A Dark Room is half an idle game, half an RPG and both part aren't that great. You start from nothing and build up to having a bunch of people working under you, then you go explore the world with increasingly better stats and random events occur from time to time. It's an interesting game to be sure, but I stopped having fun with it when the idle elements became too slow to build up to unlocking anything new and I can't say I cared much about the narrative either.

The game starts with you in a titular dark room where all you can do is light a fire and put wood into it. You get a wood flow, then you build huts and traps to collect more materials and attract people that you can assign to various jobs in order to create more resources that you'll use in other aspects of the game. Random events occur; sometime you'll have a simple choice between two options, other times it's just a determined thing. After a while, things start costing a lot of wood, the cost of huts increases over time and you need people hunting so they can then can turn meat into cured meat and cured meat into iron/coal (via miners). You can only wheel 18 wood at a time and I wasn't able to upgrade that. Worst yet were thieves that caused my supplies to just dwindle over time without anything I could do about it. I wish it took less time to get to the next thing.

You use these resources to unlock new gameplay mechanics, the compass for instance will allow you to walk on the world map, but you need food and water, otherwise you just die and lose everything you had on your character. From what I've figured, the goal of the world map is to find interesting things where you unlock even more things. Taking over a coal mine will give you the job to mine coal, which in turn will allow you to build more stuff. The battle system is turn-based and you have to tap the attack and heal button to keep yourself alive, maybe your character could've automatically attacked? From doing certain actions, you gain perks, but I only got the ones related to punch damage. You also can craft weapons, but they're one use only, so it's kind of a bummer, since they cost precious resources. Walking around also allows you to loot things, provided you have enough wagon space to carry it around.

ADR isn't a terrible game, but it didn't grab my attention enough. Having to wait forever until you can build another thing isn't fun and there didn't seem to be ways for me to improve my wood output. When the thieves arrived and just started to make my stocks drain that just cemented my decision to stop playing.

AuthorJérémie Tessier
Categories3/5, Idle, RPG