Title: Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop
Developer: Beard Envy
Publisher: Kasedo Games
Release Date: December 5, 2024
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Reviewed on: PC
Price: $19.99 (USD)

Have you ever wanted to be one of those handyman types who can open up a car engine, a dishwasher, or an air conditioner, take one look, and tell exactly what’s wrong with it? Well, what if you could do that in space?

Synopsis

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop lets you live the fantasy of being a sci-fi handyman. Styling itself as a “roguelite fix-em-up,” the game puts you in control of Wilbur, a fox-headed everyman who has just become the new mechanic at the titular Rocket Shop after the last mechanic bit the dust.

Shortly after arriving at the shop, Wilbur finds himself trapped in a time loop – every time he dies, whether it’s due to a catastrophic ship failure, or just not making rent, he gets “zooped” back to his first day on the job by a mysterious god-like entity. Over the course of the game, you will uncover the mystery of this time loop, meet several Lovecraftian deities and their followers, and of course fix a whole lot of spaceships.

Presentation

The presentation of the game is absolutely spot-on. The character designs range from adorable to hideous in a very Adult Swim way, and the writing has a sincerity and vulgarity that I found very charming and funny. I’m a particular fan of Droose, the immortal time god and part-time fry cook who seems a bit gruff at first, but ends up being a constant source of heartfelt encouragement.

The soundtrack, though a bit sparse, sets the mood perfectly – a bottleneck slide on a dusty old acoustic guitar gives the garage a scrappy, middle-of-nowhere feeling, and the more intense “boss fight” repairs bring in a driving drum beat that gets your blood pumping without getting too distracting.

Gameplay

The spaceship-fixing at the core of the game was probably one of the most rewarding and unique gameplay experiences I’ve had in recent memory.

There is a short tutorial at the start that familiarizes you with your limited set of verbs, but you’ll be doing most of the actual learning while on the job. This is thanks to the Grimoire, a bizarre reference document / user manual that is (intentionally) a bit of a mess to navigate and decipher. Here you will find descriptions and repair guides for all the various modules that you may find on a spaceship.

The overall effect is like a single-player version of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, where you’re frantically looking back and forth between an inscrutable piece of machinery and an equally inscrutable section of the Grimoire, trying to figure out how many snails you need in the rebreather module or what kind of Honk Pancake the AI module takes.

This learn-by-doing gameplay loop is incredibly rewarding and quite addictive. The initial feeling of “I’m never going to know all this” when you first flip through the Grimoire gradually falls away as you spend more loops fixing more ships, until you eventually realize that you do, in fact, know all this. It’s like solving a Rubik’s cube for the first time after spending days learning all the patterns and algorithms.

But Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop doesn’t stop there. At the end of each R.E.N.T. cycle (every three in-game days) you’re faced with the fix-em-up equivalent of a boss battle – a test from Uncle Chop himself that requires you to learn and repair new, unique ship parts. It’s a brilliant twist, one that tests not only your knowledge of standard ship repair, but also your ability to learn new repairs on the fly.

On top of that, there are multiple side quests that you can discover, all of which culminate in Wilbur being whisked away to a different location to do a new set of tasks, aided by a new Grimoire. These segments aren’t quite as fleshed-out as the core ship repair, but they do a great job of breaking up the pace and reducing a bit of the grindiness of the ship repair loop.

Unfortunately, there is still a fair amount of grind in the late game. As fun as the fix-em-up part of the game is, the roguelite part leaves something to be desired. The time loop mechanic is fine for the first few runs, while you’re still learning the ropes and getting tangled up in side quests. But once you’ve become familiar with all the ship modules, every run starts to feel the same, save for the endings.

I think a reworking of the time loop mechanic could solve this problem. The main problem is that the punishment for failure is tedium. The more advanced modules you work on often have fatal consequences for failure, so if you screw up, you have to start a brand-new run and trudge through 20-30 minutes of mindlessly filling fuel canisters and cleaning toilets before you can take another whack at the interesting thing that killed you.

To the developers’ credit, they have patched in some upgrades that you can purchase to alleviate or skip some of this early-run slog, but I think there’s still room for improvement – maybe an upgrade that just sends you back to the start of the current R.E.N.T. cycle when you die, or some build options that affect how the actual repairs work.

Final Score

A good game teaches you how to play it, but Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop does something even more impressive – it teaches you how to learn. The feeling of progression that comes almost entirely from your own knowledge is a rare and delightful treat, one that this game captures perfectly. Despite a bit of a flabby endgame, the great presentation and multiple endings help keep things from getting too stale. If you like obtuse puzzles, Rubik’s cubes, or wacky sci-fi tinged with cosmic horror, you’ll find something to love in Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop.

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