A Dark Room

A Dark Room is a minimalist text adventure by Michael Townsend. It opens with one line — "awake. head throbbing. vision blurry. come light the fire." — and for its first act that is literally all you have: a dark room, and the means to make fire.

Then a stranger appears, and stoking the fire starts to cost you wood. Everything after that expands outward in stages — a hut, a village, a trading post, then outside, into a burned world of landmarks and mines, and finally a spacecraft. It is remarkable how much story it tells with almost no interface: no map, no inventory grid, mostly a row of buttons and a great deal of silence.

How to Play

1. Light the fire. Click to add wood. The fire is the entire first act — it must not go out, and you must not let the wood run out.
2. Keep it fed. A stranger shows up and asks for help with the fire; in exchange, wanderers start leaving supplies. Wood arrives at intervals.
3. Build up. The builder appears and unlocks construction. Build a cart to carry more wood, then huts so more wanderers will work, then a trading post, tannery, smokehouse, workshop, steelworks and armoury. Costs scale with each building already standing.
4. Go outside. Once you have enough, you leave. Out there are landmarks, and each one unlocks a further step — iron mine, coal mine, sulphur mine, water tank, and eventually a ship.
5. Prestige. There is a Prestige option in the menu. It resets your world for permanent bonuses.

Controls

The entire game is mouse clicks — there is no keyboard input anywhere in the source.

• Click the fire room — add wood
• Click craftable buttons — build when the cost is met (they appear once unlocked)
• Click the trade buttons — buy from the trading post
• Click "outside" / "leave" — travel out of the room and back
• Click landmarks and encounters — travel, gather, and interact
• Click the compass icon — the equipment/scouting panel
• Menu → Settings — save, export, import and language

Getting Resources

The production chains are worth knowing before you set out, because the mid game is about unlocking them in the right order:

Building	Produces
cart	increases wood carried per trip
huts	more workers, which means more supply income
hunting lodge	fur and meat
trading post	trades for diamond, cured meat, and scales
tannery	turns hides into cured meat and leather
smokehouse	turns meat into dried rations that travel better
workshop	bolts, rope and fabric
steelworks	unlocks steel and armour
armoury	weapons and armour

Outside, the iron mine, coal mine and sulphur mine feed the workshop and steelworks; alien alloy and energy cells come from the spacecraft sequence.

The Endgame

Once you have spacecraft, the Fabricator opens and starts consuming alien alloy to build:

• weapons — energy blade, disruptor, plasma rifle ("the peak of wanderer weapons technology, sleek and deadly")
• armour — kinetic armour ("wanderer soldiers succeed by subverting the enemy's rage")
• tools — hypos and stims
• upgrades — fluid recycler ("water out, water in. waste not, want not") and cargo drone

Several of these require a blueprint found in the world, and several land on specific encounters — the Executioner in particular is the fight the whole game is building toward.

Multiplayer Mode

Yes — there is an optional co-op mode, driven by Dropbox (script/dropbox.js). It is not the default path and requires a Dropbox account.

Language

The game reads a lang query parameter and supports more than twenty languages: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English, French, German, Greek, Esperanto, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. It falls back to English when the parameter is absent, which is what happens on this site.

Save Data

Progress saves to localStorage automatically. Settings offers export and import for moving a save between browsers and machines.

About

A Dark Room was created by Michael Townsend of doublespeak games and first published in 2013. It is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

• Original live build: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com
• Original game source: https://github.com/doublespeakgames/adarkroom

It has since been ported to the App Store, Google Play and Steam. See public/games/adarkroom/ATTRIBUTION.md for the full provenance record, including the individual credits of the bundled audio libraries.