In my time as a videogame partaker, I have crawled through approximately three billion airvents. I may well have crawled through more vents than you’ve had hot dinners. As such, any videogame that can get me excited about loosening a barred hatch and hauling my heavy ass into a square tunnel is doing something right.

The Wild Gentlemen’s new sci-fi immersive sim RetroSpace gives pretty fair vent. It hides them all over. You’ll walk along a dilapidated, meandering corridor and your eye will be caught by a certain combination of shadows, flirtatiously screened by pipes. ‘Can I fit behind there?’ You ask yourself, and lo, you have revealed a shortcut to the head engineer’s office. Elsewhere, switches peek from behind stacks of luggable crates, and bent guard-rails draw your eye to a footwide ledge leading around the next pillar.

In general, RetroSpace does a nice job of squirrelling secrets into even the smallest chambers, and if the secret is very often a “rocket doughnut” or other inventory-clogging flotsam, sensing the prize and snuffling after it is a thrill. I hope the thrill will intensify as RetroSpace goes on, perhaps leaving a few of its obvious influences behind.

RetroSpace takes place aboard Aurora 5, a pseudo-1970s interstellar ark that has tumbled into a black hole, and somehow come away with a mild case of temporal indecision – certain areas flip between timeframes – rather than spaghettification and incomprehensible doom. You are a janitor, woken from cryo to find a lot of stuff on fire, a lot of people dead, and a lot of other people deranged and monsterfied by gene-modding. Taking up your power wrench, you set out for the habitat hub and soon become embroiled in missions assigned by a handful of coherent survivors, including a sentient AI and a talking pig fellah.

These take you out to the far corners of the space station, which is very much the main character here. There’s a “garden” sector that consists of a verdant silo with a starry dome, its spiral stairs and crawlspaces leading down to what I think is a bubbling soup of fertiliser. There’s a train that circles the whole facility – not a camouflaged loading screen, as with chapter breaks in Dead Space, but an actual monorail car that travels in real time. There are a lot of audiologs, hackable terminals, and comedy public safety signs or adverts. As you might expect from the devisers of chicken detective games, RetroSpace skews toward caricature, which can get obnoxious – there’s an audiolog early on that pokes fun at NPCs who leave scary audiologs. Still, it feels like the devs are fundamentally committed to making an engrossing world.

There’s a persistent mystique woven around the station’s janitors. Propaganda posters cast you and your lost brethren as urban legends, seldom seen by regular folk because you’re always up a ladder or behind a bulkhead doing whatever it is you helmeted weirdos do with those sprays and spanners. Each sector has a locked or concealed utility closet with a portal to the Janitor’s Haven – an interdimensional hideaway set up by union organisers, where you’ll hang out with story-critical NPCs and do the bulk of your upgrading and customising.

If the station is a peach, I’m a little less convinced so far by the tools at your disposal. On the one hand, you’ve got weapons such as pistols, shotguns, and rayguns, all (eventually) upgradeable. On the other, you’ve got more indirect or tactical accessories such as cloaking devices, computer-hacking gizmos, and propulsive fire extinguishers. On the third hand, you’ve got genetic engineering or Mutamods, which range from giving yourself grasshopper thighs for higher jumping, moth ears so that you heal in light, or biceps full of rhino DNA for meatier clobbering.

The gene-modding cuts both ways: when you die, you’ll be cloned for free at the nearest Bacta tank equivalent, but you’ll be saddled with a random cartoon affliction for your troubles. I came away from one misadventure with a body prone to uncontrollable sneezing and swearing, which did not help with subsequent attempts at stealth. Fortunately, you can purge the debuffs by siphoning genetic material from the nearest vanilla human corpse, and Aurora 5 has no shortage of those.

Within the world, you can also do things like hold up crates to block bullets, or spray paths of water to create an electricity trap before smacking a circuit box. It’s all entertaining enough, but many of the ideas are overly familiar from System Shock, Bioshock and Arkane’s Prey. I’m really hoping that somewhere in RetroSpace, there lurks a tool or combination of tools that is as daft in its own way as Prey’s Mimic ability. Or the slapstick bullshit you get in Skin Deep.

As it is, I’m finding that I’m too often just shooting enemies because I’m unexcited by the more devious ways of avoiding or defeating them. The enemies have their moments – lop a bugman’s head off, and it might sprout legs, while the manpigs are drawn to trails of blood – but a lot of the time, they’re just awareness indicators you can either avoid or gun down.

If you’re comfortable with how comfortable RetroSpace can feel, as a love letter to certain famous immersive sims, you’ll likely be able to forgive all this. Myself, I’d say the station ambience and secretive level design are worth the occasional sense of deja-vu. I’ll keep plugging on with the game, though games journalism being what it currently is, I sadly don’t have time for a full review. Find out more about RetroSpace on Steam. Let me know if you spot any really sexy airvents.