How good are you at following instructions? How about while you’re under a timer? What about when your life depends on it? Me??? Maybe no??t so great. Maybe.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is probably the last game I’ve been anticipating for the year. Well, that’s assuming a couple of them that have been quiet for a while aren’t going to drop. Anyway, playing the demo, it’s hard ?not to fall in love with its tricky diagnose-replace-repair? gameplay laced with dark humor and a severe potty mouth.

So, I voraciously ate into it when I finally had it in my hands for this review, but after all the time I put into it, I still haven’t hit the credits. After, urgh, 25 hours, I still haven’t found the bottom of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, but I’ve seen enough to tell you that you sh?ould definitely play this game if you think you can withsta??nd the punishment.

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop (PC)
Developer: Beard Envy
Publisher: Kasedo Games
Released: December 5, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is, on the surface, a game about repair. Folks drop in with their ailing spacecraft, and it’s up to you to diagnose problems and make repairs. Each ship is separated into modules, and each craft has a random variety and number of them. The modules range from fuel, oil, and oxygen to AI, reactors, and just one big lever. You’re told what needs fixing, so you don’t need ??to figure out which of them is broken, but each of them breaks in different ways, so it’s up to you to figure out what needs to be repaired and what it looks like when everything is working.

This is all handled through a tactile interface where you pull levers and push buttons. Once you find something broken, you have to head to the store (right next to the repair bay) to buy a replacement and slot it in. You can get a welder that will restore shattered parts, but I found it somewhat unnecessary, as parts are relatively cheap. It’s a game that feels similar to Papers, Please, but with less paperwork and more ?refilling bli??nker fluid.

To help, you’re provided an all-inclusive ins??truction manual that goes over ?everything you need to know�mostly. You usually don’t have context for what is going on until you’ve seen the module itself and have gotten to know the various parts. Even when you do, it’s not difficult to make a mistake. You might get a pancake wrong or forget to close a hatch when you’re finished. Personally, I’ve never gotten to the point where I’m completely confident in front of a reactor. But then, if you get a step wrong, they blow up in your face and take, at the very least, you along with them. Possibly the neighborhood, as well.

You play as Wilbur, a hapless guy with a four-eyed fox head. He’s just the latest in a line of mechanics employed at Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. Hints are dropped at what happened to the previous ones, but you can probab?ly guess. You’re given free rein of the shop. Most of the profit you?? make is yours, but every three days, you need to pay Uncle Chop R.E.N.T. to maintain your employment.

However, before you even really get grease on your h?ands, some dude shows up and blows your (fox) head off. It’s a good indication of how things will go from here.

You’re saved by a coworker who also happens to be th?e living personification of death. You’ve made an impression, so he will “zoop�you back to the start of your employment every time you screw up bad en?ough to die. The purpose of this isn’t completely clear at the start, but it’s nice to have job security. Also, yes, this is technically a roguelite.

There are two modes of play in Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. The first has th?e day passing by in real time, leaving you to try and fit in as many jobs as possible before bedtime. This means there’s a lot of pressure, and you’ll have to flip through that manual ??of yours pretty quickly whenever you’re faced with something you’re not completely familiar with. It also leaves more room for mistakes.

The second way of playing removes the time limit. You’re given room to complete three jobs and can take as long as you want on them. Making a mistake (or “fucking up,�as the game puts it) results in heftier penalties. However, in my experience, it’s a far easier way to p??lay. When you’re given as muc??h time as you need, it’s easier to complete a job without any mistakes whatsoever.

It doesn't necessarily feel like the intended way to play. However, it also feels like a necessary compromise. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is brutal. It throws new stuff at you all the time, practically smashing you directly into a wall. It can be cruel about it. Just wait until the first time you see a reactor. Yeah, you read that manual in advance. Go ahead. It won’t hel?p. You’re one forgotten switch awa??y from nuking your face off.

Sometimes, after the first R.E.N.T. is taken care of, a dude will land with pipe bombs strapped to his ship. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got the day timer going, you’ll have one-and-a-half minutes to deduce what wires you should snip using the Venn ?diagram from hell. I got really good at bomb defusal. I’m a wiz at reading Venn diagrams.

Even when you’ve got all the time in the world, one fuckup can be all it ??takes to gutter a run. Some customers have the “Perfectionist�trait, which means that if you make a single mistake, it will completely negate everything you got correct and leave you out of pocket. It’s a gamble since you only need to leave one too few shots left in their identification module to lose all your hard work. If you miss R.E.N.T., your job being terminated is the least of your concerns.

