Roman Sands RE:Build begins by putting the player to work at a luxury resort whose guests remain demanding even as the sun prepares to consume the world. Then it trades cocktails, errands and garish rewards for a failing ocean facility filled with machinery, infection and a voice on the radio. In Rock Paper Shotgun’s review, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell argues that the tension between those halves is precisely what makes Arbitrary Metric’s new game so difficult to shake.
Released Sept. 16, Roman Sands RE:Build is billed by publisher Serenity Forge as an apocalyptic adventure spanning two broken realities. The official description mixes adventure, visual-novel storytelling, puzzles, survival simulation and atmospheric horror. Evans-Thirlwell goes further, calling its component parts “two exquisitely grim games locked in a collapsing binary orbit.”
Two jobs at the end of the world
The resort segment runs on a time loop. Guests send the player after drinks, books, hair curlers and other conveniences, while completed chores award experience points that unlock more tools and options for later cycles. According to the review, those rewards are deliberately obnoxious and enticing, turning familiar progression systems into part of the joke. Escaping the routine means learning how to exploit the resort’s scenery and occult logic rather than simply becoming a better employee.
The facility changes the texture of the work. The review describes redirecting oxygen with valves, pressurizing doors by hand, removing screws, downloading blueprints and replacing spent fuses while an infestation consumes the station. That tactile machinery gives the player more control than the resort’s barrage of objectives, but the underlying demand is similar: keep a doomed system running for managers who appear indifferent to the worker maintaining it.
The split becomes the point
Evans-Thirlwell says recurring planetary symbols, magic circles, alchemical ideas and a fascination with the number three gradually expose connections between the two settings. The resort is bright, spacious and frantic; the facility is cramped, murky and methodical. Both revolve around maintenance, exploitation and the search for an exit.
The reviewer reports spending roughly 10 hours on a first playthrough, most of it in the resort. He praises the art, sound, writing and deliberately lopsided structure, while noting that a closing monologue explains the game’s ideas more plainly than the rest of the experience. That reservation does little to soften the verdict: Evans-Thirlwell calls each half a “short masterpiece” and says the combined result feels unlike anything else he has played.
