By: Paul Eres

On: October 27th, 2008

Notrium, an obscure but very high-quality freeware game released in 2003, is a survival game where you have to choose between one of four body types: human, alien, android, and psionic, each with its own drastically different abilities, and try to survive on a planet. You have to manage resources like energy and food, and your body temperature, and can scrounge around for items and combine them.

I recommend the alien for first-time players, as that’s the one I managed to survive the longest as — it has the strongest starting weapon, good resistance to temperature, and evolves new abilities as the game goes on. The human is probably the hardest, because he’s the most fragile and can’t survive for very long without a lot of technology.

The music is nice and ambient, although the graphics feel a bit cut and paste (they appear to be rendered 3D sprites, which can look a bit disjointed). The writing is very clear, although there may be a little too much text for the tastes of some, especially when starting out and learning about all the different items. The item placement on the maps appears to be randomly generated, which makes it somewhat of a roguelike, and which combined with the drastically different character types makes it very replayable.

The game takes a while to get into, but it has a good amount of depth to it, although you’ll probably die many times before you make any significant progress. There is a FAQ here.

TIGdb: Entry for Notrium