RetroSpace brings disco-punk space horror to PC
The Wild Gentlemen's retro-futurist immersive sim is out now on Steam, with a sentient black hole, plant-animal hybrids and a cloning mechanic that bites.
RetroSpace is out now on Steam, and it arrives with one of the strangest pitches of the year. The Wild Gentlemen's retro-futurist horror drops you aboard the Aurora 5, a city-sized station that has been swallowed by a sentient black hole, and hands you a mop.
The setup, as the studio tells it: the year is 2177 and humanity's last hope is the AURORA fleet, a convoy of floating space stations looking for a new home. Its passengers sleep away the centuries while robots, androids and a chosen team of janitors mind their dreams. You are one of those janitors, responsible for cleaning, repairs, firefighting and general upkeep — until one of the gigantic city-ships drifts off course.
What follows is an immersive sim rather than a corridor shooter. Hybrid plants and animals wander the decks, time itself misbehaves, and the studio is explicit that every obstacle has more than one answer: sneak, hack, create diversions, lure enemies into traps, find hidden routes, or fight your way through the Aurora 5.
Death is not the end, apparently
One twist worth flagging is the cloning system. Dying aboard the Aurora 5 is not a full stop, but the studio warns that cloning yourself can have strange side effects when you come back. Add cosmic horror, dark humour and narrative-led exploration and you have a game that leans hard into its own oddness, right down to the retro-futurist dressing that gives it a name. RetroSpace is a PC release, sold on Steam.
Our opinion
Horror games have spent a decade mining abandoned facilities for scares, and RetroSpace is more interested in what happens when the facility is still full of people who cannot wake up. The janitor framing does quiet work: it gives you a reason to know every corridor, faulty door and fire hazard on the ship, which is exactly the knowledge an immersive sim wants to reward.
The risk is tonal. Cosmic horror, dark comedy and a cloning mechanic that punishes carelessness are three different games pulling at the same frame, and RetroSpace will live or die on whether they hold together across a full run. If they do, the Aurora 5 is one of the more interesting places a small studio has built this year. If not, the station's oddities will read as decoration rather than dread.