Thoughts on: ROUTINE

Now that I’ve played ROUTINE, after over a decade of waiting, I can safely say that the story of waiting for the game turned out to be far more interesting than the game itself. Announced back in 2012, the game looked very promising. It seemed like curious continuation of ideas from System Shock 2 and Doom 3, mixed with more modern (for the time) approaches made by Frictional Games with their Penumbra and Amnesia titles. But also mentioned some more unconventional concepts, like the idea of a permadeath or highly non-linearity… Then, development troubles ensued and after moving from Unreal Engine 3 to 4, then to 5 and changing quite a bit from those initial trailers, the game is finally out.

During the years of development, the craze for the Amnesia: The Dark Descent-like games have died out, as did the “scarecam” popularity of YouTube videos. In fact, streaming or recordings of streams seem to be far more popular for games nowadays than pre-recorded videos. A lot of the elements that people were hoping to see in Routine were realized to great effect in the fantastic Alien: Isolation back in 2014. And in 2017 Capcom revived the proper classic survival horror with Resident Evil 7, with the genre still being popular today. All of which would be hard to ignore going into Routine. But even if I did, even if I would imagine this game coming out in 2013 the same way it came out today, I’m not sure the game would’ve felt any less mediocre.

How does it even play, now that it’s out? Well, it is very much an Amnesia: The Dark Descent-like horror themed stealth adventure game. You have some means of protection, but mainly you focus on evading the hostile entities and hiding or running away, rather than attacking them. However should you try to attack enemies, you would need to use the same tool you use for most of the problem solving, which is a special sci-fi multi-purpose tool with a screen. It gets upgraded as the game goes on, working with it feels very tactile and immersive and the idea behind it is very cool, especially during the first hour of the game as you’re learning its rules.

As it goes along, it does fall into the same overall… well, routine, of these types of games. There’s a hub, there’s a problem, you solve it via exploring parts of the hub, at some point enemies become present and when you solve the problem you move on to the next part. There is certain non-linearity, but despite the game opening up with a promise of open progression across several levels, it’s quite limited and railroaded in reality and becomes even more restrictive as the game goes on. It’s not much of a problem, to be fair, just tamper your expectations as you go in.

A far more frustrating issue is the fact that a lot of the times you may experience moments of “now what”. Like in a lot of classic point and click adventure titles, where even when most of the game would be great, they could have at least one moment of you not knowing what to do next just because you didn’t pixel hunt some interactive zone somewhere. Routine turns out to be quite bad at teaching you concepts. In the beginning, i thought it was an intended experience, of doing things “Myst-style”, but as the game progressed it became clear, that it wasn’t the case. At one point, for example, I spent around 10 or 15 minutes trying to understand where to go, finding everything visually locked with no buttons or other means of opening things that were established up until that point. Until it turned out, that one particular type of a door works completely differently from anything that happened before and I discovered it simply because I literally started hitting all walls. That situation was especially frustrating because right before that I couldn’t progress because the game actually soft locked and didn’t work correctly until I reloaded the save. So I didn’t know if this is yet another bug.

Ultimately, though, nothing in the game was outright bad. It’s just that, nothing felt very good either. It has a cool visual style, sure, but even its mood is inconsistent. There’s a clear reset of the atmosphere and “vibes” in the middle of the game that I, personally, found to be for the worse as the second half of the game felt much weaker and less interesting. The story starts on a promise but then slowly fizzles out and ends on absolutely nothing. Puzzles range from poorly explained to barely existing. The tool, that has so much promise at the beginning, ends up underutilized. You use it a lot, sure, but while it starts clever, it quickly devolves into something that could be just an abstract action zone and nothing would change.

ROUTINE is not a bad game. But even if you remove the 13 years of waiting and expectations, even if you imagine yourself to be back in 2013, the game is simply nothing special. It’s okay, it has a cool visual identity and I like the return of Doom 3-style screen interactions or just general focus on trying to make every game aspect be part of game world. It’s all cool… Apart from the fact that pause menu doesn’t pause the game – that’s just inconvenient and pointless. But in the end, Routine is just very mediocre, which is kind of a shame.