2025 continues to be a gift that keeps on giving for the gaming world. We’ve been having a blast with Routine, an indie first-person horror experience that has had a long and arduous journey to its final release. We’d given up hope of ever seeing this one actually make it to the shelves, so its excellence becomes all the more special as a result.
But what happened over the course of the thirteen years since the game was first announced? How much has it changed in the process? What’s so special about it that has us quite excited to make it to at least one of its endings before the holidays are done?
We’re going to dive into all of that, showing you why this one’s worth your attention if you’re a fan of horror titles or games that get very immersive indeed. Join us as we examine a title that has been quite a pleasant surprise.
A Warm Welcome
When we first heard of Routine, it was at Gamescom 2012, and it seemed like a very interesting title at the time. It brought a lot of familiar elements from the best of media in the horror genre to a passion project that saw its lead designer, Aaron Foster, set out to bring his childhood passions together into an experience, and Lunar Software was born once he began to expand his team.
Taking place on the Moon, Routine puts you in the shoes of a nameless protagonist trying to piece together a series of events on a desolate base, braving sentient robots that seem quite insistent on preventing you from going any further. We’re going to dive into why it’s as good as we think it is in just a bit, but before that, let’s take a look at why it’s taken thirteen long years for the game to make its way to its players.
Although things were looking good for Routine following its 2012 announcement, it was hit by what would be the first delay in a long line of them. Nearly four years and multiple announcements of delayed release windows later, 2016 finally gave the game a March 2017 release date. We were as excited back then as we are now to play a game that looked so darn good in all of its promotional materials.
But another blow came to eager fans in April 2018, with the developers expressing dissatisfaction with the narrative’s endings, and further delaying the game’s release. With the team unable to agree on a mutually acceptable option, Routine would be on a very long hiatus until development would resume in 2020. With a lot of the funding for the project coming from within the team, financial constraints would also be a factor at this stage.
The game shifted to Unreal Engine 5 once its development resumed, a move that seems to be the right one based on our time with its early hours. The rest is now old news. The game was announced once again in 2022 at the Summer Games Fest and is finally in our hands.
Sci-Fi Scares
The desolate station you explore in Routine is quite a nasty place. But it’s also a world that’s been cleverly designed to balance scares with a good amount of interactive elements that make exploration a fairly unpredictable experience that does play it safe in order to ensure optimal balancing, but does a good job of keeping you on your toes nonetheless.
It took me a while to get into the habit of keeping my eyes peeled as I carefully made my way through the adventure. That’s because the station’s security system really doesn’t like you and sends its robots to remove you from the board. Although I was initially relieved to know that it could activate only one robot at a time, my elation was short-lived.
That’s because you never know when and where it could choose to activate a robot. Coupled with procedurally generated levels, that’s a recipe for a game of cat and mouse that decidedly places you in the latter role, and at quite the disadvantage. It’s enough to make the sound of robots’ thumping footsteps set your pulse racing as you try to find a way to safely mitigate the threat they pose.
With no HUD and permadeath being an ever-present problem that’s always a nagging thought at the back of your mind as you try to make sense of the world around you, Routine doesn’t shy away from defying mainstream traditions despite being the first release after a very turbulent period for the studio.
It’s clear in its vision, which is to present an unforgiving world that seems hell-bent on preventing you from uncovering the secrets it’s trying to hide. Even the tools it gives you in its attempt to even the odds require a lot of strategy to be effective against your enemies, and its limited battery capacity means you’re going to want to have a contingency plan in place whenever you decide to use it in battle.
However, Routine could have easily fallen prey to a frustrating loop of gathering enough supplies to make a run for your next objective, with failure resulting in some tedious farming as a result. However, the things you need to proceed are never quite far from you, but finding them requires some diligence on your part.
The gameplay loop in Routine is thus suitably tense and fraught with enough peril to make playing through the adventure a riveting, satisfying experience that’s helped along with some excellent art direction and creative flourishes.
An Unreal World
The Moon was always going to be the stage for this adventure, being an area of fascination for Foster and also a location that could convey a sense of loneliness and desolation in the wake of a series of unfortunate events that the player must uncover. While the jury is still out on how the story ultimately plays out, we’re certainly enjoying taking it one painstaking step at a time. But each of those steps feels so immersive thanks to the game’s retro yet futuristic art direction that really sells the material it’s working with. The enemy designs are also suitably impressive, the robots’ raw speed, size, and strength being evident in the way they toss your player around like a ragdoll if you’re unfortunate enough to let one catch you.
You truly feel vulnerable thanks to how well the experience is presented, the lack of any sort of indicators about your health being a superb touch that makes it all feel very real from moment to moment. On the presentation and visual fronts, this one is definitely a winner. The audio design is similarly good, with heavy silences being broken by the sound of your next encounter so suddenly you can’t help but jump.
The level design is another highlight, with enemies so cleverly hidden away, lying dormant until they are called upon to make your day as miserable as they can manage. It helps that said enemies are quite smart, hunting you down with unerring precision and invading hiding spots with clinical efficiency in their quest to put a premature end to your playthrough.
The entire vibe in Routine comes together quite well, making you feel like even the slightest of errors can have you on the backfoot since death comes with very real consequences. By choosing to make the gameplay loop as intense as it has, Lunar Software has crafted an experience that’s largely been worth the wait.
It makes you hold your breath as you carefully make your way past a dormant automated monstrosity, hoping against hope that it isn’t going to power up and give chase. Just when you think you’ve managed to get away with your espionage, you’re set upon by another, entirely new one that you failed to spot since its buddy was holding your attention.
It’s a game that feels like it’s been worth a thirteen year wait. And that’s saying something for a game that languished in development hell for so long. It’s rare for such titles to turn out okay, and for one to be as great and entertaining as Routine currently is, there were clever decisions made and implemented quite well.
Those decisions seem to have paid off, and we’re hoping that Routine continues to enthrall us as we take on more of its challenges and threats. We’re also wondering if 2025 has any more gems hidden under its sleeve as a year of great games draws to a close.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
