Over the course of my gaming career, I’ve cycled through approximately three billion vents. I may have crawled through more vents than you have eaten hot dinners. As such, any video game that can make me want to unscrew a barred hatch and haul my fat ass down a square tunnel is doing something right.
Wild Gentlemen’s new immersive sci-fi sim, RetroSpace, gives pretty good freedom of access. This hides them everywhere. You will walk along a dilapidated, winding corridor and your eye will be drawn to a certain combination of shadows, coquettishly masked by pipes. “Can I sit back there?” » You ask yourself the question, and lo and behold, you’ve revealed a shortcut to the chief engineer’s office. Elsewhere, switches appear behind stacks of transport crates, and curved railings draw your eye to a foot-wide ledge leading around the next pillar.
In general, RetroSpace does a good job of accumulating secrets in even the smallest rooms, and while the secret is very often a “rocket donut” or other inventory-clogging wreck, smelling the prize and sniffing after it is a pleasure. I hope the thrill intensifies as RetroSpace moves forward, perhaps leaving some of its obvious influences behind.
RetroSpace takes place aboard Aurora 5, a pseudo-1970s interstellar ark that fell into a black hole and came away with a mild case of temporal indecision – some areas switch between time periods – rather than spaghettification and incomprehensible catastrophe. You are a janitor, awakened from cryo to find lots of things on fire, lots of dead people, and lots of other people disturbed and monstrous by genetic modification. Grabbing your power key, you head to the center of the habitat and soon find yourself involved in missions assigned by a handful of cohesive survivors, including a sentient AI and a talking pig fellah.
These take you to the far corners of the space station, which is really the main character here. There is a “garden” area which consists of a green silo with a starry dome, its spiral staircases and crawl spaces leading to what I think is a bubbling soup of fertilizer. There’s a train that circles the entire facility – not a camouflaged loading screen, like with the chapter breaks in Dead Space, but an actual monorail that travels in real time. There are many audio recordings, hackable terminals, and humorous public safety signs or advertisements. As you might expect from chicken detective game designers, RetroSpace leans toward caricature, which can get obnoxious – there’s an audiologist early on who mocks NPCs who leave audiologists creepy. Yet it feels like the developers are fundamentally committed to creating a compelling world.
There is a lingering mystique woven around the resort’s concierges. Propaganda posters portray you and your lost brothers as urban legends, rarely seen by ordinary people because you are always on a ladder or behind a partition doing whatever you wear a helmet on. weirdos do with these sprays and keys. Each sector has a locked or hidden utility closet with a portal to Janitor’s Haven – an interdimensional refuge set up by the Syndicate organizers, where you’ll spend time with story-critical NPCs and do the bulk of your leveling and customization.
If the station is a peach, I’m a little less convinced so far with the tools you have. On the one hand, you have weapons like pistols, shotguns, and ray guns, all of which are (eventually) upgradeable. On the other hand, you have more indirect or tactical accessories such as cloaking devices, hacking gadgets, and powered fire extinguishers. On the other hand, you have Genetic Engineering or Mutamods, which range from granting grasshopper thighs to jump higher, butterfly ears to heal in the light, or biceps filled with rhino DNA for meatier strikes.
Gene modding goes both ways: when you die, you’ll be cloned into the nearest equivalent Bacta tank for free, but you’ll be saddled with a random cartoon affliction for your troubles. I came away from one mishap with a body prone to sneezing and swearing uncontrollably, which didn’t help with subsequent stealth attempts. Luckily, you can purge debuffs by siphoning genetic material from the nearest vanilla human corpse, and Aurora 5 has no shortage of that.
In the world, you can also do things like hold up crates to block bullets, or spray paths of water to create an electrical trap before slamming a circuit box. It’s all quite entertaining, but many of the ideas are overly familiar from System Shock, Bioshock, and Arkane’s Prey. I really hope that somewhere in RetroSpace is a tool or combination of tools as stupid in its own way as Prey’s Mimic ability. Or the slapstick bullshit you get in Skin Deep.
As it stands, I find that I shoot enemies too often because I’m not excited by the sneakier ways to avoid or defeat them. Enemies have their moments – cut off a bugman’s head, and legs can sprout from it, while manpigs are attracted by trails of blood – but mostly they’re just awareness indicators that you can either avoid or shoot down.
If you’re comfortable with the comfort of RetroSpace as a love letter to some famous immersive simulators, you can probably forgive all of this. Personally, I’d say the resort’s ambiance and secret level design are worth the occasional feeling of déjà vu. I’ll continue to check in on the game, although games journalism being what it is right now, I unfortunately don’t have time to do a full review. Learn more about RetroSpace at Steam. Let me know if you spot any really sexy aerovents.
