Notrium

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

Posted in Freeware, Roguelikes, Windows

Darkehorse

Notrium is probably one of the greatest indie freeware games ever. It defines the survival genre. I agree the graphics could use an update, and the way the worlds scroll & flip (like Zelda) could be replaced by a giant scrolling world. Other than that I have no issues. Wonderful game.
Ryan Fox

I played this a long time ago. It was quite frustrating at first, but it totally sucked me in. Definitely worth spending a Sunday on!
Mischief Maker

Notrium really lost something when they added the cabin and the hermit at the beginning.
Benerhos

I still recommend the Astral Entertainment games.
WineBlood

That’s some nostalgy for sure! I remember playing it years ago when it just got out and I liked it, though I didn’t have the chance to play it much at the time due to computer problems. I should give it another try…
Quetz

Way awesome! I put this on my computer in programming class and played it and Cave Story lots when I was done with the assignments. I recommend checking out some mods, especially the Werivar mod, which adds a lot of areas and content, including a new race.
Julius

It’s awesome that the main site is being updated more then once a week!
Paul Eres

Julius: at first I thought you meant the Notrium site, but then I checked and was like, that can’t be right, that site is updated about once a year. So now I’m guessing that you mean TIGSource itself, but I don’t think it’s true even then, because there are 1290 entries going back to May of 2006, which is two and a half years ago, and 1290/365*2.5 is actually an average of 1.4 posts per day, which is better than my average of 4 posts in 5 days.
rndll

Strange, I thought Notrium was already reviewed here. Must’ve been some other site.
Gainsworth

Ah, Notrium! Fantastic. Can’t believe this wasn’t listed before. Stick with it, folks – it gets quite good once you learn how to live.
MisterX

I also remember playing it a long time ago.. shortly, until I think I got frustrated because either I didn’t like or couldn’t figure out how it works. But the very positive response should be enough to make me play it again, as generally I totally dig survival games, and it’s unfortunate that there are so few good ones.

That reminds me of good ol’ “Schiffbruch”. Good to see it has been featured here already :)
Paul Eres

I did a site search before writing about it, and nope, the game hasn’t been reviewed here before. It’s been reviewed on Abandonia and Game Tunnel though, maybe it was one of those?
Thearmyofnone

One of my absolute favorite indie games of all time! Glad to see more attention being given to this classic. I’ve put many many hours into this and the werivar mod!
Mark

@ Paul:

Thanks for your posts this week so far… it’s my favorite string of posts in a very long time!

Really, this kind of thing could happen more often and you wouldn’t hear many complaints. :)
http://www.wyrdysm.com th15

Definitely a must-play indie game!
Quanrian

It’s nice to see all the positive comments about a game I worked on so many years ago. I can’t really say when it’ll happen, but Notrium 2 is at least on the board to be done and will likely use the same engine we’re using for Cormoon. Thanks again for all the kind words !
Trotim

@MisterX: Schiffbruch was awesome, man. Notrium? Eeeeeh…
Dodomaster

@Quarian

That would be awesome!!!
http://jimmythechang.livejournal.com jimmythechang

Oh, Notrium. I spent so many days running frantically from mushroom patch to mushroom patch.
Zeph

Notrium 2? Awesome!!

If its using Cormoon engine, it’ll be sidescrolling?
http://www.0xdeadc0de.org/ Eclipse

played years ago, interesting premise but badly realized, Wazzal and Magebane 2 are more interesting to play
http://www.slimesalad.com Mogri

The UI for this game is really bad, though the game seems interesting otherwise. I tried playing as an alien and ran out of food quickly. I might try another, less food-intensive race later.
Ambergris

@Trotim: Too true man.
Pretzelking

It’s about damn time this game gets a mention over here.

@Quanrian: Hell yes.
Quanrian

@ Zeph

No it should still be top-down. Right now though the team is a little more focused on Cormoon, since we’ve been working on that for a while now, where as Notrium 2 kind of came up in the middle of Cormoon’s development. I can’t stress enough how slow Indy development can get, especially when you’re in different countries and are doing everything over the net.