Sci-fi horror game Routine just came back to life for the 2nd time in 13 years: ‘We are beginning to approach the finish line’

Remember Steam Greenlight? That was the user-voting system Valve briefly implemented to judge whether or not it would let a game release on its platform, before it just gave up and decided it’d put up what-the-hell-ever if you tossed it a hundred bucks.

Greenlight wasn’t long for this world, but one of its earliest success stories—one of the games that ginned up enough popularity with voters to guarantee itself a spot on the storefront—was Routine: moon-base horror filtered through the hazy, VHS-y lens of ’70s sci-fi. It looked great, won over a bunch of Greenlight voters, got a 2017 release window (after an initial 2013 release window), then vanished off the face of the Earth.

Which was a shame. Then, out of nowhere in 2022, Routine was back. Re-revealed at Summer Game Fest, it looked as cool as ever and promised to wow us in the near future. Then it disappeared again.

Which was, um, which was a shame. But guess what? Routine is back! In a post on Steam, the three-dev team at Lunar Software said that a “huge undertaking” like this meant “it was important to keep our heads down and focus entirely on finishing.” Thus, the radio silence.

But good news: “Routine is still very much in active development, and we are beginning to approach the finish line for the game,” say the devs, who wisely note that “We’ve learned a lot from past experiences, one of those is not to commit to a release window before we’re absolutely sure we can hit it.” So they’re not saying when it’s due, but are “confident that we’ll be able to share more news on that front soon.”

To which I can only say, with the best will in the world, that I’ll believe it when I see it at this point. To tide us over on the news front, the devs showed off a couple new screenshots (yay) and announced that Mick Gordon left the project last year (boo).

“In July 2024 Mick made the difficult decision to leave the project because of conflicts in his schedule,” says the studio. But fear not, “Mick created many outstanding audio assets that will be featured in the final game and provided invaluable audio direction for Routine,” which will now be handled by a new—unnamed—audio designer and team.

God willing, this will be Routine’s final resurrection before release, not just because I’d like to finally play it, but because any game that stays in development for 13 years has probably inflicted enough psychic wounds on its devs that not releasing it would disintegrate them all where they stand. And I don’t want that to happen. They seem nice.

I am curious if the game will truly hit as hard as it might have back in 2012. Alien: Isolation kind of ate its aesthetic lunch in 2014, and I wonder if that might dull the impact a little. Still, I want to play it, and I want to never write another news post about it returning from the grave. So here’s hoping the work that’s left to do is pretty, uh, routine.