The game I played was A Dark Room by Doublespeak Games. A Dark Room can be played in web brower, iOS, Windows, and Mac and is intended for casual games who enjoy strategy and interactive games. I played the game on the browser for around 3 hours, unlocking the “dusty path” area. Since A dark Room has no visuals and is only text, it builds a world through the setting, surroundings, and what actions the player can make combined with the discovery of new areas and resources as an embedded narrative. The games mechanics are stoking the fire, collecting wood, checking traps, and creating buildings. These mechanics work to create the dynamic of survival. The main aesthetics of the game were fantasy and narrative.
When I first entered into the game, you are only told that the fire has gone out and the room is cold. The only button available is to light the fire. I first imagined it was a cabin in the forest and the character we play as had just woken up. As I continued to stoke the fire I was introduced to the first NPC and first resource. The “Ragged stranger stumbles through the door and collapses in the corner.” After the stranger entered the room and I noticed a new resource, wood, was depleting with every stoke of the fire, my perspective of the game quickly changed. I began to think that the scenario was more apocalyptic, with formal elements of player vs environment game where the goal of the game is only to survive. As I continued to play even more resources like fur, leather, cloth, teeth, scales, and iron were introduced. The lack of visuals in A Dark Room force the world building to be through the surroundings.
The start of the game, and the first NPC enters into the room
Later on in the game, a wanderer appears asking for 100 wood, but promising to return with more in the future. I choose to give the wanderer wood, expecting to be scammed, but only doing it to see if it would progress the story in any way. Unexpectedly the wandered did appear later with a large sum of wood, much more than the 100 that I had originally given him. This broke the stereotype of people being greedy. In my experience playing survival games, there are normally thieves and robbers who try to sabatoge the player and act as an obstacle to progression. In contrast in A Dark Room, all the NPC that join your village are helpful, you can assign them to roles like collecting wood, making leather, hunting for fur and meat, or other tasks. I felt that allowing the player to use NPCs to gather different resources helped the game since it added another mechanic, but I also thought that the game lacked challenge and there was no threat of losing in the game since there were not many hostile enemies.
The player can assign the villagers to do tasks such as hunting gathering and trapping to help with progression
After playing for even longer, I a new area became available called the “A Dusty Path”. In this area the scope of the game opens up, the player is no longer confined to the village and text screen and a map appears. Initially it is only a 3×3 box with the player and the village in the center, but after choosing to “embark” the player can leave the village to explore new areas like caves, abandoned villages, and a mysterious “borehore” which I found but was too afraid to explore. My perspective of the game shifted again as the world continued to expand, I began to think that the goal of the game might not be just surviving, but something else. This thought was reinforced when I found “alien alloy” and energy cells. The game uses environmental story telling with resources and new places that the play can find through exploration. Additionally there is an aspect of enacted story since the player’s progression is based off their exploration of the area “A Dusty Path”.
One critique of the game I had was that it was very slow in the beginning. Starting off with just the options to stoke a fire and build traps was very uninteresting and even a bit boring. For new players it requires a lot of waiting in order to build up resources to build up your first buildings which will unlock more gameplay and new areas. I think a possible solution to this could be giving the player a bit of information about the game at the start. For example a small letter, or the builder who first arrives could explain some of the lore to the game.
