Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop Is An Irreverent Roguelite Take On The Job Simulator Genre

I’d meant to play more than just one demo last night after clocking off from work, but I was doomed the moment I started up Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. To be fair, I love building Ikea furniture and one of my favourite jobs was working as an administrative assistant at a big four accounting firm where all I did was file documents and send emails – this game was always going to be for me. I just love menial tasks.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop almost fits into that thriving genre of games where you do repetitive work, falling into patterns and gaining muscle memory. PowerWash Simulator, a game I find deeply calming, is in this group, as are PC Building Simulator, House Flipper, and the like. It’s aesthetically and tonally different (Uncle Chop’s is cartoony, full of anthropomorphised animals, and crassly funny), but the core gameplay loop boils down to fixing spaceships with the help of a trusty manual and some brain cells.

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that – it’s also a swear-filled, hilarious, somewhat surreal roguelite. You play a fox-human hybrid named Wilbur, who comes to take over the repair outfit after the last mechanic died a presumably untimely death. You’ll have to regularly pay rent to a giant floating projection Chop himself, so you better make some dough. Your first job? Taking your predecessor’s dead body out of the basement, shoving him in the space capsule you landed in, prying his repair manual out of his cold, dead arms, and shooting him straight into the inky void of space.

You go through training, where you learn to repair stuff – or rather, you learn to diagnose and fix problems by following the instructions in the aforementioned manual. On your first day of work, some incompetent hand-for-hire shoots you point blank in the face. You go to what appears to be hell, where a spider demon greets you, opens up a portal for you to go back in time, and gently kisses you goodbye. It’s all very weird and good. This is the roguelite part of the game – there are many ways to die. Don’t make rent, and Chop will kill you. Fail to defuse a bomb that some moron customer brought into your shop, and you’ll be blown to bits. There are probably more ways, but I mostly died because I didn’t make rent.

There are many ways to make money – do your job well, and you’ll rack up that good coin, but mess up and be penalised. There are two modes: one gives you seven minutes to finish as many jobs as possible in a shift, and the other removes the time pressure and gives you three jobs with harder, more complex problems to fix, which means more money per job. The latter mode will allow you to get deep into the mechanical aspects of the game and learn the protocols by heart, and I suspect that after playing this way for so long, I’ll be able to do far more jobs in a shift in the timed mode.

There are also different currencies, one that can be used to buy upgrades for your workshop, and one called Omens, which can be spent in a weird, demonic vending machine in the basement to purchase upgrades for your little fox guy. The game has all the trappings of a strange, irreverent roguelite, and perhaps most thrillingly, even though we see some of the same events happening run after run, there are always random events and new things to discover if you take the time to explore before and after your shift.

None of this would be interesting if the busywork itself didn’t feel good, but amazingly, it does. Playing feels incredibly tactile – you pull levers, pull maintenance hatches, press buttons, flip switches, plug and unplug wires, the list goes on. Even more satisfying is the fact that you eventually learn to move faster than you thought you could. After four hours, I was performing complex repairs from memory, not even needing to look at my manual unless I was encountering a totally new process.

I played this damn demo for four hours, and I still want to go back and play more. You can wishlist it on Steam here ahead of its projected launch in November.

On an asteroid-bound service station in an unfrequented space lane, Wilbur carves out a paltry living as a mechanic, repairing as many ships as he can to afford the ever-rising R.E.N.T payments to his corporate overlord, Uncle Chop. Where most of his customers find meaning in pastimes like worshipping deranged space gods, feeding random crap to a sentient black hole, endlessly digging for The Treasure™ or mentally enslaving donut shop workers, Wilbur lives a more humble life, fixing the galaxy’s ills one broken ship module at a time.