When I decided to chase my passion and start a gaming blog, I thought I’d finally escaped the "time is money" hamster wheel of retail and service jobs. No more menial work under a time crunch with the literal fear of death over my shoulder. No more arbitrary micromanaging. No more the customer is always right. I traded all that for the sweet freedom of drowning in a near-toppling pile of indie games waiting for review... at my own pace!
That was the dream, anyway, until the rise of routine-based simulators pulled me right back into the grind — this time, at least, without the real-world consequences.
Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is the latest in this blooming genre that has consumed me, reeling me in with its easy to understand manual-driven gameplay styles and its deep lore-filled world that I've only scratched the surface of.
Just the Facts |
Developer: Beard Envy |
Publisher: Kasedo Games |
Platform(s): PC*, PS5, Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed |
Price: $19.99 |
Release Date: December 5, 2024 |
Review key provided by publisher via PressEngine. |
A greasy grimy world
Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop comes to us from the small team that is Beard Envy, a trio dedicated to making games that require all of your mental processing power to play. Their first game, Filament, is all about solving puzzles by wrapping cables around poles in increasingly convoluted scenarios. A thinker.
Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is more of... a stressor. This game asks you to keep up with increasingly complicated repair scenarios within a daily time limit, all while hoping to make R.E.N.T. payments every few days and avoid death at the hands of your hologram pig landlord. As we all do.
You go through all this as the newly hired mechanic at Uncle Chop's, Wilbur — a fox-headed man who seems happy to haphazardly stumble his way around the job. The grimy chef of the diner opposite the repair shop, Droose, serves as Wilbur's mentor and helps him adjust to his new day-to-day: Wake up, take out the trash (for example, the body of the last mechanic, still in the basement), flip through the employee manual with its seven tab-separated sections, punch in, and get to work.
The layers of filth and delightful absurdity are apparent from the jump. A mechanic wearing a tank top and jorts meets the foul-mouthed chef of what is essentially a space highway diner, and the first thing they do together is "inter" the body of the station's last mechanic by tossing him in the same space pod that delivered Wilbur to Uncle Chop's, only blasting him off after they've torn the heavy employee handbook out of his arms and fully disturbed his body. The team cites its influences as some kind of hodge-podge blending of 2000s cartoons like Adventure Time with 1950s Americana, all wrapped up with an emphasis on the more eldritch and surreal aspects of both.
Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop doesn't flinch from the grime of the gig. Wilbur will literally hose shit from clogged toilets. Uncle Chop will implode Wilbur's head if he doesn't make R.E.N.T. And Droose and the customers of the Rocket Shop will pepper you with all the f-bombs you could ask for. With its morbid humor and the constant surprises of randomized repair tasks and whatever new daily gimmick the job offers, Uncle Chop's is endlessly unpredictable.
And that's all before you get resurrected by a literal god or get yourself wrapped up with the internal and external conflicts of one of the game's silly factions. Cultists, multi-level marketing schemes, donuts, capitalism-focused gods. They all await in Uncle Chop's and all are delivered with that Adult Swim-adjacent humor.
Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop's narrative, and your knowledge of its deeply complex systems, bloom at a similar pace. As you learn more about the various complexities of the ship modules you repair, you also start to understand more about what you're really here to do and how literally everything — on the station, in the handbook, and even on ships — could be hinting at bigger mysteries.
It doesn't seem like it at first, but Uncle Chop's is a game ripe for deeper analysis, for lore breakdowns and community-driven mystery solving. In my 17 hours playing through 20 loops of the game's four days of work, I feel like I've only begun to scratch the surface. And I'm itching to get back in to uncover even more after finally seeing the end of the loop.
Keep reading and this ship gets fixed
In our first preview of this game, we likened it to a randomized single-player take on the manual-driven Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a party game that asked players to work together to defuse bombs.
