Routine inspection

You know it’s going to be a bad day when the company’s automated machine spits my ID right into a forgotten slot under the printer and I have to not only crouch down, but actually get down into the dust and dirt to pick it up.

I’ll soon start wishing my ID wasn’t my biggest problem on this huge, empty moon base. I’m all alone, the security system seems to treat my continued existence as a personal insult, and every screaming T5 skeleton robot in sight will happily free my skull of its contents if it catches me.

These Type-05s can rack my nerves before they even reach my skin. I’m usually alerted to their presence by the distinctive, weighty patter of their feet as they search for me, or the sight of their lasers scanning a dim hallway. They are knowledgeable enough to look around corners and open closed doors. The good news (as good as it gets with the killer robots) is that the security system can only activate one of them at any given time, although the result is metal shells standing in the halls waiting for me to dare to sneak past, praying that the one on standby doesn’t suddenly start shuddering and shaking to its full height.

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Routine handles unscripted chases and constant pressure very well, but it’s also a clever enough horror game to know when to back off. Being chased is terrifying. Classic nightmare fuel. But the constant chasing is really annoying. Here, I always have enough space to breathe, solve puzzles, and read notes to let my guard down enough to mistakenly assume that the shape in front of me is just a harmless shadow.

Just as I can never be sure how much danger I am in, I can never be sure how much health I have. There’s no readout, no red mist creeping in around the edges of the screen – I just have to hope I’m grabbed and thrown, rather than grabbed and used to repair the nearest wall. In this context, I like the lack of information. My only states are “not dead” and “dead”, which means I’m never left tediously limping around looking for first aid kits or have complete confidence that I’ll survive the next blow.

Like Alien: Isolation, Routine presents a vision of the future imagined by the past and executes it with impressive believability. There are plastic chairs, curly cables and even a store where you can rent VHS tapes. Glass is scratched, metals are pitted and dented, and bulky CRT TVs don’t always fit perfectly into cases. It takes a lot of effort and great attention to detail to make a place look as convincingly dilapidated as this one.

And even more to make it as interactive as it is here. My CAT – an astronaut assistance tool – is equipped with a series of buttons that I have to poke and press with the cursor in a tactile way. The recent features don’t just physically fit into the gun-like housing: they have their own sliders and latches to activate, and if I want to survive, I have to figure out how to manually trigger their features. Some of them can temporarily incapacitate an enemy, others are needed to gain access to security systems or reveal hidden fingerprints. Most of these uses consume some of my CAT’s miniature onboard battery, so every fuse box shorts out is one less horror movie I can temporarily turn off, and every open door eats away at my ability to see in the dim.

Substitutes scattered throughout the site facilitate offset this severe limitation. I have to be careful and pay attention to the battery indicator, but never to the point of wearily planning every action. Puzzles that require battery power to solve always –Always— have a fully charged battery nearby or a bin filled with endless recycled disposables. Thanks to the latter’s thoughtful placement, I would still be able to clear the game even if I intentionally discharged every standard battery I could find directly into the floor.

The routine is so thorough in coming up with plausible solutions to my own problems that it took me a while to get used to it and realize that all I need is something I can see or touch. That’s why I was a bit stuck at first. To log into the computer system, I had to enter an ID number. Don’t hack it or override the setting, just access a regular public terminal as you normally would. So I went to look for my ID card. I searched every room I could find. I spent ages checking rooms, looking at floors and desks. I finally realized I could just look at my spacesuit and read the numbers on my badge. The one I fished out of that crevice at the very beginning and then attached to my chest.

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I felt like an idiot, but I was also excited to see such an obvious, common-sense solution to a very familiar problem.

It’s a shame that Routine wasn’t as thorough in developing the story behind the lunar horror. The first half is filled with all the usual sci-fi hellscape tropes, a very banal kind of evil lightly covered up with cynical advertising and cute mascots. There is a visually striking false climax that ultimately leads nowhere, neither tantalizingly resolved nor triumphantly tied up. Then comes a major plot twist and a jarring genre switch, Alien awkwardly mixed with something more supernatural.

While I enjoy surprises, this change in tone unfortunately doesn’t justify its presence, and the game ultimately ends with an airless whimper instead of a substantial bang. The penniless execution of a technically good idea, and a plot that prized mystery and madness above all else, left me feeling like I was dragged in rather than naturally led to the game’s single, unsatisfying ending.

It’s a disappointing ending to a game that otherwise does a great job of balancing adrenaline-filled encounters with refreshing takes on familiar puzzles, and it’s actually not challenging to ignore these shortcomings when you’re being lifted into the air by a murderous robot. But that means that by the end, the scares have lost their teeth, and their clumsy influence fades as quickly as a shadow in torchlight.