Unreleased Indie Horror Game Returns 10 Years After Its Debut

Please watch the trailer to see how this gun works, it’s the coolest thing I’ve seen all week Screenshot: Lunar Software

Ten years is a long time in any business, but it’s an eternity in video games, where technology and design are always evolving, and always at the fastest pace imaginable. So it’s both amazing and absolutely wonderful today that we can slow things down a bit and revisit a game which I first wrote about in 2012but which has not yet been released.

This game was/is Routine, which a decade ago felt like a neat little horror experience that drew inspiration from survival games and Dead Space. It was first person, it was set on a moon base, and i was very into it.

It came back a year later with a proper gameplay trailer showing that, although we didn’t know it at the time, he was pioneering some really strong alien isolation vibes, a game that also had a retro-future aesthetic and a focus on exploration horror, but which would not be released until 2014.

And then… nothing. The game has disappeared. Truth be told, I forgot all about it, and anyone who remembers game trailers from 2012-13 probably did too.

That was until today when the game’s ‘trailer re-reveal’ droppedshowing that nine years in the desert had left us with a game that looked… well, entirely new:

So why the break? Games that disappear for a year or two are nothing new, but nine years of pipeline is almost unheard of for a game not called Duke Nukem Forever or Star Citizen. The main reason, it turns out, is simply the fact that the team decided, after five years of development and with Routine nearing completion, that they weren’t happy with what they had done. So they threw it away and started over, found a publisher, and are now back.

Here’s the team’s full statement explaining their decision, absence, and ultimate return (and why there’s no release date attached to this news):

Hey,

We are Aaron, Jemma and Pete, also known as Lunar Software.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Routine, and we’d like to discuss it a bit today.

In short, we’ve basically restarted production of the game. What we’re sharing here today are some in-game footage from Routine. So why did we make the difficult decision to start over?

As we neared what we thought was the end of development, we found more and more things we weren’t happy with that were negatively impacting the experience. We had been working on the project for 5 years by then and we just couldn’t release it as is.

We were surviving on an extremely tight budget. Financial stress began to weigh on us, especially as we realized we had to work longer. At this point the routine 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 might release. It was a huge pressure for us because we had let ourselves down, and our friends and family, and all of our supporters and fans.

We struggled and didn’t know how to handle this or how to fix it. At the time, we just wanted to say sorry. But I didn’t even know how we could start doing that without giving some sort of development time window. We didn’t expect it to take this long – and for those of you who waited patiently, we’re so sorry.

It took us a while to figure out how to complete the project and deliver it as the experience we wanted, but when a line of communication opened up with Raw Fury, we knew we had found a partner who would be in able to support us in all areas we have struggled with before.

To everyone who waited long and short, we want to say thank you for all the love, support and patience. We’re thrilled to be back and working with Raw Fury, so we can finally bring Routine to you.

While we won’t make the mistake of sharing a release date until we’re sure we can hit it, we didn’t want to keep you waiting any longer and felt it was time to share what we have been working on.

We look forward to hearing what you think.

– Lunar software