ROUTINE

A must have

Astounding, the way that routine is able to make me emote, not just with fear, but it brought me to tears, this was amazing, many thanks to the team behind the game <3

Yay

This game is excellent.

One of the best Horror games ive played it was so peaceful yet unerving

Amazing! Frustrating, difficult, scary but really good!

ROUTINE — A Masterwork of Dread I've played horror for years — Silent Hill, Resident Evil, the whole lineage — and Routine still did something to me that none of them managed. This is one of the most complex games I've ever played, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It's the kind of work you have to step back from, like a vast painting, to see the whole composition. Up close it's a tapestry where every single stitch was placed with thoughtful care and purpose. Nothing here is accidental. That craftsmanship shows in everything: the C.A.T. device, the puzzle design, the level lighting, the aesthetic, the sound. It's built around an 80s vision of the future — cassette-futurism, chunky beige tech, a monochrome green palette that leaves your eyes starved of information so every dark corner stays ambiguous a beat too long. The result is a specific, crushing loneliness. A future that already feels abandoned. What sets Routine apart mechanically is what it refuses to give you. No weapon. No safe room. A one-hit entity that ends you the moment it sees you. Other horror games hand you a gun eventually, and the second you have one, the fear has a release valve — tension, fight, relief, repeat. Routine strips that loop out completely. You never graduate from prey to predator, so the dread never discharges. It just accumulates. The entity's voice, the lurking, the not-knowing-where-it-is — it got under my skin so deep I genuinely struggled to keep going. That's the design working exactly as intended. The puzzles deserve their own mention. They're hard, and they demand real attention to detail. The developers aren't disrespecting your intelligence — they're challenging it, and that respect is rare. My one real disagreement is a design choice: placing a one-hit entity inside the hardest puzzle rooms. Puzzle-solving and prey-evasion run on opposite mental systems — one wants you still and analytical, the other wants you moving and reactive — and stacking them means neither works. The entity keeps flushing you out of the headspace the puzzle needs, so it reads as annoying rather than scary, and every death wipes your train of thought instead of resetting a clean chase. A one-hit stalker belongs in a traversal gauntlet, where the threat and the objective point the same direction. In a puzzle room it's just lost progress. Around the halfway mark the story takes a sharp turn — darker, more mysterious, drifting into surrealism. It threw me at first, because you begin with a clear purpose and then it dissolves into question marks. But I've come around to seeing that as a strength rather than a flaw. The ambiguity is what keeps the game alive after the credits: the theories, the speculation, the arguments about what the "exploitation" actually means. It refuses to close itself off, and that's an artistic choice, not a lazy one. Routine is the first game that ever made me feel this way — worn down, unsettled, fascinated. It's a masterwork, and I'm still thinking about it.