2 December 2025

A Promising Sci-Fi Horror Game Marred by Frustrating Gameplay

By newsgame

Sci-fi horror game Routine was first announced all the way back in 2012 and has been trapped in development hell for 13 years. Suffering from massive delays and significant overhauls, Routine has been on horror fans’ radar for over a decade, but many lost hope that it would ever see the light of day. Unfortunately for horror enthusiasts that have been waiting ages to play Routine for themselves, it turns out its concept is far more interesting than its execution.

In Routine, players wake up on a seemingly deserted lunar base that they have to explore in first-person. With no other human beings in sight, it quickly becomes apparent that something has gone very wrong, and it’s up to the unlucky player character to figure out exactly what happened.

Routine‘s lunar base looks like what the 80s imagined the future would look like, with players interacting with brightly-lit, chunky terminals and exploring retrofuturistic environments that give off serious Alien: Isolation vibes. Moving through Routine works mostly how one would expect from a first-person game, but with a couple of clever twists, like giving players the option to stand on their tiptoes to look above objects and drop all the way to the floor to look underneath things. This is an interesting idea and is used effectively for a couple of puzzles in the game, but it is largely forgotten as the game progresses.

Routine’s Puzzles and Exploration Are a Mixed Bag

The bulk of one’s time in Routine is spent stumbling around in the dark, solving puzzles ranging from satisfying and fun to frustrating and obtuse. Level layouts can be confusing, and there’s a decent amount of back-tracking required, which doesn’t make for a particularly fun time.

For most of the game, Routine players are free to focus on the puzzles and find the necessary C.A.T. upgrades needed to advance. The device gains more functionality as the game goes on, in turn giving players more ways to solve puzzles. However, sometimes puzzle-solving is interrupted by the presence of powerful enemies that can kill the player character in one or two hits, like the imposing Type-05 robots, for instance.

By and large, Routine players are defenseless when it comes to the enemies in the game. The C.A.T. tool can technically stun them, but that takes multiple shots and is rarely a good idea. The best course of action is almost always to hide or run away whenever possible.

Routine will be available through PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate on the day of its release.

The C.A.T. tool doesn’t do much for players engaging with Routine‘s limited combat, but it does come in handy when solving the game’s puzzles. Routine‘s puzzles are fairly standard survival-horror fare, with players exploring the world for codes and clues that help them gain access to new areas. The enemies add an extra dimension to the puzzle-solving and exploration, and one that doesn’t make the game better, but does make it less fun to play.

The enemies in Routine can make solving its puzzles especially annoying, because while they don’t pose any real threat, they do like to mildly inconvenience you every chance they get. Getting caught by enemies means respawning at the latest save point and losing little to no progress. So what happens is a loop of running straight to where you need to go to solve the puzzle, potentially getting caught, and repeating the process until you succeed. Even though it led to my getting caught and killed, I still found rushing through the stages to be faster and more efficient than taking the stealthy approach. Routine originally had a permadeath mechanic, and while I think that would have been too far in the other direction, there’s a middle ground that could have been reached.

Routine Isn’t Scary Enough to Make Up For Its Gameplay Shortcomings

If you are afraid of being mildly inconvenienced, Routine is potentially the scariest game of all time. Otherwise, its inability to instill fear is the biggest letdown. The first couple of times players encounter enemies, it is an unnerving experience thanks to their intimidating appearance and Routine‘s admittedly brilliant audio design, but once it becomes apparent that their threats are hollow, they lose their luster. There is one really effective jump scare in Routine that legitimately frightened me, but even though the game tries really hard with its dimly-lit environments and horrific sights, it largely fails to scare.

A horror game that isn’t scary is hard to recommend, and unfortunately, Routine isn’t scary. That doesn’t mean that horror fans won’t still find some value in it, though. Taking cues from the Resident Evil series, Routine has notes and files for players to read that help slowly unravel its creepy overarching mystery. A couple of story moments in Routine left a big impression on me, and it’s the kind of game that will be torn apart and analyzed to death. Each bit of lore is a new piece to the puzzle and kept me going even when I felt let down by the gameplay and scare factor.

Routine‘s narrative is elevated by its photo-realistic graphics and tremendous audio design. The strained huffing and puffing of the main character as players crawl through cramped ventilation shafts and the bizarre noises the enemies make when they’re in pursuit are enough to make one’s hair stand on end. Full-blown scares are still few and far between, but the audio does its best with what it has to work with.

My initial playthrough of Routine took about eight hours, but it can be completed much faster if you are quicker with the puzzles.

There’s nothing wrong with Routine from a technical standpoint, and its story, visuals, and audio are all top-tier. The problem is that the gameplay is such a slog that it makes it hard to appreciate what it does so well. It can be flat-out boring a lot of the time, and the scares simply aren’t there to make up for its lack of engaging gameplay.