RetroSpace lands on 1 October with eight endings

RetroSpace arrives on Wednesday on PC, PS5, Xbox Series and Switch 2. The game from Hungarian studio The Wild Gentlemen blends a System Shock style immersive sim with a 1970s space station, disco and moustaches included. Its lead is a janitor stuck aboard the Aurora 5, a vessel swallowed by a black hole that keeps jumping between two time periods. The studio promises eight separate endings and a cloning system that saddles every resurrection with a fresh flaw. Announced for the second quarter, it finally lands on 1 October.

At a glance

What RetroSpace borrows from the immersive sims

The Steam page for RetroSpace sums the intent up in a line: disco-punk space horror where you play the sneaky type or turn into a mutant bruiser to survive. Bánk B. Varga, the studio’s creative director, listed his references in an interview with Wesley LeBlanc for Game Informer: the Thief series, the System Shock games, Deus Ex and Prey. The disco-punk label comes from the cinema of the era, which he ties to Logan’s Run, Buck Rogers and Silent Running.

The signature system in RetroSpace is called Mutamods. These are mutations that hand over an ability and a side effect, to be balanced against a chosen playstyle. Death gets its own mechanic: every rebirth comes with a cloning error, a drawback to work around. Varga describes the idea as drawn from soulslikes and from the traits in Void Bastards. The station unfolds like a metroidvania, with a central hub tying the sectors together. The game also leaves players free to pick their approach: stealth, open combat and hijacking the ship’s systems all lead somewhere, with different consequences.

RetroSpace, the third game from a 23-person studio

The Wild Gentlemen formed in 2018 around three friends and now runs to 23 people, according to its publisher’s press kit. The studio made its name with Chicken Police – Paint it RED!, a black and white noir populated by anthropomorphic animals, praised for its writing and art direction. Two further projects are in the works, Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! and Moses & Plato – Last Train to Clawville. RetroSpace is therefore its first game to step away from noir altogether. It joins the small run of European developers betting on a strong visual identity, like the Metz outfit Flying Oak Games in our piece on Knuckle Paradise.

The publisher is Britain’s Kwalee, founded by David Darling, co-founder of Codemasters, and named best publisher at the TIGA Awards in 2022. Its release of 18 August confirms all four launch platforms. Kilian Binder at AllKeyShop noted the same day that no PS4, Xbox One or first-generation Switch version was planned.

A release that arrives after two slips

The calendar has moved more than once. Keiran McEwen at Phenixx Gaming points out that the game was announced as far back as 2023. The Steam page still promised a second-quarter 2026 launch last November, before the 1 October date was locked in over the summer. A demo has been on Steam since 11 June, and the studio published a detailed developer breakdown on 24 September. RetroSpace asks little of a PC, an i5-8400, 16GB of memory and a GTX 1050 Ti, which puts it within reach of ageing machines. It carries an 18 rating in Germany and 16 in Brazil.

As for how many players are waiting, the Steam page had RetroSpace sitting 318th among the most wishlisted unreleased games on Monday morning, out of a chart running to 5,286 entries. The studio announced 30,000 wishlists back in May 2024, a figure that has aged by now. The game ships in nine languages including French, with English voice work. No price appears on the listing two days out from launch. Players after indie games with the same kind of personality will find one in our article on Dust till Dawn.