Routine Takes Gaming to Horrors Apex
I haven't been genuinely frightened of a movie since sometime in the 1980s. I'm not sure if that's because I was an impressionable child, or because the movies were just plain scarier. You ever seen ET? That was a damn horrorfest, and one I hope never to see again. So here's Routine, a first-person horror exploration game set on the desolation of Earth's moon circa 198X. This is already hitting all the right notes.
In what I'd call 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Amnesia: The Dark Descent meets Panos Cosmatos, Routine looks all kinds of awesome with a dash of spook. Horror games have been mostly dead the past decade, so to see this attempt to carry the torch from Amnesia sits well with me, like a stomach full of steak and whiskey. Routine is the first offering from Lunar Software, a 3-person studio based in the UK, and is due in 2013 for both Mac and PC. I sorely miss the days of floppy disks, cross-processed colors, and retro-future technology, so I'm eagerly counting the days until I have them all back in my life.