Uncle Chop's squishes that experience down onto one player, giving you the book that explains how to tinker with the purposefully convoluted systems that get these spaceships running. You to fiddle with tactile bits and bobs as you do repair jobs, all while fighting against a time crunch. You've only got so much time to work during the day and each new customer has a patience meter that'll deplete over time, decreasing their potential tip and satisfaction with your work.
Do jobs, earn money, pay your R.E.N.T, or die. If at any point Wilbur dies, he's sent back to the start of the week to try it all again.
For those who think a ticking clock might overwhelm, Uncle Chop's does offer a "calm" mode (Focused Fixing vs. Frantic Fixing) that replaces the clock with harder repair jobs and more limited opportunities at repair, removing the stress of time and replacing it with the stress of perfection. In this mode, you are judged more harshly for mistakes and are expected to use the freedom of time to ensure you're being detail-oriented in your repairs.
On the whole, I found the dense manual-following work to be a joy. But I'm also the kind of person who celebrates at the opportunity to build furniture, to troubleshoot technical issues for friends and family, and to test my abilities to follow even the vaguest step-by-step guides to achieve some goal. And that's all that Uncle Chop's is.
With the roguelike format, you earn upgrades to your shop that persist across runs, making the job easier and teaching you the long-term lessons that make referencing the guidebook less necessary as time goes on. In that regard, there is a feeling of actually growing and learning as one would in such a high-stress job as this.
Roguelikes always give you the satisfaction of learning and growing the more you play, but when it's so closely tied to the tactile satisfaction of blue-collar work, it feels even better.
Uncle Chop's will certainly overwhelm at the start. Between the ticking clock and the newness of it all, the game punishes you early and often for even the smallest mistakes. I found my best way forward was to start on the Focused Fixing, ignoring the clock to let each new repair module sink into my squishy brain, before finding some level of mastery in each task and taking that knowledge into the more chaotic runs of Frantic Fixing.
I fully accept that this game fills a very specific niche and that many would find pain in the manual-driven repair experiences rather than the joy it gave me. It's a hard game that technically does — and doesn't — hold your hand through it. Because it provides you with all the answers from the start, but expects you to leaf through pages of a manual to understand it.
But it's a strange game. It's something fresh. It's unlike anything I've played in recent years, and I celebrate it for the niche interest it satisfies.
The blue-collar life ain't for everyone
I will say, it was a bit anticlimactic to end a proper run and not receive any obvious answers as to what to do next — to finally defeat the gauntlet the game laid out in front of me, only to be left with even more work to unearth the game's bigger mysteries.
And the obscurity of those clues feels like I'll need the help of the community to fully answer the questions I still have. That can be fun for the biggest secrets, but not when I feel like I need that to experience a "proper ending."
This inadequate signposting and purposeful obscuring even locks you out of some of the most interesting side content. There's a clear dedication to building out dense lore, but when the mysteries block you from having full gameplay experiences, it's a detractor for sure.
Aside from that, and the generally overwhelming nature of the early game, Uncle Chop's doesn't have much to dislike. The sci-fi world captures the blend of cutesy and crude reminiscent of the early 2000s animation scene. The moody twang of guitar tracks accompany each work shift, and the ship modules' tactile interactivity pairs perfectly with audio design that makes it all the more satisfying and easy to follow. Altogether, it's engrossing and rewarding, as far as jobs go.
Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is a especially satisfying routine game that emulates the best bits of furniture building and tech troubleshooting to provide a roguelike you'll feel is worth mastering. It's silly but narratively dense. It's randomized but always feels intentional in its design. And I just can't stop thinking about Wilbur and his weird batch of rocket ship pals.
If you're the type to greedily clap your hands together at the sight of a hefty manual, then a gig at Uncle Chop's is for you.
Video Games Are Good and Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is . . . . GREAT (8/10)
+ the joy of learning and gaining mastery, a roguelike experience unlike any other, simultaneously dense and simplistic gameplay systems
- dissatisfying "ending," a bit overwhelming, manual-driven routine gameplay will either be a big hit or an extreme miss
Коментарі