Ten years is a long time in any business, but it is an eternity in video games, where technology and design are always evolving, and always at the fastest pace imaginable. So today it’s amazing and absolutely wonderful that we can slow things down a bit and review a game I first wrote about in 2012, but that hasn’t come out yet.
That game was / is the routine, which a decade ago seemed like a small horror experience that was taking some clues from the Survival and Dead Space games. It was first person, it was located on a moon base and I really liked it.
He returned a year later with a proper game trailer that showed that, although we didn’t know it at the time, he was a pioneer in some very strong Alien Isolation vibes, a game that also had a retro-future aesthetic and an emphasis on ‘exploration of terror. , but would not be released until 2014.
And then … nothing. The game is gone. The truth is, I forgot all about it, and whoever remembers the 2012-13 game trailers probably did too.
That was until today, when the “revelation trailer” came out of the game, which shows that nine years in the desert had left us with a game that seemed … well, completely new:
So why the rest? Disappearing games for a year or two is nothing new, but nine years in the pipeline is almost unheard of for a game not called Duke Nukem Forever or Star Citizen. It turns out that the main reason is simply the fact that the team decided, after five years of development and with the routine about to end, that they were not happy with what they had done. So they packed it up and started again, found a publisher and now they’re back.
Here is the full statement of the team explaining its decision, absence and final return (and why there is no release date attached to this news):
Hello,
We are Aaron, Jemma and Pete, also known as Lunar Software.
We haven’t talked about routine for a long time, and today we’d like to talk a little bit about it.
In short, we have basically restarted the production of the game. What we share here today are pictures of the routine game. So why did we make the difficult decision to start over?
As we approached what we thought was the end of development, we found more and more things that we were not happy about and that negatively affected the experience. We had been working on the project for 5 years at the time and just couldn’t get it out as it was.
We survived on an extremely tight budget. Financial stress began to affect us, especially when we realized we had to work longer. The routine at this time became a part-time project as we had to work on other jobs / projects to stay afloat. We went from having a release date, to not even knowing when we could release it. It was a huge strain for us, as we had dropped ourselves, our friends and family, as well as all of our fans and fans.
We struggled and didn’t know how to deal with it or how to fix it. At that time we just wanted to say sorry. But we didn’t know how we could even start doing it without giving some kind of development time window. We didn’t expect it to take as long as it did, and for those of you who have been waiting patiently, we are very sorry.
It took us a while to figure out how to finish the project and offer it as the experience we wanted, but when a line of communication opened with Raw Fury, we learned that we had found a partner who could support us in all areas. with which we have struggled before.
To all who have waited both long and short, we want to thank you for all the love, support and patience. We’re excited to be back and working with Raw Fury, so we can finally offer you the routine.
While we won’t repeat the mistake of sharing a release date until we’re fully confident we can get there, we didn’t want to make you wait any longer and believe it was time to share what we’ve been working on. activated.
We can’t wait to hear what you think.
– Lunar Software