There's something very "Steam game" about Atrio: The Dark Wild. I don't know exactly what a Steam game is but if you think of Steam as pistons and valves, the colour black, and that ultra-low thunk of a piano key when a Valve logo pops up on the opening screen of some classic, I think it's that. Atrio is dark, literally and figuratively. It has some of that lovely, satisfying kind of automated crafting. It's a bit political, and a bit funny, in its own way, the game you giggle at villainously from your racing car throne in some enjoyably dingy, PC monitor-lit bedroom. So: Steam game, whatever that is.
In Atrio you play as an android with a 15-minute battery. Your task is to do what you're told, popping out of a tube onto the overworld, which is desolate and grim but also remarkably stylish. Atrio is a stunner, a kind of isometric plane of geometric art, the natural world rebuilt, presumably – this is far-future dystopia, of a sort – as if it were some utilitarian cuckoo-clock. Seemingly mechanical deer skip about, eating sap and pooping out fuel. The ground is littered with things like blood ore and quartz and little flowers with rosy, glowing cuboid bulbs that power a nearby generator, which powers lightbulbs, which connect to more machinery that enables more research to build more, and onwards.
Light is central to all of this. You start in a fairly small area, without light and with just that generator nearby – stray into the nearby dark and, within a few seconds, you'll die. The bulbs of those little flowers offer a little, temporary power to light the nearby ground but not much, and so one of your early tasks is to make fuel that can top the generator up to max in one go. That requires blood rock, which you turn into blood ore, which you turn into blood ingots, which combine with some other bits and bobs to make the batteries for the generator. All of these tasks come from a central computer, which has a fondness for exploding your head when you're done and firing up a new android to take your place.
