Uncle Chops Rocket Shop

Scrap mechanics in sci-fi media rock. Whether in Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars, or Wall-E, these characters stimulated the creation of many daydreams I could insert myself in to experience the fantasy of scavenging and fixing cool machines.Their appealing characteristics—confidence, indifference, and a genius intellect—are all things I desired as a child, which made it even easier to grow attached to this fictional way of life. Who wouldn’t want to work a job filled with adventure and excitement, holding both the allure of treasure hunting and the joy of creativity? Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, the newest game by developer Beard Envy, captures some of this magic while also putting more emphasis on the meandering grind this line of work could potentially contain. 

The setting is appropriate, taking place in the bum crack of nowhere with little entertainment to be found outside of the seedy diner and bar. Cheap coffee, corrupt money, and shady dealings are as common as the work you do with the wrench. You are the new mechanic at this dump, and your introduction is less than pleasant. You are met by the shop’s owner, the titular Uncle Chop, an inconsiderate hologram who immediately demands steadily increasing R.E.N.T. payments before you’ve even found your feet. The one thing left to you by the previous mechanic (left unceremoniously in the basement with a knife in his back) is a hefty manual detailing the correct procedure for all the problems you’ll be running into at the shipyard. The one bright spot in this place is Droose, the chef and customer service manager at the bar, with whom you develop a quick friendship. This is what the game leaves you with upon entering into the first day of work. 

The vibe of this world falls somewhere in between Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and an Adult Swim TV show, with characters cracking inappropriate jokes at your expense and death being portrayed as a regular occurrence without much weight. At times this energy felt really fitting and complemented the gameplay well, but I found myself getting tired of its negativity the longer I played, which is amplified by challenging design that not everyone will find fun. 

Something this game does do very well though is the art design. It utilises crisp models and outlines to make everything very engaging to look at, which is a big positive, as you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at the different ship modules and the aforementioned instruction manual, which, by the way, is beautiful! Each page is so full of life with notes left from the previous owner denoting warnings, clarifications, and humour, which made flipping through its many pages always engaging. Each section of the book has a corresponding symbol that will appear on broken ship parts to help direct you to the correct instructions, which is super helpful when you’re first starting out.

The structure and routine of the game come from a time loop you’re involuntarily sucked into, started by a bullet finding its way into your skull. After this gruesome death, you find yourself in some kind of red limbo, faced with a strange-looking creature holding a scythe. He expresses gladness at your presence, apologising for your death but ensuring that it was necessary for his plan to work. He tells you to make him proud and that you have great potential, quickly sending you back to the first day you arrived with more questions than answers. This is the backbone of the game, allowing death to not just be a setback but a chance to strive for mastery through constant repetition. I see lots of similarities to Outer Wilds and Rain World in this design. In all three experiences, information is the most important currency to acquire, which leads to moments of immense satisfaction but also requires more from the player than is comfortable. Something that adds to this is the time commitment. The length of a single run in Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop can be as long as 3 hours, so when things inevitably come crumbling down and you get sent all the way back to the first day, it’s hard not to be discouraged. There are permanent upgrades you can buy with Omen Tokens (a currency that persists between runs), but they don’t speed up the process enough to balance the brutal consequences of failure.

If you are thinking of picking up this game, I would like to make a couple of recommendations that will make your playthrough a little less brutal. Two different styles of play are offered before you start the game: frantic or focused fixing. If you’re not a masochist, I highly encourage playing on the latter, as it alleviates the time limit and makes the learning experience a lot more manageable. The jobs you experience throughout a day are made up of a number of different ship modules, with the higher-difficulty jobs containing more sections that need repair as well as more complex problems. The progression is executed quite well, with early game tasks such as fuel and oil changes building a good foundation for the ramping difficulty later on. That being said, sometimes you’ll be thrown into a situation without any reasonable chance of success, which thankfully can be reset by quitting out to the main menu, something I used frequently in late-game runs. Gaming purists might look at this and scoff, but for an experience this brutal, it’s well worth using any advantage you can find. The final thing I would endorse is playing this game on PC with a mouse and keyboard, as it feels like the intended platform everything was designed around. There are so many things to unscrew and move around between your inventory and workspace, with increased speed and accuracy being a massive part of your progression as a player. I can’t see this working well at all on a gamepad, as you’d inevitably lose a lot of the intended physicality of the repair process. 

The soundtrack is one element a game can use to give emotional respite, and though the music accompanying your stay in this world is good, it unfortunately faded into the background a little too much to really strike a chord with me. The style Tom Rumbellow and Michael Samuel-Bryan went with takes clear influence from Darren Korb’s work on Pyre and Bastion, falling into that downtempo folktronica style. It compliments hard work well but repeats the same tracks a little too frequently to remain fresh through the many repetitive shifts. 

It’s important for games with resistance and hostility to connect you to the world and characters in a meaningful way to keep you pushing forward. A good example of excellence in this area is FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, which hides intriguing characters and quests in unexpected places to keep the player interested throughout their gruelling journey. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop tries to accomplish this through Wilbur’s relationship with Droose, but it doesn’t give the player enough agency or Wilbur enough character to give much weight to their interactions. Part of this issue stems from Wilbur being a silent protagonist—a real missed opportunity, in my opinion. He feels soulless, which contrasts hard with his fun design and amazing run animation. I would have loved the simple ability to choose a basic emotion for Wilbur at the start of each day that would slightly change character interactions. This would have gone a long way in connecting the player with the protagonist.