Routine was among the first set of games to make it through Steam Greenlight - its one-minute teaser's promise of first-person space horror clearly resonating with the service's voters. Now, the three-person team at LunarSoftware have released a new, longer trailer, hinting at the terror that lurks inside the game's non-linear, abandoned moon base.
The Moon is a perfect setting for an exploration horror game. It's remote, dark and hostile, but not entirely alien. We've seen it close up in ghostly archive footage of the Lunar landings. Nobody's built a proper Moon Base yet, but we're familiar with the utilitarian angles of Nasa architecture. Alien, Space: 1999 and 2001: A Space Odyssey have shown us the claustrophobic corridors and cluttered mess halls of the future.The Lunar base we'll explore in Routine occupies fertile middle ground between the familiar and the unknowable - a perfect place to deliver some scares.
Greenlight voters seemed to agree. Routine was one of the first games to get the go-ahead from Valve after the release of the arresting Gamescom trailer. I called up art and design man Aaron Foster find out more about Lunar's intriguing take on survival horror.
