In my time as a videogame partaker, I have crawled through approximately three billion airvents. I may well have crawled through more vents than you’ve had hot dinners. As such, any videogame that can get me excited about loosening a barred hatch and hauling my heavy ass into a square tunnel is doing something right.
The Wild Gentlemen’s new sci-fi immersive sim RetroSpace gives pretty fair vent. It hides them all over. You’ll walk along a dilapidated, meandering corridor and your eye will be caught by a certain combination of shadows, flirtatiously screened by pipes. ‘Can I fit behind there?’ You ask yourself, and lo, you have revealed a shortcut to the head engineer’s office. Elsewhere, switches peek from behind stacks of luggable crates, and bent guard-rails draw your eye to a footwide ledge leading around the next pillar.
In general, RetroSpace does a nice job of squirrelling secrets into even the smallest chambers, and if the secret is very often a “rocket doughnut” or other inventory-clogging flotsam, sensing the prize and snuffling after it is a thrill. I hope the thrill will intensify as RetroSpace goes on, perhaps leaving a few of its obvious influences behind.
