In Steel Seed, you’ll leap and dash across a colossal, planet-spanning machine – launching in April with a demo available now.

Grand yet furtive robot action-adventure Steel Seed will launch on April 10th, developers Storm in a Teacup and publishers ESDigital Games have announced. Not heard of Steel Seed before? You would’ve if I’d ever written up that demo build I played at last year’s Game Developer Conference. I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to mention the game, given that it contains one of my favourite things in fiction: a machine the size of a world.

In Steel Seed you play Zoe, a nimble and upgradeable robot, and her flying drone acquaintance Koby. You’re exploring a vast cybernetic undercity created by overclocked WALL-Es to preserve the last human survivors of a global apocalypse.

The overarching story is about “exploring the fine line between human and machine, trust and control, resilience and despair”, but in the moment, Steel Seed is more about exploring the fine line between crouch-walk back-stabbing and open combat with electroswords and Koby’s ranged attacks. Needless to say, you’ll also be doing a lot of platforming: leaping to handholds, wall-running, sliding down ramps, all the classics.

I wasn’t mesmerised by the jumpy-sneaky-slashy elements of the GDC 2024 build I played. It felt like a sturdy but essentially makeshift cobbling-together of parts from other action-adventures. I can’t knock the environments, however, which consist of layer upon layer of unsleeping industrial machinery – gushing cyclopean smelters, sunset-sized reactor cores and turbiney wotsits made up of individually rotating and grippable sections.

The extra frisson of architectural intrigue is that Steel Seed takes a lot of inspiration from Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!, among other megacity mangas. I haven’t read Blame!, so my nearest parallels are other video games – last year’s superbly unaccommodating spelunking sim Lorn’s Lure, and Ninja Theory’s ageing Serkis ’em up Enslaved: Odyssey To The West.

If you like the sounds of all this, but you’re umming and erring over my indifference to the combat and stealth, the good news is that Steel Seed has a demo on Steam. It includes the game’s intro and gives you a taste of the robot-bashing and/or bamboozling ahead.

Storm in a Teacup have form for moody sci-fi – their previous games include Close To The Sun, which Alice Bee (RPS in peace) found a little too Bioshlock in places but was otherwise quite pleased with. “Close To The Sun exists in a potential sweet spot for me, a mix of horror and leisurely exploration, and I enjoyed a lot of it,” she wrote in our review. “It excels at toying with you, particularly in the first half of the game, and paces itself so that you’re constantly tense even when you have nothing to fear.”