Notrium

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

You're an intrepid space captain, one of the last humans left, exploring the galaxy.

You're an android warp engineer, having secretly modified yourself to achieve sentience.

You're the ship's medical officer, a powerful psychic alien of an unknown race.

You're an Alien stowed away in the ventilation systems.

Whatever you were, now you've crashlanded on the planet of Notrium, shot down by a mysterious automated missile defense system.

Notrium is a Freeware Survival game by Ville Mönkkönen, where the player must gather food, fight off hostile alien predators, and survive the freezing cold nights, all whilst trying to gather the scattered remains of technology from your destroyed spaceship to cobble together something to defend yourself with.

Will you repair your escape pod and flee the planet? Send a distress beacon for help? Or will you discover the secrets of planet Notrium?

The website can be found here.

Tropes used in Notrium include:
  • Action Survivor: The Captain is hardly an action hero, punching things hurts him as well as his target, and he has the second lowest health of the characters.
  • As You Know: Many important tidbits of information, including incredibly important item crafting recipes, are revealed to the player through character journals viewed over the passage of in-game time. This can lead to a situation where a new player unfamiliar with combinations can be holding all the ingredients to create a temperature regulating Stasis Tent, and then die of hypothermia because the character hasn't told themself the recipe yet.
  • Awesome Yet Practical: The Sniper Pistol - you have to make the gun from scratch, and manufacture every bullet by hand, but it takes down most things on the planet in one shot. It's also useful for Recoil Boost.
  • Boring but Practical: The Welding Torch. It never runs out of ammo (one of the only weapons that doesn't use it), does more damage and has a longer range than punching, and can break open storage containers containing valuable survival supplies.
  • Bottomless Bladder: Possibly why dying of thirst is one of the only things that isn't in the game.
  • Commonplace Rare: Justified, marooned on an alien planet, things like basic rations, lighters and bullets are all hard to find and invaluable.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: You can die from heat stroke, hypothermia, starvation, torn apart by aliens, shot down by missiles, or even burned to death before you even manage to set foot on the planet.
  • Game Mod: The game is highly moddable and has several of the more prominent mods hosted by the creator.
  • Item Crafting: Vital to every character. Most equipment must be created from scratch from salvaged materials.
  • More Dakka: The Pulse Laser and Machine Pistol are all about this.
  • Multiple Endings
  • Nintendo Hard: You will die many, many times.
  • Psychic Powers: The Psychic has them.
  • Roguelike: Shares many similarities, though a non-turn based example.
  • Samus Is a Girl: The Alien is an egg-laying female.
  • Shotguns Are Just Better: Averted. Whilst the Pebble Shotgun is a decent weapon (and requires very few resources, which is important), it deals fairly low damage compared to other guns. Justified, since it shoots pebbles.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Psychic's entire game experience is radically different from the game's other characters, as he cannot carry items, use weapons or make use of most items of technology, making his game experience so different, he even gets his own version of the game's tutorial.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: When you first land on the planet, you're confronted with an angry hermit, whose house your escape pod landed on. You can either give him some of your scavenged survival supplies or....
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: For the Captain only, killing the Hermit deprives you of the chance of getting The best ally in the game.
  • Villain Protagonist: The Alien intends to use the planet as its base to create a conquering brood.
  • Weak but Skilled: For its race, the Alien. A journal entry mentions that it was born small, weak and unfit, and had to use cunning and guile to defend itself from the other members of its brood who wanted to kill it.