1. A Dark Room is not actually the rudimentary idle clicker game it initially seems to be.
2. You could be forgiven for thinking that though as the opening minutes of gameplay consist exclusively of clicking on buttons in order to get more buttons to click, which matches well to what seems to be the goal of collecting resources in order to be able to collect more resources.
3. Text prompts appear to the side of the play area which bring to mind the status messages you get when playing the original Rogue. Over time, these begin to tell the story of your encampment, which starts as the titular dark room and gradually blossoms into a village. Random wanderers. Eventually, you start getting an image of the bleak, destroyed world in which A Dark Room is set.
4. The only graphical elements are ASCII characters and some very simple effects but in spite of or perhaps because of this, A Dark Room manages to be quite evocative. I found images of ragged survivors and savage battles dancing though my head as I played. One advantage of such limited graphics is they never get in the way of your imagination.
5. Another advantage is you can play this at work w/o being totally obvious about it.
6. As mentioned, this appears to be an idle clicker on first glance. From there, it branches out into a management sim and then keeps branching from there. The next step is into a Roguelite adventure and switching between this and resource management will be how you spend the bulk of your time playing.
7. Essentially, you use the resources your encampment produces to supply your exploration. As you explore, you discover things that allow you to harvest additional resources that let you explore further. It's a good loop.
8. There's some combat as you explore. You click on various actions all of which are on cooldown timers until you win or die. If you die, you lose the consumable items you happen to be carrying which can sting a bit but it's easy enough to get back on your feet. You can also die buy running out of food or water--which took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out so please don't tell anyone I told you that.
9. You do acquire resources if you just leave this running in a browser but there is some material that is very helpful in the end game that can only practically be had by going out and finding it while you're exploring so that keeps the gameplay experience pretty active.
10. On a similar note, if you keep your resource management under control, there is very little waiting around. For some of the more expensive structures, it may take some time to build up resources but you can generally keep it such that you have what you need to do some exploring in the meantime.
11. As you scratching out a living and then building a larger and more productive village, aspects of the game's wasteland begin to reveal themselves slowly. You don't get so much a story as a world that unfolds before you. Many hints to the true nature of your situation require a pretty close reading of the text and so are easily missed. The game doesn't lean to heavily on its story though so don't worry you're missing anything too important.
12. You eventually find a thing that let's you finish the
game. You are scored at this point based on the amount of resources
you've produced. I am not sure if the developer has weighed in on this
specifically but the community surrounding A Dark Room tends to
play by the rule that lower scores are better since they mean you've
been more efficient in your quest. Do what you want though. Nobody
cares.
13. A Dark Room presents a huge depth of play and touches on tons of different genres while keeping to a graphical style used by the only the most ancient of PC games. It's engaging while still being the kind of thing you can just keep open in a browser tab to come back to when you get a chance. It works really well on many levels and something about it just strikes me as creative and refreshing. Definitely a must play game.
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