Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop

As part of a leadership training course, I recently took a personality test that categorizes you as one of four colors: orange, blue, green, and gold. Reading the summary of each color, I knew I was glistening gold before I even answered the first question. Gold’s are task-oriented box-checkers who love making lists and following rules above all else. That’s me to a fault, so when I discovered that Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is a roguelike game essentially about following instruction manuals, the gold in me whirred with excitement. Despite seemingly being a roguelike made just for people like me, my excitement waned after several hours and runs of giving Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop the old college try.

The game opens with the player character – a four-eyed fox-head man named Wilbur – crash landing on a planet. He’s been sent to replace the previous proprietor of a spaceship repair shop, which is overseen by a corporate benefactor named Uncle Chop. Dear old Uncle Chop requires you to pony up rent of increasing amounts every few days, with failure resulting in Wilbur’s untimely end, and the cycle starting over once more.

Like Wilbur, I’ve been clocking in each day, attempting to unravel the game’s mysteries while getting better at its mechanical puzzles. I’ve been repairing oil pumps, toilets, photographic identification devices, and VR machines, just to name a few. Jobs are selected from a payphone and range from simple refueling to multi-stage repairs of several ship systems. Carrying out repairs is extremely tactile, requiring manual input from the player every step of the way. Every bolt needs turning, every lever pulling, and each mechanism increases in complexity, but even the simple fixes have layers. So, for instance, changing out a busted fuel canister requires opening each fuel container compartment, sliding a master switch to expose the canisters, sliding two more switches to release each one from their housing, and then finally removing and transferring them to your inventory. Then you must pump the proper amount of fuel at a filling station by attaching each canister and operating another lever, being careful not to overfill or risk destroying the canister altogether. And that’s just one item on a ship’s repair checklist.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop has two “game modes”, which are essentially difficulty levels – frantic fixing and focused fixing. Frantic is the default gameplay experience which places a time limit on each in-game day – seven minutes early-on – and allows you to complete as many jobs as possible within the allotted time. More difficult jobs have better payouts, creating a risk-reward trade-off to consider as you work towards accumulating enough cash to make rent. Focused fixing removes the daily time limit, but only lets you complete three jobs per day, ramps up the difficulty of repairs, and penalizes mistakes more heavily. After attempting a few runs on frantic fixing mode, I eventually switched to focused fixing, though it still drove me crazy in different ways.

If you’re the person who opens something up for the first time and immediately tosses the instruction manual aside, you’re going to hate Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. If you like figuring out how things work, you’ll probably enjoy it quite a bit. An in-game grimoire has a chapter on each type of repair job, with illustrations and copious amounts of information to abide by. Completing one task out of order, missing a step, or not hitting a mark properly can mean failure. It’s like putting together IKEA furniture on repeat – if you know, you know. And failing a repair doesn’t mean you just don’t earn money for that job; nope, it means that you’re on the hook for any damages too, making every mistake that much more costly. All of which is to say that this game is difficult.

As is typical of the roguelike genre, I did eventually master some of its more basic repairs, with some things becoming second nature. For instance, I knew that if the pressure release did not vent on an oil pump, that the heat sink needed replacing. In that regard, the game does reward studious repetition, should you have the patience for it. Station upgrades, like electric tools, also persist between runs, and you can store some items to have them available for next time. After seven runs, I was finally able to make my first rent payment of $280. I quickly failed to make my second rent payment of $870 but was able to make the $280 rent payment after the first day the next time around. In other words, I was making progress, but I grew tired of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, its repetitive tasks, copious instructions, and occasionally frustrating controller input issues. To wit, on more than on occasion I accidentally bought an expensive – and run derailing – upgrade because interactive objects were placed too close together. All I could do was rest my face in the palms of my hands in frustration, buck up, and go at it for another run at making rent.

Despite my eventual and numerous frustrations with the game, I did appreciate the irreverent tone and humor of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. Don’t let the cartoon aesthetic fool you – this is not a game your children should play. It boasts that late-night Comedy Central adult cartoon dark humor, and it did often make me snicker. A creature crash lands on the landing pad at one point to which Droos, the local café manager, instructed me to get a water hose and “clean this [expletive] up”. Later, scoffing at the number of patrons in his establishment, he remarked, “Christ, there’s a lot of [expletives] in here.” Beyond the dialogue, there were also some mysterious events happening that kept me intrigued. A dark, slender figure (Slender Man) would randomly be waiting for me outside of my camper to share some cryptic ramblings, in addition to a strange talking cat and other oddities. However, its mature and strangely dark tone could not clear the air long enough for me to forget about its frustrating gameplay.

If you’re a mechanical engineer or NASA astronaut, I can comfortably say that Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is the roguelike for you. On the contrary, if you come home after a long day at work, looking to turn your brain off for a while by enjoying the splendors of video gaming, this is most certainly not the game for you. It manages to pair the joys, or lack thereof, of assembling IKEA furniture with a roguelike video game, which even for this task-oriented rule follower did not land. The strange part is that it largely accomplishes its vision for the game it is trying to be, but it’s too much of an overstimulating slog to be consistently enjoyable. I thought this was a roguelike for a gold personality like me and it wasn’t, and that is totally fine. Still, I know there is a super-specific niche of gamers out there who this will resonate with.