ROUTINE

Cool idea and fun using the tool to interact with, but feels half baked (took me about 6 hours dragging my feet on some end of game puzzles) with underutilized mechanics, a cookie cutter story that had me imagining way more horrifying things than there actually were. Story is a big nothing burger that feels like a waste of time. One of the final chapters lead to ALOT of backtracking between routing power between doors in a giant maze-like section, which could easily be circumvented by, oh I don't know, giving the player a map. By halfway, I started to realize this game didn't have many more tricks up it's sleeve beyond the first hour and by then I just wanted it to end. Normally, I LOVE puzzle horror centric games, they are my ♥♥♥♥, but not here. Wait for >50% off

All this game has is an incredibly impressive visual style. Oh, and the gun is an interesting feature. Enemies are stupid and can't even get you if you hide under a table right in front of them. They are spooky looking and sounding, but hardly all that dangerous. But they are omnipresent and it feels like a constant chase, or constant hiding. Batteries for the only gun are absolutely everywhere and respawn quickly, but cannot be collected in advance. Only 1 battery at any moment. Better remember where you saw them if you need a recharge. Shooting enemies is only useful in a pinch. It is easier to take a hit and run away, as only the second hit kills, and enemies are only stunned for a short while. Oh, and there is no health system, you just need to make sure you don't get hit a second time too soon. Game is littered with bugs. Some minor visual ones, and more serious gameplay ones. For example, at one point I managed to accidentally delete all enemies from the location by simply opening and closing a door. Or, another example, a game had me locked with an enemy chasing me, and upon hitting me, he pushed me through the locked door, eliminating the need for me to open it myself in some kind of puzzle. All in all, beautiful game, but repetitive and buggy gameplay with a few weird game design choices. I expected a new Alien Isolation, and got a singleplayer Dead by Daylight.

[h3]終わりなき生命の営み[/h3] 月面基地で異常事態が発生し、そこへ調査に来たエンジニアが主人公。周囲の環境を観察しながら謎解きをして、障害を取り除いていくアドベンチャーホラー作品。 次にやるべきことが常にUIで表示されたりはしない。いま自分はどこにいて、次はなにをやるべきかをきちんと考えないと先へ進めないシステムとなっており、謎解きが面白かった。とはいえ、端末でタスクを確認すると最低限の目的が表示されるので不親切というわけでもない。ただ、一部の謎解きは何枚もスクリーンショットを取って比較しないと解けないレベルの複雑さで、特定のアイテムを拾って持ち歩ける仕様にした方が良いと感じた。 マップの作り込みが凄まじいが、そのせいで重要なアイテムが小道具に紛れて見落とすことが多々有り、無駄な時間を費やすことがあった。その体験はリアルといえばリアルなのだが……。 敵との追いかけっこやかくれんぼが何度か発生するが、難易度はそれほど高くなく、恐怖感を演出する為の存在として機能している。あまり難しくても雰囲気をぶち壊すだけなのでちょうど良いバランス。 物語はAIの暴走から未知との遭遇を比喩で包んだようなサイエンスホラー、切り口次第でいくらでも解釈できるが答えははっきりと明示されない。後半のページを半分破り捨てたリング三部作&天使の囀りのような、もやっとしたものが残った。 80年代のレトロSFを髣髴とさせる小道具、月面基地の偏執的なまでの作りこみは圧巻。敵が居ない場面でも常に不安を与えるような圧迫感。この空間を歩き回れるだけで買う価値は十分にあった。

One of those games that I wish there was a mixed option on reviews. There are excellent, mastercrafted things in this game. The sound design is pure terror, I truly never felt safe anywhere in my 8 hour play time and that is in large part due to how the sound is made in this game. Every creak, groan, drip and electrical sound feels organic, it makes the environment feel alive and hostile. The graphics and the 80s retro future aesthetic are also fully realized, with the CAT tool and even the grainy VHS like feel of your perspective. However, aesthetics and vibes can only take you so far, how does it play? It's serviceable. My main pet peeve is that you move. So. Freaking. SLOW! It's a painful snail's pace, there's a sprint but you can't use it for long. There is "combat" but it's almost not worth bringing up. You manage batteries (with no inventory) to (temporarily) disable horrific looking robots with a glorified taser. The CAT is an interesting take on a multi-tool, you have to actually press individual buttons to interface with it, making it realistic and a bit tense, but it is not used to even half of its potential and mechanics are dropped entirely at points. The puzzles are okay, simple enough to not make me want to look up a guide, while being stimulating enough to make me feel like I'm a smart cookie for figuring it out. The main criticism I have for this game is that it feels disjointed and doesnt flow/mesh well. It feels like there are 2 different games, the first half feels like an Alien Isolation clone, while the second half is much more interesting, yet somehow EVEN LIGHTER on actual gameplay mechanics. It just feels incongruent to each other. There is a story, and you're going to have to watch a youtube video to understand it. The bulk of it is told through terminals and audio/video logs. Overall, I didn't hate this game, but I hesitate to recommend it because I feel like there is not enough substance to this game to justify its price. I do not recommend this at $25. Even if you like the genre, and find the premise and aesthetic appealing, be cautious with this one.

