A Dark Room

Lore & Background

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. As the game progresses, the player gains abilities to collect resources, interact with strangers, start a village, and explore the world. The plot unfolds through environmental cues: the player character lights a fire, a woman stumbles in and collapses, and the player begins collecting resources from a nearby forest. The builder helps establish a village, but the player character overworks the villagers into slavery. Eventually, the player acquires a compass and explores a post-apocalyptic wasteland, discovering a functional wanderer spaceship. The builder vanishes, leaving a glowing locket. Clues reveal that wanderers are extraterrestrial beings who invade planets. The player character, a wanderer, uses the spaceship to pursue the builder but encounters a meteor cluster, crashing back to the start. An alternate ending, achieved by not building huts, sees the builder saving the ship, potentially at the cost of her life.

Reader's Guide

A Dark Room is significant as an early example of a successful open-source mobile game that blended minimalist text-based gameplay with a deep, surprising narrative. Its release on iOS in 2013 rocketed it to the most-downloaded spot in the App Store's games section in April 2014, and it appeared on multiple 'Best of the Year' lists from Forbes, Paste, and Giant Bomb. The game's design, which tells its story entirely through environmental cues rather than exposition, was praised by critics like The New Yorker, which noted its hybrid nature as 'part mystery story and part smartphone productivity software.' The game's legacy includes inspiring ports to multiple platforms and a prequel, The Ensign, released in 2014. Its open-source code, released under MPL 2.0, allowed community contributions such as the addition of audio in 2020. The Nintendo Switch version briefly faced removal from the eShop due to an unauthorized Ruby editor, but was later restored. The game remains available for purchase and is considered a cult classic in the text-adventure genre.

Did You Know?

• The game's source code was released on GitHub under the open-source license MPL 2.0 in July 2013.
• A Nintendo Switch version was temporarily removed from the eShop because developer Amir Rajan included a Ruby editor as a 'last second spark of inspiration.'
• The game was originally published for web browsers on June 10, 2013, by Canadian indie studio Doublespeak Games.
• An open-source contributor added audio capabilities and lo-fi sound effects to the browser game in October 2020.

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