There’s also the chance that a customer will show up requiring a fix you can’t prov?ide. This sometimes happens before you have the “Pancake�machine required for building specialized parts, but I also had one that needed a fuse that wasn’t available for me to purchase yet. I’m not sure this is intentional design. The game will sometimes let you know when you don’t have the machines needed to fix a ship before you take a job, but it doesn’t work every time. I’ve learned to just buy the Pancake and Encoder machines immediately at the start of the first run and avoid rebreathers on the first day.

But even still, my last run was ended because I took a job from an ??armed customer. He tried to rob me, but when I refused to empty my pockets, he shot my brain off. This is Fuck Around and Find Out: The Game.

It’s okay, thoug?h. Every time I got my run nuked, I’d just slump my shoulders and decide if I had time for another run. The only aggravating part about it was that my deadline was coming up and I like to have a game beaten before wr??iting the review since you never know when something will shake apart at the last minute. However, I think I’ve gotten to what is essentially an end (there appears to be multiple). I just know that there’s a tonne left hidden because the places you can stick your fingers to find secrets are on display at all times.

What made it so hard to stay mad at it was that, even after restarting dozens of times, I was still being presented with new stuff.?? N?ot necessarily modules; I know how to fix a rebreather in my sleep. It’s the interactions with customers and coworkers. Every time one gets out of their ship, you never know if they’re going to give you a hug or complain about how you smell like wet dog. Visiting the speakeasy before or after work also gives you the opportunity to see more of the station’s denizens and pick up side quests.

But it’s maybe the fact that Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop doesn’t lean entirely on cruelty to Wilbur?? that makes it more tolerable. As much fun as it is to see a hapless protagonist suffer, and it feels appropriate in a workplace environment, it can get tiresome. Instead, most of the characters have a softer side. Droose, especially, outwardly seems to care about Wilbur, and some moments with him are endearing. He and some of the custom?ers will offer frequent words of encouragement, even if others are deliberately trying to blow you up.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is a lot. It’s a lot more? than it has to be. While its design is tight and well-executed, it offers an obscene amount of variety and seemingly endless things to see. Which is good, especially if you’re like me and you find yourself in a hellcircle of 11th-hour fuckups that prevent you from witnessing the final clock out. And I think it says a lot when, despite how badly I’ve been savaged by its unforgiving nature, I’m happy to start up a new run and try again.

It’s pretty clear that not everyone will thi??nk that way. A game about throwing levers and getting blown up repeatedly isn’t going to gel with some. And while there is some permanent progr?ession, the only thing you carry over between runs that will help you is what you were able to learn. A fondness for troubleshooting will get you far.

But regardless of whether or not this is the type of game you think you’d enjoy, it’s clear that Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is exactly what it wants to be. It’s an expert mix of cruel work-a-day tinkering and dark, vulgar humor. A bottomless well of savagely comedic moments, beckoning secrets, and puzzles that require Ikea furniture-level manual comprehension skills. If you’ve got room in your skull for some truly useless knowledge and can tolerate having your face stomped on a few times, you’ve got a friend in Uncle Chop.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Kaseda Games has announced that Beard Envy’s tactile repair experience, Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, is comi?ng out on PC December 5, 2024. Ma?rk your calendar.

Not familiar with Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop? There’s a hefty demo you can try. Don’t want to bother playing the demo? I wrote about the demo over here. Don’t want to click a link? Let me explain.

In Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, you’re cast as a hapless fox-man who is starting their job at an interstellar service station. You’ve been g??iven no training and have to learn how to diagnose and repair various modules on spaceships based entirely on what you can learn in a hefty manual. You only have a few days to scrape together enough R.E.N.T. to survive your employer’s wrath. Not easy when you’re faking it until you make it.

There’s a roguelite-style run format where you keep repeating the days unt?il you can finally succeed. I don’t recall specifically, but largely, the only thing you take back with you in a new run is knowledge. You have to build your knowledge and skill when it comes to repair and diagnosis. You need to learn the various ship modules t??o ensure that you can fix them with maximum efficiency. Only then will you survive your workweek.

The main hook is that each repair job has a bunch of tactile elements to it. You have to turn cranked and remove parts, disassemble, and reassemble. It’s just so sa?tisfying. Absolute brain candy. The whole thing is set alongside a brutally humorous story. Really dark stuff. Really leaning into the “comedy is tragedy from far enough away�mentality?.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop releases on PC December 5, 2024.

