Routine, let’s venture into the dark side of the moon!

La Luna.

Inspiration for hundreds of songs over time, but also a suggestive and mysterious place where evil could lurk in any form, if we are not careful where we place our steps in limited gravity: if we then find ourselves the protagonists of Routine, then it will not be enough just to pay attention to what is hidden in the darkness.

The story of this title is as complicated as it is fascinating, marked by a thousand difficulties and a gestation period lasting more than thirteen years, which says a lot: these days stores and physical shops are overwhelmed by an unprecedented videogame offering, titles that every month fill shelves and the cloud; however, in the indie world, and Routine fully belongs to this category with all due honors, things are quite different: time is not an enemy for developers, even when it proves less than kind to creativity put to the test.

To handle the overdecade-long development are Lunar Software (and what else could they possibly be called?), for what looks to be a full-fledged survival horror in a sci-fi vein, with a series of new features and innovations that I consider far more than worthy of interest. The official date seems to be next December 4, 2025, and we all hope that this will be the final release window. 

Ambiented in an abandoned lunar facility for unknown reasons, Routine puts us in the shoes of the usual reckless explorer, whose identity at least at first does not seem to matter as usual, with the aim of uncovering the truth behind the silences of the corridors emptied of any other human presence, except for that of our avatar. By interacting with environmental objects (it is clear that our heroic busybody is a technician) and a series of pieces of information recovered during the lunar mission, as in the best tradition of adventures in which the plot and narrative twists are revealed as the game progresses, Routine will allow us to fully immerse ourselves in the main character, and it will do so by making us feel the most recognizable and powerful ancestral emotion of all time: no, it is not the force of love nor that of friendship, but Fear.

The terror of deep space, of the immensity of the void, and the bucolic yet treacherous scenery dotted with lunar craters, wounds of war and in the soul of our protagonist, perhaps: the “moon boys” developers will play heavily on these intimate aspects, even when it comes to giving us more than one thrill: the base will prove to be anything but deserted and the robots that inhabit it (or watch over it?) will give a very, very painful sense of how fundamental it is, today and in the future, never to change the programming of the laws stated by Asimov and the foundation of every principle of applied robotics.

To put it briefly, if robots become killers it is only because someone played at being God with binary language.

To help us is the technologically cutting-edge tool we will have at our disposal, the C.A.T.: unlike what its feline name might suggest, it is not a crossover with the adorable kitty protagonist of Stray, but rather the acronym for Cosmonaut Assistance Tool. Thanks to it, we will be able to gather essential information for the continuation of the adventure, analyze the environment for the numerous puzzles to solve, alternated with not always heroic escapes in what is, to say the least, an inhospitable territory.

The dark side of the moon, then, is just waiting to have its fun at our expense, and we really hope it can surprise us, because after thirteen years of looking at the world through a porthole, we’ve all gotten a little bored.