How long is Routine?

How long is Routine? After almost a decade and a half in development, Lunar Software's highly anticipated horror has had plenty of time to balloon in scope. Before you finally touch down on the Union Plaza lunar base, you might be curious if the studio has devoted all that time to quality or quantity. Is Routine short and sweet, or a full-fledged space odyssey? Now that we've rolled credits, we can give you a definitive answer.

Linear, story-driven horror games from indie developers tend to stay on the shorter side, and there's no question that Routine ticks all of those boxes. However, it's hard to discount how similar it is to Alien Isolation, which is often criticized for its lengthy runtime. To put those fears to rest, here's how long it'll take to roll credits on Routine.

Routine takes around seven hours to beat. This was how long an average playthrough took across the PCGamesN team. However, your playthrough could take over ten hours or as little as one hour, depending on your aptitude for puzzles and sensitivity to horror.

The vast majority of Routine's missions involve solving puzzles, and so the time it takes to beat varies from player to player. If you're confident with logic puzzles and ciphers, then your playtime will be a lot shorter compared to a player who struggles with both.

You also need to factor in the time it takes to navigate past Routine's enemies. If you're adept at avoiding stalkers in horror games like Alien Isolation or Resident Evil 2 Remake, then sneaking around in Routine shouldn't be too much of a challenge. If you're easily spooked, expect your total playtime to become artificially inflated from time spent running and hiding.

A first playthrough will always take substantially longer for a linear game, but in Routine, the various codes and puzzle solutions aren't randomly generated. As a result, we're confident that an experienced player could perform a full playthrough of Routine in under an hour.

If you'd rather keep your total playtime in Routine to a minimum, bookmark our guides to the Routine locker puzzle and how to make the EL9 solution. Since they're two of the toughest puzzles, going in with the answers will save a ton of time. We've also got the Routine elevator code if you're having trouble getting past the Arrivals lounge.