This was a really interesting game. I'm gonna give it like... 9.7/10. As a horror game, as an aesthetic, as a narrative I'm still reeling from, it is just a really odd and elating experience that I'm now going to try to describe in some human detail - so, spoilers. The atmosphere at every moment is desolate, isolated and confused. You will regularly be tasked with going down dim, unfamiliar corridors and performing some task while enemies lurk in unknown places. It's scary, but in kind of an unconventional sense? Even when you know there are no enemies around - or, better, know enemies are around, and how to deal, duck and weave around them - there's this serious undertone that you are never truly in control. Every footfall is laborious and heavy, every run is a stomp, every second marked by a breath, every frame datamoshed into a blurry, semi-lit pixelation. This is a game where even sure odds are never all that sure, and playing it feels so strict and mechanical. I love to run in horror games because running is a sure way to get ahead of enemies, but these narrow halls, peering into a miniscule CRT screen, navigating simultaneously futuristic and anachronistic technology, begging to hit right for the eyes the first time, knowing you only have so much battery in the CAT - it is a transcendently anxious experience. The story rules! It is a very unclear but pretty comprehensible narrative. You play some [some guy], doing [whatever], in order to basically just... move forward. There's an odd amount of distance between you and the character you're navigating as, where his goals are always marked, but the resolutions, the goals themselves, don't seem entirely clear. When your character marks that "The Canal needs me", there is an intentional ambiguity as to what that means or what that entails. Right up to the end of the game, you have no idea what is actually happening or why. Yes. You will wander down the same 9 hallways, look at the same 5 terminals, read the same 12 messages and look at the same 8 doors with utter confusion for hours on end. The brain-wracking parts of the game where there are no enemies and you are free to explore are simultaneously the most boring parts of the game, and, by far, the most intriguing. Like, I have enjoyed the boredom of wandering down nominally spooky halls with no enemies to deal with, for the sheer fact of trying to figure out which doors to open to get to what puzzles. ROUTINE doesn't just mess with the player's internal concepts of control, but it confuses what our idea of control actually is. Are we in control when we choose to sprint from one corner of a space station to another and back 18 times just to figure out what we were supposed to do in the same terminal we've crossed countless times prior? If so, does it mean we have given up all or some control when we finally make progress and close in further inevitably to the next enemy encounter? These are not nominal questions - you can feel that anxiety every step of the way in this game. You can feel yourself dreading the inevitable enemy encounters you know are coming, even as you yearn for progress. I found myself wanting to independently solve the puzzles, even as I grew more enxious and worried about the next encounter. The story is kind of... vignette. I think that's a fitting term, as you don't exist in a specific place or time. You don't exist on a day or coordinate, you exist on "the moon" in "1977", with your only real character qualities being, "astronaut". As such, there is the aforementioned distance created further between the player and their character - but more than that, this enhances a chronologically confused span of time through the course of the experience, and every step is less a step into a structured and recognizable place, but more a mark of progress into a maze that looks like a rusty silo. This makes thinking about the game just all the more intriguing. ROUTINE is the least fitting possible name for a game where nothing is familiar or controllable, yet it begs the player to consider the actual character's place in the events unfolding here. Is the pollen on the moon something horrible? Is it what caused the people there to dehydrate to death? Why does my character teleport in and out of space seemingly randomly? Why, by the end of the game, do I see a pod open up, and another astronaut rising out of it in a field of pollen? Why does this game draw my attention so intensely and deliberately to this substance? The game has an extremely strange sense of ambivalence at all times and that ambivalence makes every death, jumpscare, dark hole you climb into and DeimOS terminal just a satisfying detour from trying to figure out what we're actually doing trying to open up a big hole on the moon to walk into. It's use of symbols, of its' monster enemy, the way it builds up this enemy in the cassettes, the way it stares longingly at a tape recording of its' dead half-mother, it reminds me not of a story with an extremely clear structure and narrative, it reminds me that looking for answers is a difficult and scary process. It provides a kind of experience where wandering is both rewarding and pointless. It is a grim and hostile world, but you can still feel something your character never gets - and, in a strange way, that feeling is pathos. You were lost in a place with control over so little, and managed to have so little answered, but being satisfied with what you got to see was the journey. You have to be satisfied with having given comfort to something that probably killed you several times by the end, something fast and only loud enough to really be sure of its' position when it's still near you, which brutally instakills with even a slight slip-up - and I'm reminded that that kind of pathos is enough for me. I'm still having trouble understanding this game, but it is genuinely such a good time making progress. Prepare for a lot of walking, wandering, thinking, maybe even looking stuff up, and confusion. The game is very good at using a wandering mind and you should embrace the peace of boredom and the intensity of enemy encounters, as it treats both with a lot of care and it is very interested in how to convey ideas without people to speak them. 9.7 out of 10, just an absolute must-play.

The puzzles are ruining the game and it genuinely makes the game unenjoyable. There is no way they spent 10 years working on this game just to make people rage quit because of puzzles (I gave up at chapter 4 Kali's Locker Puzzle) and sad thing is that I was enjoying the scary parts of the game, jumpscares are actually scary, the monster is scary, story is cool and I found this game unique, but I am stuck and have to uninstall the game because of a stupid ass puzzle. I wish that at least they'd added an easy mode that at least gives us players more hints and make it more like a tense walking simulator, and players who wants to suffer with the puzzles could still play it as it's original mode but i guess they didn't want just anyone to finish the game.

Шикарный визуал и стиль, отличный звук и интересная история в оболочке крайне атмосферного хоррора. Игра точно понравится любителям Soma, Penumbra, Alien, Signalis и т.п.

Es un excelente juego que destaca por su inmersión y su confusa historia. Sí bien siguen siendo un simulador de caminata, todo el tiempo te mantiene tenso, confuso y solo. La manera de resolver los puzzles son fascinantes, pues no hay nada que dé indicios o pistas, pero la solución siempre está ahí. Me recuerda mucho a Alien Isolation, por la tensión y la inmersión. No está enfocado en la acción, pero no por es un mal juego.