A Dark Room is an open-source, role-playing, text-based, survival adventure game with rogue-like elements designed by Canadian indie studio Doublespeak Games. Originally published in 2013 as a web-browser exclusive, it soon found itself in the Apple App Store not much more than a year later for ios and related devices. In A Dark Room, you play as an unnamed protagonist that awakes in a mysterious dark hut in the middle of an ominous forest. An untended fire pit lies adjacent you. It is up to you now to use only the natural resources around you to build a thriving community in the mystery landscape and expand it deep into the forgotten war-torn wastes.
The entirety of the game is text. Touch a word to stoke the hearth. Touch another to lay a trap. Touch another to collect wood or punish a lazy worker. Mechanically, the gameplay is reminiscent of simple, text-based, resource-generating browser games like Cookie-Clicker and Paperclips. The crucial difference being that in Cookie-Clicker and Paperclips, the player’s winning objective is to accumulate as much of the product as possible. In A Dark Room, the player tracks their progress based on how much information they have regarding the overarching narrative of the game.
The player begins with nothing but a button superimposed on a white backdrop. The button reads: Stoke Fire. If the player waits too long without pressing the button, they may begin to notice the screen will slowly lose brightness. Only when they tap Stoke Fire does the screen become alit once more. This is arguably the only element of emersion by replication you’ll see in the game. Stoke the fire, light gets brighter. Every other aspect requires you to imagine and visualize for yourself the interactions taking place and the context of your environment - given only short, one-sentence hints that taunt you with lore and an explanation of the world surrounding the protagonist. This utter lack of information, if nothing else, inspires a fervent craving for more.
It soon occurred to me on my first play-through of the game that, beyond the Stoke Fire button, all other functions of the game were revealed through the game’s narrative. The narrative wasn’t linear in this way, mind you. Rather, it presented itself as a complex story with several bits and pieces scattered around the open world. It is the player’s distinct responsibility to uncover said pieces and construct their own cohesive narrative based on the information they themselves gathered. There is an open-world element in play, where depending on where you go and who you interact with may prove to impact your own narrative and what you derive of the world narrative. This method of agency in story-progression defies the triple-A cannon: gameplay followed by linear cutscenes that track the game’s progression rather than the player’s.
The longer I played A Dark Room, the more I found that the end-goal or “winning objective” seemed to become increasingly more ambiguous. Traditionally, one of the core aspects of a given piece of media that distinguish it as a game is an objective a player can actively aspire to achieve using the game’s base mechanics. The player should then feel a sense of pride and accomplishment upon completing the objective. In A Dark Room, however, the closer the player gets to completing the game, the more the game derails from the status quo and the more apparent are the themes of hopelessness accompanied by the cruel cost of success. Similarly to number games that generate products at a regular interval, where the objective is to maximize utility and accumulate the most of that product as the game allows (cookie-clicker, paperclips), A Dark Room has the player build a village using local resources only to then assign villagers to gather more resources. Then, near the end of the game (spoilers), just as the final objective comes into sight, the player notices that the game renamed your “villagers” as meager “slaves”. Now, the village’s threat to order is internal, and you must decide how brutal and barbaric a dictator you must become in order to maximize your product output so as to venture further out into the desolate landscape and discover more hints relating to the lore behind the game world.
My final conclusion of A Dark Room is that the game presents itself as the epitome of the anti-game. It does not strive to keep you entertained with either intense action, colorful graphics, nor a cinematic narrative. It deconstructs the notion of success in video games without mention of sacrifice while tracking game completion based on the player’s own comprehension of what had occurred to the society that has been reduced to the rubble they now tread. In its current state, I’m torn between calling it a genre-specific minimalist survival horror game and a blatant lampoon of how disconnected the triple-A industry is from what the popular demographic would deem “fun”.
Comments