Trailer Review - Atrio: The Dark Wild
This trailer for Atrio: The Dark Wild is one of the best game trailers I've seen this year, AND it's in a genre of game which is difficult to parse from watching footage from it. And yet, they made a trailer which is clear, funny, and gives a great sense of the FEEL of playing the game.
The trailer, made by its developer @IstoInc, came to my attention when they tagged me and fellow trailer maker Marlon Wiebe as thanks for our videos and articles about making game trailers (If you haven't seen Marlon's Choice Cuts show which he used to stream on Twitch, he has lots of good game trailer analysis. I particularly enjoy this behind the scenes look about capturing footage for the Phantom Brigadetrailers).
I haven't played it yet, but it appears Atrio: The Dark Wild is a twist on the factory genre of games wherein you create an automated production line to harvest materials and build a product. In this case you're making mushrooms (there may be more things you're making in the game, but the trailer focuses on mushrooms). Here's the full script of the trailer which I think on its own does a masterful job of summing up the game's premise, sense of humor, its intricacy, and difficulty:
Growing a mushroom in Atrio is easy.
All you need is fertilizer and water, and getting fertilizer is easy.
All you need to do is use your trap to launch a mini deer into the poop pen with the 10 other mini deer you've captured, launch the poo into the factory, dump the fertilizer onto your mushroom, and then let it grow.
But you don't want to pick them [the mushrooms] because you're lazy. But don't worry, automating picking is easy. All you need to do is venture into the dark, find a tornatoad and... respawn, feed it a bomb, because a captured tornatoad will pluck the mushrooms for you and now you don't have to collect anything, and all you have left to do is to replant them.
But you don't want to replant them, because you're lazy. But don't worry, automating replanting is easy. All you need to do is venture into the dark, and find the bees, and then put them to sleep, because when you re-home them they will fly from box to box grabbing spores and replanting the empty ones, and now your mushrooms will grow all on their own, and all you have left to do is stay alive.
but don't worry staying alive is easy. All you need to do is build a light bulb line so you can harvest ore in the dark and then build an assembly line to move the ore all back to base and combine them into your batteries and... build walls and gates to defend your base while at the same time finding a way to replace your dying battery.
but don't worry, replacing your battery is easy. All you need to do is venture into the dark and avoid dying to exploding boxes, the push backs, the giant screaming spiders, pass through the blood lake, harvest your own body, pet a deer, sacrifice yourself in exchange for a battery, get resurrected, replace your battery, refuel your ever expanding base, and then take a well-deserved break to collect your delicious, delicious mushrooms.
And like I said, growing mushrooms is easy.
The first few shots of the trailer focus on one small thing
This is a brilliant script and excellently put together trailer which is mostly done in a series of long take shots which definitely required the developer be involved to custom make it in the game's engine.
The big difficulty of making trailers for factory, building, and real-time strategy games is their visuals are often overwhelming and lack a point of focus. In this previous article I wrote about a few realtime games which did a great job with their trailers. In this trailer the narration guides us through what we're seeing. This in tandem with the closeups of the visuals make understanding the trailer... easy.
This repeated motif of "... is easy" is a great device because you quickly realize everything they're describing is the opposite of easy. This idea grows more and more absurd as the trailer progresses. The repetition of this motif makes the trailer easy to follow, and builds anticipation for the absurdity of the next iteration. In the trailer's YouTube comments people latched onto this structure and played along like I did at the end of the previous paragraph.
The trailer gradually adds visual complexity. This shot would've been far too overwhelming to start with, but at this point in the trailer we know enough to understand it.
The structure of the trailer has a fantastic build and uses a game trailer editing concept which I've not yet written about, but try to employ in my own work. That is, an effective way to make a game trailer is to depict the game's "loop" over and over with ever increasing intensity.
A game's "loop" is the basic series of actions you perform over and over again as you play. Some games have short loops and others have long ones. For example, the loop for the game Tetris is: A new piece appears, you rotate and move it into a good position, you place the piece, completed lines disappear when they're filled in and then the loop starts again. In Atrio: The Dark World, the loop seems to be: Find a task you need to achieve, gather the items you need to achieve that task, set them up in the factory line, and try not to die while you're setting this up.
The first task is to grow a mushroom with water and fertilizer.
The second task is to create fertilizer by trapping a deer, gathering its poop, launching the poop into a factory, which creates the fertilizer.
The third task is to pick mushrooms by finding a "tornatoad," capturing it, and positioning it in the factory to pluck mushrooms. But in this scenario there's a twist because you can can die in your quest to achieve this task.
With each task described, the trailer adds more and more layers, with each increasing the possible points of failure and difficulty of achieving the tasks. The trailer ends with a montage of events which says: "Here's a bunch of stuff you can do in the game which you'll have to play in order to understand what they do and why you do them." It's a great montage of content which says "There's more to this game than what we've shown you."
Whenever the trailer introduces a new idea, it focuses in so you don't miss it.
In abstract, the structure of this trailer is:
This is the goal of the game
This is one component of how you achieve that goal
This is a way to achieve that first component, and you can die while trying to do that.
This is how the game builds and builds on each system.
Here's a bunch more stuff from the game
Here's a reminder of why you're doing all of this
The other great thing about this trailer is its rhythm set by the pacing of the narration. The pace accelerates throughout the trailer until it reaches a point where it's difficult to fully grasp everything being said in the end montage. This shows how overwhelming the game can get by overwhelming you with the pace of the information you're given. This is a good example of how editing rhythm can augment the feel of a game!
By the way, there is one more thing...
I don't have much to critique about this trailer, but the music is so low in volume it almost feels like it's not there. This feels like a missed opportunity to use music to enhance the feel and atmosphere of the game. The starkness of the audio does contribute somewhat to the dark atmosphere of the game, but I think more could've been done to tie it together.
The other small detail is I wish the trailer had captions which aren't auto generated by YouTube. This would make it easier to understand everything being said, especially during the end montage. The timing and pace of the captions could be another opportunity to play with the humor and overwhelming feeling of the trailer while contributing to the humor. A version with captions would help its presentation on social media where video plays muted by default.
But overall I LOVE this trailer! I consider these small notes the last 5-10% of polish. I will likely add this trailer to my posts about realtime strategy games and using voiceover to guide people through the trailer by explaining the mechanics.
Great job!