, and I’d argue it’s best enjoyed at a lower resolution than you’d play most modern games, almost made to look like you’re playing a game off of a VHS.

What cinches it all, like any other classic horror game, is the soundtrack. DOOM, Prey, and Wolfenstein composer Mick Gordon and the rest of Lunar Software’s audio team deserve all the credit in the world for creating an extremely terrifying soundscape. From the heavy thuds of T5s walking, to the ways their necks creak with sounds of old technology, not to mention the sounds they make while scanning their environment, and of course, the sounds they make during your death scene.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X (code provided by the publisher).

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8.5

WCCFTECH RATING

ROUTINE