RetroSpace launches today, and you can get through its dying space station without firing a shot
The Wild Gentlemen's disco-punk space horror arrives October 1 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2 and PC. Combat is one option among stealth, hacking and sabotage aboard a station swallowed by a black hole.
RetroSpace is out today on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2 and PC via Steam. Czech studio The Wild Gentlemen has been building it for years with Kwalee publishing, and it arrives on all four platforms at once.
What it is
The pitch is "disco-punk space horror": a 1970s-flavoured retro-futurist space station, Aurora 5, that has been swallowed by a black hole, and a janitor who has to survive it. The look is deliberately low-poly and the tone swings between grim and silly, moustaches included.
Mechanically it is an immersive sim rather than a shooter, and the studio is blunt that shooting is only one answer. Stealth, hacking, diversions, traps and hidden routes are all viable, and the developers say you can get through without fighting at all. A mutation system called Mutamods trades raw power for side effects that change how you play, and the station is laid out as an interconnected space you learn rather than a run of levels.
Before you buy
There is a free demo on Steam if you want to test the feel first. In a developer deep-dive posted on September 24, the team walked through what the game actually is, an unusual thing to still be explaining a week before launch and a fair signal of how hard RetroSpace is to summarise.
Steam's listing had not published a price when PlayThruu checked it ahead of the day's unlock.
Why it matters
Immersive sims that genuinely let you skip combat are rare, and rarer still at this budget. RetroSpace is a real one launching on consoles and Switch 2 the same day as PC.