Notrium

Notrium is played from a top-down perspective, giving an overhead view of proceedings. The player may move in all directions while facing in a separate one, similar to the way a first-person shooter is controlled, and similar to the shareware PC shooter Crimsonland.

During the course of the game, the player encounters various items and objects strewn across the terrain, such as edible plants, weapons, and other machinery. As most needed materials, such as a protective force field, are not found intact, the player is required to build them out of two or three separate pieces. Most useful machinery in the game is constructed in this manner.

The game takes place on the fictional eponymous planet, Notrium. The game world is divided into large squares, each of which has its own separate environment and set of objectives. The player may move between squares at will to reach the other areas, though some are only accessible via methods such as boarding certain vehicles or using teleportation. Environments range from jungle terrain, to desert, to tundra, all of which are affected by a day-night cycle, except for interior levels which are artificially lit.

The game's graphics, aside from certain plot-related areas, are all randomly generated at the beginning of the game. Random generation affects the precise location of items and vegetation, though most objects and all scenery will remain in their environment square, the placement of which in relation to others is a set constant. For example, tree placement in the Jungle zone changes each time a new game is begun, but the start location will not, and the Jungle zone stays adjacent to the same areas.

Notrium was developed by independent Finnish programmer Ville Mönkkönen and released in 2003. It is the seventh game by Mönkkönen, but only the fifth to be released fully in English. Notrium's source code was released by the developer after 2003 under a custom open-source like software license. It is developed as OpenNotrium on GitHub by the community, with new code being GPLv3. Following that, the game was ported to many other platforms (Linux etc.), also mobile devices like the Pandora.

On Dec 8, 2015 a "Notrium Special Surprise Edition" was released commercially by the author in the digital distribution adding some improvements.

The game won second place in the "Adventure Game of the Year" contest on GameTunnel. In a 2014 retrospective, Rock, Paper, Shotgun noted Notrium as one of the early procedural generated survival games.