Early into your investigation of the dilapidated, retrofuturistic moonbase at the center of Routine, you get the Cosmonaut Assistance Tool (C.A.T.). Chunky and drab white, it resembles an old piece of medical equipment, complete with a grainy monitor prone to distortion. To fix the display, you turn the C.A.T. on its side and press the degaussing button. This side view—which on PC is assigned to the R key that tends to be reserved for reloading a firearm—is the purest example of the tactility that makes Routine so stunningly transportive.
There are no health bars, visibility meters, or objective markers crowding the edges of your C.A.T. screen, and to check the tool’s remaining battery power, you turn it to the side and look at the icon above the handle. The C.A.T. also has a Wi-Fi button that interacts with various projectors around the base to display a menu on the wall that, as a list of ongoing tasks and useful information like keycodes, would be the pause screen of most other games. This diegetic menu is a triumph of tactile world design, never wearing out its novelty.
While you creep through the moonbase, there are puzzles to solve and enemies to hide from. At first they’re clanking killer robots that can only be disabled temporarily, but later they’re something decidedly more organic. There are emails to read and audio logs to peruse. So far, so similar to countless other horror games set somewhere outside Earth’s atmosphere.
In fact, even if Routine had come out closer to its initial announcement a whopping 13 years ago, its setting, as well as the horrors you encounter within it, wouldn’t have been especially earth-shattering. Though your pursuers are good for a quick jolt or two, there’s little complexity to their behaviors: The robots in particular tend to give up if you manage to crawl under a desk, into a vent, or anywhere else that would require them to bend their knees.
But the you-are-there feeling of Routine is so powerful that it elevates the entire experience. Some first-person games don’t depict your character at all when you look down where your body should be, but Routine goes so far as to incorporate your lower half into a puzzle, requiring you to check the ID card clipped to your chest. To synthesize a disinfectant, you need to reference the papers lying on desks and taped to cabinets in a lab rather than digging through the documents conveniently, digitally hoarded into a pause menu. Routine turns observation into a purposeful action: You have to pay attention to the objects in the environment rather than quickly and mindlessly scan for the telltale glint that tends to mark a usable video game item.
You’ll spend much of Routine combing through emails, watching creepy video footage, and staring at the monitor on the C.A.T. to illuminate the darkness. The game recalls a great found footage film in not just this focus on screens, but in how its presentation transforms an experience into a life-defining horror. This is a game that’s both notable for convincingly placing you in the shoes of its protagonist and for the way it builds tension on the margins.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Raw Fury.
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