I played A Dark Room, an iOS & Web game created by Doublespeak Games, intended for fans of minimalist narrative games, resource management features, and rich storytelling. A Dark Room is unlike any other game I’ve played before, since it invites players to its world not through visual or dialogue or explicit characters, but rather through emergent systems, word-based storytelling, and minimalist design. While this is a unique approach, throughout playing this game, I also recognize that it is not for every player and risks disengaging others due to its minimalist interface and lack of intuitive direction.
opening scence
When I started playing the game, I was very confused. I only saw a white screen with some text (very poetry-like), with the only button being “stroke fire”. For a while, I wasn’t sure if I was progressing or just clicking aimlessly. This confusion didn’t come from difficulty, but from a lack of affordances or feedback early on. Eventually, the design started making sense to me, as I unlocked more actions, such as gathering wood, and building things such as a hut or a trap for food and sources. Other characters also got introduced, although I was confused as to who they are, since the only way to ID them was through vague descriptions such as “builder”. After a while, I caught on to what was happening; the tasks I was performing were for survival, and I’m building and protecting lives with the resources available in this forest. However, the action I was performing was still hard for me to understand because I couldn’t visualize it. I asked myself what this would mean for players who don’t have a lot of context clues to piece the context of the game together, or players who don’t speak English, could they ever understand the game?
the act of collecting and using resources
world changing color
Over time, my village began to form. More characters were introduced, but no one had a name. No one spoke. Roles were assigned automatically. I had a brief moment of “a-ha”, but still, no clear narrative emerged for me as a player. Later on, the background briefly switched to black, which was to send a message to me, but still, it didn’t make much sense to me. However, it did make me realize that this game and the messages are very much up to the player’s interpretation. After a while, a message popped up for me: “the simple task brings solace. gives purpose. can’t give up”. This gave me insight into the character I was playing for the first time. Until then, I had been acting without reflection, like a machine. This line provided extra context to the game. However, it did take a long time to get here. I wonder, for players less patient than I am, will this moment ever come?
the message
While there were moments of confusion, this game also taught me how worldbuilding can be done with so little. You don’t need to have 3D characters and a fleshed-out world to make it tell a story. The design of the game, while very minimalistic, was a part of the message it was sending to players, to imagine a world where nothing exists and nothing matters except your action, and also strips away everything else, such as name, to show what survival can do to you. The mechanics of the game also follow the same structure, very simple, it is essentially just a clicker game, and the feedback is also slow and ambiguous. Each clicking action also revealed a new narrative plot, which I think was pretty cool. For our game, especially since we are making a slice and with the timeframe we have, I recognized that sometimes, if you have a good narrative and tools to bring that alive, we can even go a more minimal route.
Ethically, the part that the game removed was the identities of the characters, which I think encourages players to reflect on survival and what that does to people. However, villagers are never individualized. They’re referred to by role: gatherer, trader, fighter, and their labor becomes just another input in the resource economy. For our game, which emphasizes the backstories of our characters, this is for sure a contrast. At first, I found this distance confusing, maybe even alienating. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to see it as a deliberate choice. The game doesn’t avoid emotional connection by accident, it forces you to reflect on how quickly you start treating people like resources. In class, we talk about Dungeons & Dragons, but this game in general removes almost all character traits in general. However, in the absence of identity, we can start treating other characters in terms of efficiency, not empathy. If I were to mod the game, I’d be interested in exploring subtle emotional clues like villagers hesitating, or a message appears like “the builder looks tired”. Small touches like these could restore a sense of personhood without removing the simplicity of the interface.
A Dark Room builds its world quite unlike others, mostly through absences. One minute you’re in a fire, and the next minute you’re building and hunting. While I find this form of worldbuilding interesting, I can also see how it can be accessible. When doing this, you risk losing players before you can even reveal the depths of your world to them. Translating this into our game, I want to think about how to make the narrative clear and engaging to every player, especially when we’re making an escape room already with many things they would have to solve and could be confused about.
