RetroSpace Story Explained: Aurora 5 and the Golden Journey

By Dana Whitcombe · Updated October 1, 2026

This page covers the premise and the world, all of it from the store page, the opening minutes and the developers’ blogs. Nothing past the first hours is spoiled.

The premise

The store blurb: “2177 - Humanity’s last hope is the AURORA fleet, a convoy of floating space stations searching for a new home. On this century-long mission, humans spend their lives in deep sleep, while robots, androids, and a dedicated team of chosen janitors guard their dreams. Until one of the gigantic city-ships derails off its course… Sucked into a black hole…”

The opening broadcast fills in the rest: Earth is dying, “our best scientists and hardest workers have built 13 giant floating space cities”, and the voyage is called the Golden Journey. You are on Aurora 5. You wake early in stasis chamber 37 with stasis amnesia, and nobody comes to help.

Two timelines

The black hole scrambles space and time. The store page says the ship “is constantly jumping between two time periods”, and the game uses it for level design: rooms change after a jump, and the way forward is often a door you could not open in the other period.

Who is on board

• The Board: the station’s management, a cheerful voice on the PA and in ads (“The board is with you. Always.”).
• The janitors: the crew who keep the station running while everyone sleeps. Their creed, read out in an early audio log, begins “Always and everywhere we help. We are not seen unless we want to be seen.”
• Sleepers: the passengers. Before the disaster, dozens were waking up every hour with amnesia.
• Mutants: passengers changed by Mutamods and the black hole. Dev Blog 04 describes the design idea: astronauts turned into Mothmen, botanists turned into flower-headed mutants.
• Survivors: six characters you can recruit to your base, the Janitors’ Haven. See characters.
• Dr. Nebula: a voice on the radio who says you are the only janitor left that he can reach.

Tone

The developers call it “disco-punk space horror”. In a 2023 interview, Bánk Varga described aiming for the contrast of 1960s and 70s science fiction: serious works by authors such as Ray Bradbury next to cheesy pulp films. The Bradbury beam gun is one nod; the “I’m MacReady!” achievement for the hardest difficulty, Russ Kurtell, is another, to The Thing.

Who made it

The Wild Gentlemen, the Hungarian team behind the noir adventure Chicken Police, published by Kwalee. A developer said in a podcast that RetroSpace began as a two-person internal demo roughly four years before launch, originally pitched as a Soviet-era, 1950s-style space parody before it became the game it is now. It is built in Unity.