Roman Sands Re:Build is the sort of game that resists a tidy verdict, which is exactly the point. In a hands-on review, the game is described as an almost fourteen-hour, two-act experience built around tonal whiplash: a fiendish, vaporwave-glitchcore immersive sim followed by a slow, oppressive survival puzzler soaked in Evangelion-flavoured dread. Both halves circle the same idea, according to the review – the exhausting, often degrading work of keeping something alive.

That’s not a small ask of a player, and the review is upfront about how gruelling it gets.

Context and Setup

Eurogamer’s reviewer had logged roughly fourteen hours by the time of writing, having also spent time with an earlier demo that showed glimpses of both acts years prior. At the time, the reviewer misread that demo as suggesting a continuous back-and-forth between the two realities; Re:Build, it turns out, structures things differently, moving the player from one act into the other rather than looping between them.

The “Re:Build” tag exists specifically to separate this release from 2019’s Roman Sands, which the review characterises as a first iteration that wasn’t fully cooked. A copy of the finished game was provided for review by Serenity Forge, and the game’s imagery is credited to Arbitrary Metric, Serenity Forge, and Beep Japan Inc.

Act One: Service Work in a Vaporwave Hellscape

The first act drops the player on the beach of a cursed resort, where the job each day is pleasing four thoroughly miserable residents: Bunk, a lecherous drunk; Sylvia, an evasive manipulator; and Betty and Harold, an old couple the review calls a two-headed case for euthanasia. Tasks run the gamut from cleaning up vomit and fetching trinkets to giving massages and mixing negronis, and the review notes that daily routes can be optimised as the player uncovers more of the resort’s layout and secrets.

Every trip between areas eats into a shrinking clock, and the residents themselves shuffle around the map as the day wears on – a design choice the review credits with keeping the busywork tense rather than rote. Eurogamer’s reviewer spent nearly six hours in this act alone, climbing to level 31-plus and unlocking mostly cosmetics, gacha pulls, and the occasional key item needed to push the story forward.

Beneath the grind sit three Myst-style puzzles with minimal hand-holding, solvable mostly through pattern recognition and trial and error. The review singles out the orrery puzzle as a genuine pain point on controller, only clicking once the reviewer switched to keyboard and mouse, and flags the wider UI as occasionally murky. It’s also where Kara, a chain-smoking coworker, reveals the resort is apparently trapped inside the decaying dream of an angel – a detail that recontextualises the entire loop, oversized doom-sun and all. For players who enjoyed the queasy pleasure of watching a broken system reward bad behaviour, this act shares DNA with Dystopicon‘s take on dystopian service busywork.

Act Two: Isolation, Oxygen and Deliberate Misery

Where Act One is loud, sugary and frantic, Act Two goes cold and quiet almost immediately. The player wakes in a sealed, failing zoological research station having just lost their cow, with a parasite loose in the systems and oxygen management now the core loop. Progress means poking at valves, buttons and levers with a screwdriver, wrench and PDA, working toward a process the game calls sublimation; failing or passing out simply resets the player back in the dorm, surrounded by Act One’s leftover gacha toys.

The review draws a direct line between the station’s bicolour terminal displays and the iconic NERV supercomputer aesthetic from Evangelion, and it’s not a subtle homage. What’s notable is how deliberately joyless the act is by design – no chimes, no juicy unlock animations, just footsteps and groaning machinery. Eurogamer’s reviewer is blunt that this section was exceptionally hard to sit with personally, comparing the ordeal to some of the worst stretches of quitting a fifteen-year smoking habit, yet argues it shouldn’t be waved off as the game’s “draggy” half. It’s framed instead as a necessary counterweight to Act One, in the same register as the dread Control Resonant traded in.

Pros and Cons

• Pro: A genuinely distinctive two-act structure that rewards being read as a single, connected work
• Pro: Striking vaporwave-glitchcore presentation backed by a strong drum-and-bass score
• Pro: An inventive, unlikely blend of immersive sim, puzzle design and gacha hooks
• Pro: Three chunky Myst-style puzzles with real teeth
• Con: Act Two’s pacing is deliberately slow to the point of exhausting
• Con: UI clarity issues, worsened on controller during the orrery puzzle
• Con: The demeaning busywork loop is, by design, not much fun to sit inside for hours

According to Rock Paper Shotgun’s supplementary review of the same release, the resort section alone can absorb roughly ten hours on a first run, and the outlet frames the whole package as a rare two-parter that’s genuinely compelling in its asymmetry between the two halves – a reading broadly consistent with Eurogamer’s account of the game’s split identity.

Final Verdict

The review declines to attach a score, arguing the game defies that kind of neat analysis, and the writing backs that stance up. Act One and Act Two are described as two sides of a dense thematic coin about maintaining life at someone else’s expense, and the review insists neither half makes full sense without the other – even though the reviewer found Act Two personally intolerable at points, which the piece treats as proof the horror is working exactly as intended.

This is not a recommendation for players chasing conventional fun, clear signposting or a brisk pace. It is a strong one for anyone drawn to abrasive, experimental immersive sims and psychological horror. Readers interested in The Watcher may also be curious about this kind of discomfort-driven experience. Everyone else should probably let this particular cow lie.

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