RetroSpace review

Videogames have long entrusted humanity’s survival to seasoned soldiers and space marines. RetroSpace has a better idea: its hero is a janitor. When Aurora 5 gets swallowed by a sentient black hole, time starts slipping, mutants infest the corridors, and salvation depends on the person who knows their way around the service tunnels.

That blue-collar perspective injects The Wild Gentlemen’s (Chicken Police – Paint it RED! and Zipp’s Café) latest effort with personality. Casting you as a nameless custodian makes sense as you navigate the station’s neglected spaces, as you improvise different ways to save humanity from dying. While real-life tech billionaires keep trying to convince us that they’re our saviors, RetroSpace finds hope in an everyman who is used to cleaning up after everyone else’s mess.

First-Person Action Requires Brain Usage

Set in the year 2177, RetroSpace takes place aboard one of the AURORA fleet’s city-ships that was built to carry a sleeping population to their new home. But Aurora 5 has fallen off course, been swallowed by a black hole, and started jumping between two time periods. Naturally, the game will draw comparisons with evocative first-person experiences like System Shock, Prey, and BioShock. But RetroSpace finds distinction in its disco-punk setting. With plenty of wood paneling, chunky terminals, brassy colors, and era-appropriate facial hair, making this an enchantingly analog place to explore.

At times, Aurora 5 feels like a character in its own right. Smart level design connects different rooms in each sector with vents and maintenance passages, while a working tram connects the station’s major zones. Shortcuts gradually turn the labyrinthine layout into something resembling a functional workplace. But instead of merely serving as a backdrop, the environment is something you are constantly interacting with.

A spray bottle can help clean away grime obscuring a keypad code. In other areas, crates become improvised stairs while a fire extinguisher provides propulsion. Fascinatingly, water, oil, electricity, hackable turrets, and even hostile factions can create opportunities for some improvised trouble. This isn’t a full-on physics simulation of course, so not every experiment produces a result. But curiosity is habitually rewarded. The one issue is that objectives can be rather vague. That is clearly meant to spur moments creativity, but it can occasionally slow the momentum of forward progress.

Sam Fisher Might Not Survive on the Aurora 5

Games that promise both stealth and action usually favor one mechanic over the other, and RetroSpace is no different. In theory, darkness offers protection. You can break lights, create distractions, cloak yourself, and smash a unsuspecting mutant with a charged wrench attack. An optional indicator shows whether enemies are oblivious, scouting you, or in attack mode.

However, in execution stealth can be pretty temperamental. Enemies sometimes spotted me in apparent darkness, and closing the last few feet before delivering a silent strike sporadically triggered an alert. While that might be realistic, it goes against traditional stealth conventions. Creatures have defined senses and behaviors, but the slightly inconsistent relationship between visible shadows and actual concealment makes infiltration feel unreliable. Avoiding combat entirely is possible. Yet pulling the trigger is often faster and less likely to unravel because a mutant noticed your boot in the darkness.

Gun Beats Wrench

For better or worse, confrontation is usually the easier option. Armed with a power wrench and basic pistol, early fights are hectic because ammunition is scarce, so you don’t want to waste a single round. Gradually, that concern lessens as your arsenal includes a revolver, shotgun, submachine gun, Gatling gun, and even a ray gun. Pleasingly, upgrades improve efficiency while adding cool effects, such as making pistol rounds ricochet off walls. Scanning enemies reveals their weaknesses, encouraging you to swap weapons rather than rely on your last, and probably most powerful acquisition.

I liked how restrained the starter weapons felt, as if the developers were reminding me that RetroSpace wasn’t just another dedicated corridor shooter. Your wrench hits with weight, while your later guns provide some flashier effects and more destructive energy. Meanwhile, environmental kills, such as electrifying a puddle or igniting oil, ensure RetroSpace never becomes a basic shooting gallery. Curiously, there are no dedicated stealth weapons, which could have created a third kind of approach.

Here, Piggy Piggy

One of RetroSpace’s most curious components is its Mutamod system. These animal-derived alterations provide active and passive abilities for combat, traversal, and sneaking. Moth genetics regenerate health beneath bright lights, while rhino DNA gives your melee attacks some extra oomph. There are some funny augmentations too, such as the pig mod that lets you recover health by eating corpses.

Besides being darkly humorus, Mutamods aren’t merely basic stat increases. Many come with repercussions, so light-powered healing slows you, bat sonar tints your vision, and going swine leaves you vulnerable while you’re hunched over your lunch.

Can Your Soul Be 3D Printed?

Death is handled just as creatively. When you die, Aurora 5 prints another janitor and leaves your former body where it fell, creating a corpse run closer to a Soulslike than a roguelike. Depending on the difficulty, returning to the body can also be necessary to recover lost equipment. The real twist is that each replacement can carry a random cloning error, or degeneration.

Some errors make you sneeze or swear involuntarily, which can make stealth both disastrous and darkly comical. I imagined a Mission: Impossible movie where everything went sideways because Ethan Hunt got a nose tickle. Between the sneezing fits, bad manners, and other involuntary behavior, there’s a good amount of body horror/comedy in RetroSpace. Fortunately, degeneration isn’t permanent. Extracting genetic material from your former body clears the penalty.

Performance Review: Needs Improvement on Portable

RetroSpace has a few unpolished edges. Stealth is no match for action, navigation can become aimless, and curiosity isn’t always rewarded. During my time playing on Steam Deck, the frame rate was also disappointingly erratic. That said, Aurora 5 is such an entertaining place to investigate that these faults often disappear into the background. From the grotesque mutants and gallows humor to the funky soundtrack, this space station is undoubtedly one of this year’s more interesting gaming locations to visit.

Best of all, RetroSpace understands the joys of resourcefulness. You survive with maintenance tools, scavenged firearms, animal genetics, and a knowledge of the station that only a janitor might have. While thousands of passengers remain tucked inside their cryogenic beds, an everyday worker saves humanity. I doubt a soldier would know where the circuit breakers are.

RetroSpace was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.