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

La Luna.

Inspiration for hundreds of songs over time, but also a evocative 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 as the protagonists of Routine, then it will not be enough to simply pay attention to what is hidden in the darkness.

La storia di this title is as complicated as it is fascinating, marked by a thousand difficulties and a gestation period of more than thirteen years, which is saying a lot: nowadays 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 in this category with all due honors, things are quite different: time is not an enemy for developers, even when it proves unkind to creativity put to the test.

A decade-long development has been handled by Lunar Software (and what else could they possibly have been called?), for what looks set to be a full-fledged sci-fi survival horror, with a series of novelties and innovations that I believe are more than worthy of attention. The official date seems to be next December 4, 2025, and we all hope that this is the final timeframe setting. 

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 the start does not seem to matter as always, with the aim of uncovering the truth behind the silences of hallways emptied of all other human presence, except for that of our avatar. By interacting with environmental objects (it turns out our heroic busybody is a technician) and a series of info gathered 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 let us fully identify with the main character, and it will do so by making us experience the most recognizable and powerful ancestral feeling 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 landscape dotted with lunar craters, wounds of war and in the soul of our protagonist, perhaps: the “lunar boys” developers will play heavily on these intimate aspects, even when it comes to giving us more than one thrill: the base will prove 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 uttered 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 God with binary language.

A technologically cutting-edge tool will come to our aid, the C.A.T.: unlike what it might feline-ly suggest, this 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 fundamental information for the continuation of the adventure, analyze the environment for the numerous puzzles to solve, alternating 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 throw a party for us, and we truly hope it can surprise us, because after looking at the world from a porthole for thirteen years, we’ve all been pretty bored.