A Dark Room
Review

A Dark Room (2013) is an adventure where you try and survive in the wild. The world is depicted with just text but leads you into a dense narrative with intriguing visitors and a steadily expanding world. It has a simple start – a single option to stoke a fire – but soon evolves into an incrementally complex system of resource management as a larger story unfolds.

Play involves making choices about how to spend resources and where to put your people to work. But also, you must choose whether to be generous and how to deal with strangers. It's a game with plenty of unexpected turns, both in the story but also in how you interact with it. What starts as a resource management style of game, eventually evolves into an experience not far from Pokemon.

Along the way, you learn not only how to look after communities and maximise resources but question whether it is you, or the others that you meet that are actually the heroes of the story. In the end, you face the question of whether you are actually the bad guy.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked A Dark Room 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 2 weeks ago.