How Mud-Covered Oysters inspired the Indie Automation Game, Atrio: The Dark Wild

Keep your disposable android-body alive by automating everything. Automate farming, foraging, crafting and capturing – and even assimilate creatures into your production lines during your impossible mission to relight the world. But how did it come to be?

Oysters. Dirty, mud-covered oysters.

We’ve always been fascinated by how humans discover so many technological advancements from nature. I stumbled across a video of oysters filtering water.

In just five hours, a couple of oysters turn a completely filthy tank into something clean! In fact, they can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. We had a discussion over lunch about if they could alter fresh water mussels to filter out bacteria, we could just ship them worldwide and have a living filtration system. (You can’t, by the way. Please don’t do this and expect not to get sick!)

While fleshing out details for Atrio: The Dark Wild, we knew we wanted an assembly line, but we thought, “what if instead of building everything out of metal, we incorporated living things?” You could capture living creatures, and have them do tasks machines can’t do – digest and produce other compounds the same way we can’t print spider-silk. Pushbacks will split  lines for you, tornatoads will pluck plants on your behalf, mini-deer will process and poop out new materials, and bees will replant mushrooms.

With that, our tag line was born “Capture creatures, and add them to your assembly line”.

Atrio: The Dark Wild is out now on Xbox One  and Xbox Series X|S

Atrio: The Dark Wild

Isto Inc.

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$17.99

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Keep your disposable android-body alive by automating everything. Automate farming, foraging, crafting and capturing – and even assimilate creatures into your production lines during your impossible mission to relight the world. FEATURES: Hand Crafted Open World – Explore a beautiful and unique world, shaped by the contrast of sharp neon lights and darkness, while you fight to turn the lights back on. Witty Story- Unravel the real reason that you’ve been sent to the surface in this witty narrative experience. Unique Creatures – A roster of unexpected, half robot, half organic creatures wait for you on the surface. Pooping Deer? – That’s right! Something as unusual as deer poop may be the key to your survival.