In Atrio: The Dark Wild, you play as an android in a deserted neon cyber metropolis. Everything is dark, the city is overrun by renegade, savage cybernetic creatures, and you must turn on the lights. It’s a hybrid of an open-world survival crafting game and an automation-factory construction game. You’re also going to be scared at least once because it’s about awful dog-things with pusher plates for heads leaping out of the darkness to slaughter you.
As your character explores the city, restoring its functionality and discovering new things while unraveling a narrative mystery, you also establish a base. A base with several conveyor belts, tossers, and pusher plate dogs that you seized and converted into industrial pieces. Because you’re out exploring so much, you’ll also need to maintain the base’s defenses automated, which adds a new twist to this genre mix. It’s similar to playing a light version of Factorio, but you also have to cope with Don’t Starve’s perilous expeditions outside your base’s safety gates.
If you like this type of game, there’s also a wonderful short movie from the creators about how they ran a contest for the people who playtest the demo and, well, they did a lot of things the devs didn’t expect.
Atrio: The Dark Wild is available on Steam, where a sample is available until the end of Steam Next Fest tomorrow.