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It’s hard to keep track of the demos available during Steam Next Fest. I wish Steam would email me about games on my wishlist getting demos, because Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop has been on my wishlist since August 2022. Would have been nice to hear of the demo.

I found it eventually. I don’t remember how, but I’m glad I did because it gave me a taste of what I’ve been looking forward to. A big taste. It pushed my chin back and made sure I had no choice but to guzzle it all down. I had other things to do that evening, but they got shunted aside for three hours of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. I don’t regret it.

The philosophy behind Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is tactile mechanics. In a lot of games, the act of doing basically anything gets distilled down to be intuitive; almost too much. Some games will have you pick a lock with a dice roll or a progress bar, and others give you a mini-game where you jiggle the pins. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is all pin jiggling.

A lot of actions get boiled down in games to make things more intuitive or to even out the difficulty curve. Sometimes, it’s so the action just flows better. Other ?times, designing an entire mini-game around a simple action just isn’t within the game’s scope. However, good use?? of tactile mechanics will feel extremely satisfying, like when a horror game makes you jiggle pins while a killer is bearing down on you.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop has you playing as Wilbur, a hapless mechanic at an interstellar service station. Wilbur has had very little training, but both hi??s life and his livelihood depend on him bein?g able to repair all manner of problems.

Somebody lands with a problem, you flip open the panel, and then you discover that you haven’t seen? this particular type of fu??el module before. Panic creeps up your spine, and you try to soothe your bladder before pee can escape.

The goal is to complete eno?ugh jobs �and of high enough complexity �that you can pay your R.E.N.T. after a few days. However, before you have the chance to get into it, a hitman blows Wilbur’s head off. That’s not the end of the dem?o.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop borrows the “run�concept of the roguelite genre. If you can’t pay your rent by the end of the time period, you’re dead??. A shadowy figure then greets you and sends you back to the beginning of the period to try again. Having Wilbur ?unceremoniously assassinated is the game’s way of introducing you to the concept. After that, however, you’re thrown into the deep end.

The central concept of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop that I think is going to be make or break? with some people is the way it doesn’t teach beyond the core mechanics. New modules keep showing up on visiting spacecraft, and if you haven’t seen them before, you need to bring up your grimoire and find the chapter that covers them. Then, you need to learn how to diagnose and address problems. Being faced with a new module and having to learn it can take up a lot of your day, meaning you won’t be able to finish many jobs and might come up short on rent. This is where the roguelite aspect plays well. It gives you both the opportunity and requirement to improve your skills.

That’s under “Frantic Fixing�difficulty, anyway. There’s also “Focused Fixing�which doesn’t have you on a time limit but only lets you complete three jobs a day with greater punishment for difficulty. I’m a writer, so I’m used to work??ing under deadlines.

The important part of diagnosis and repair in Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is that it actually feels like diagnosis and repair. Modules rarely break i??n just one way. Sometimes, you can see visible damage, and other times, you need to calibrate. The Grimoir??e is sometimes specific in its information, but more often, you need to try and interpret diagrams through trial and error. If you’re not careful, you may break components and need to replace them.

As you play, you gradually become better at these, learning certain modules inside out and backwards. Sometimes, when a new twist shows up, you already have some idea on how to approach it. Because Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop doesn’t hold your hand and resp?ects you enough to assume that you’ll be able to figure things out on your own, it’s a rewarding and meaningful game. Sure, maybe replacing the oil pump on a spaceship isn’t going to easily translate into the real world, but I like games that make me feel smart when I’m not.

The day before rent is due, you get a whopper of a spaceship. It has multiple p??roblems to address, some of which you might be seeing for the first time??. This ensures that getting to the end of the day with enough money left in your pockets to pay rent will probably require a few runs.

If you pull it off, your reward is a sh?ip that has multiple bombs to defuse. You’re not supposed to survive. That’s the end of the demo. You’ll be told this directly. It’s an appropriate way to end things.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is planned for November 2024. I was already interested in the direction that Beard Envy had chosen, but the demo is beyond my hopes for execution. With its tactile gameplay that puts the onus on you to improve your skills and learn new ones, it’s among the ?most satisfying games I’ve played. When combined with a charmingly bizarre art style and darkly funny script, you wind up with the whole package. I’m not looking forward to the chilly weather, but November can’t come soon enough.

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