Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop: A wacky and well-oiled game about interstellar auto repair

Everyone forgets the little guy. In the sci-fi genre, players realise lofty dreams of travelling across the stars and exploring the fringes of the universe. Who's gonna pick up after you? For every story about cavorting across the cosmos like in Starfield, there's many more to be told about the people who put in the work to keep the ships running, like in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. The upcoming Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is another game about the unsung peons of the future.

You're Wilbur, a mutant fox starting out as the mechanic of the local Rocket Shop, a place where spacefarers seek repairs when their ship breaks down. Indentured into a contract with the corporate Uncle Porkchop, the player has to manage the shop's upkeep in order to pay the rent every fortnight. Fortunately, Droose, the chef of the Shop, is able to teach you the ropes. Before long, you're working dawn till dusk on ships, meeting the strange passerby on the galactic highway as you go.

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is gloriously odd right from the start, prefaced with a well-designed animation juxtaposing the laid-back morning routine of Wilbur and the chaos of a ship about to crash-land at the shop. The player's first task in the tutorial is to dispose of the previous mechanic, who's knifed in the back in the basement. Later, be it a random event or narrative device, but I had my head blown off in a hit and ended up in the afterlife. It brims with a energy that the developers state comes from an appreciation of 00s cartoons like Rick and Morty.

Gameplay in Uncle Chop is all about taking on contracts to refuel and repair ships to earn cash to pay the rent. Each day, after clocking in, players can select a few gigs, where customers will arrive and land their ship on the pad. Maybe they need a basic refuel or oil change. Or maybe their Universal Poop Receptacle is broken. The job menu shows what customers need, and how difficult the job should be. From there, it's time to wander down to the ship and open 'er up!

I was immediately surprised by how tactile and in-depth this aspect of gameplay is. Spacecraft are complex machines, and Uncle Chop treats their design with the reverence and precision of a mechanic. Players are provided with a mystical grimoire, an in-depth manual of the inner workings of all of the parts they can expect to work with. There are lovingly detailed diagrams within, including everything from the fuel canisters, the onboard AI, to the pancake maker. Each of these elements has an animated and tactile counterpart on customers' ships.

Bringing up a sidebar, the player has a few tools at their disposal to interact with the ship's systems to open up, repair or replace components. Sometimes this is as simple as taking out a spent fuel canister, recharging it, and putting it back. In other cases, more in-depth work is required. There's a good sense of diagnostics supported by the grimoire: for instance, more than one thing can go wrong with a ship's photo identification system, requiring players to test out the photos it takes, and figure out if the focus is blurry, has a broken flash, or it's just run out of ink!

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is being developed by Beard Envy Games, a three-man team from the United Kingdom comprising art director Aaron Coker, character artist Ben Webster and technical artist Josiah Ward. The game is their second after Filament, a 'cable-based puzzle game' that demonstrates a similarly playful and tactile approach to the engineering aspects of spacefaring. Uncle Chop is being released by indie publisher Kasedo Games.

A demo of the game is available on Steam, with an expected release date of November 2024.

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