A Dark Room

A Dark Room begins with you waking in a cold, dark room after a mysterious event. At first, your only task is to light and tend a fire. As the game reveals more of its world, you collect resources, meet strangers, establish a village, and explore a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

About A Dark Room

A Dark Room is an open-source, text-based role-playing game originally released for web browsers. Its story unfolds through small discoveries rather than long explanations. The fire, the people who arrive, the resources around the settlement, and the ruins beyond it gradually show you what happened to the world.

The game starts with a narrow set of actions and expands as you progress. Resource gathering supports the village, while exploration takes you beyond its safety into areas containing ruins and hostile enemies. The amount and variety of resources and exploration available increase over time.

How to Play A Dark Room

Keep the fire burning while you uncover the next available actions. Once you can gather resources, use them to develop the settlement and support its villagers. A builder helps establish a village for wanderers, and the villagers then gather resources for you.

When you obtain a compass, you can leave the village and explore the wasteland. Exploration exposes you to hostile enemies, so your expedition can end in defeat. If your character dies in the wasteland, you awaken back in the village and can continue from there.

The story eventually leads to an abandoned wanderer spaceship. Bringing it back to the village opens the path toward the game’s final journey, but the ship is damaged by a meteor cluster and falls back to the planet’s surface. An alternate ending is possible if you do not build any huts before the builder collapses from exhaustion.

Game Controls

Controls are not specified in the available game information.