A Dark Room
| A Dark Room | |
|---|---|
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| Developer(s) | Doublespeak Games |
| Publisher(s) | Doublespeak Games |
| Designer(s) | Michael Townsend, Amir Rajan (iOS) |
| Platform(s) | |
| Release | 2013 |
| Genre(s) | Online text-based role-playing game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
A Dark Room is an open-source software role-playing text-based game originally published in mid 2013 for web browsers by Doublespeak Games. Later that year it was released in the App Store for iOS devices. In 2014 a prequel entitled The Ensign, which provided more insight into the world and its characters, was released for iOS.
A Dark Room was created by Michael Townsend and released for browsers on June 10, 2013. According to Townsend, the game was designed to tell its story entirely through environmental cues, rather than relying on exposition and dialogue. In July 2013, Townsend released the source code of the game on GitHub under the open source license MPL 2.0. Soon, Townsend was contacted by developer Amir Rajan, who asked for permission to adapt the game for iOS. Amir ported the game to iOS using the RubyMotion mobile toolchain, and released it on the App Store in late 2013. From 2014 onwards an Android port of A Dark Room was being worked on, which was finally released in 2016.
The game begins with the player awakening in a cold, dark room after a mysterious event. Initially, the player can only light and tend a fire in the room. As the game progresses, the player gains the abilities to collect resources, interact with strangers, start a village, and explore the world. As the game progresses, the type and quantity of resources and exploration available increases. According to The New Yorker, "What follows is a strange hybrid, part mystery story and part smartphone productivity software...the game evokes the simplest text-based computer games of the nineteen-seventies while stimulating a very modern impulse to constantly check and recheck one’s phone. It’s like a puzzle composed of deconstructed to-do lists." The site added, "You can begin to see a structure emerge from the fragments, but where that structure will lead you remains impossible to predict, and so the compulsion to keep pressing little word buttons grows stronger."
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