Routine review

I love horror games. Outlast, Resident Evil, even Poppy Playtime, and more. Alien Isolation is one of my favorite games ever made, and I love Silent Hill so much that I own it on every system possible! Even the disks, which I can't even use.

Routine is a beautiful game. The whole space station feels alive, which I adore. I had to play Routine three times to get everything down, but the game can be completed in 5 to 6 hours. I reviewed this game on the Xbox, which I think added to a few of my pain points.

The Good

The sound design in Routine is amazing. Not only does it add to how creepy the atmosphere is, but it also makes everything sound like it could exist in our world. The tool, door, and all of the little mechanical elements sound fantastic.

The atmosphere is great. The space station aesthetic is nailed and is one of the best I have seen in a space-themed horror game, and we do see a lot of space stations. Because we are on the moon, the outside of the station is creepy; you can see it from the windows. In general, I like how realistic the game looks, especially when it involves any metal. The station feels lived in, and if you zoom into specific items, you can tell that they've been used, which I thought was really cool.

I love the omni tool or CAT gun because you have to manually swap the modulus to use it. You press each button and can twist the nobs and everything. It's cool and sounds nice. I am normally not a fan of tools like this because they tend to take away from gameplay, but this is fine. I will say that the tool probably feels better when you're using a mouse because doing anything with this Xbox controller becomes increasingly irritating.

Up until around chapter 3, the story and all of the context provided for the story is really great and had me hooked despite how tired I am of hearing about evil AI. I find the trope to be played out, but I love space as a setting so much that I kept an open mind throughout the first few chapters and, honestly, enjoyed what the story had to offer.

What didn't land

The omni tool functions fine; it is what you will use to shock enemies and open doors, and complete other tasks. You don't really get to fight much in this game; you spend most of your time hiding or shocking enemies. The issue is using the joystick to interact with this tool. Routine has you using the left stick to interact with a lot of objects, starting in the tutorial. A circular cursor will appear for you to make precise clicks, which is extremely irritating and is something that I wish developers would stop doing on console.

The story tries to be something it's not. There are layers of hidden lore and complexity here that didn't land because of the pacing. Aside from that, Routine has officially killed any liking of robotic enemies for me. I am sick of seeing them, as I find them to be a cheap and lazy enemy to face in games. The whole time I was going through the first chunk of the story— spoiler alert: turn off the AI—I found myself wondering a few things. One, why do the robots look the way they do? The answer is because it makes them look creepy, yes. But there is no in-universe explanation for their design. Normally, I could ignore this, but they're meant to be working alongside people, so I found their design to be a little off.

There is also this section where you have to do a long puzzle, and while I won't tell you the solution, I can say that it felt absolutely and extremely out of place. It also threw a wrench in the way the story was flowing. It only gets worse as the game continues. The ending is alright, if not a little too vague, but that is fine by me.

Final Thoughts

Routine introduces you to its mechanics right away. One thing that I really like is how you can stand on your tippy toes and get under things by simply using two buttons. Doing this feels fluid and intuitive. However, I believe that hide-and-seek gameplay feels dated. Before I played Routine, I spotted some comparisons to Alien Isolation and was extremely excited, but in Routine, the hiding feels much worse, which I believe is because the AI is just not as smart as it should be. You can often escape encounters by running away, for example.

There are a few different kinds of enemies to encounter, but none of them stayed with me. The designs all just mush together in my mind. Which is irritating because if nothing else, I love me a good monster.

Regardless, Routine was a lot of fun to play the first time. If you can get through it without thinking too hard about any of the mechanics and systems, you are in for a good time.