A Dark Room

About the game

A Dark Room opens on almost nothing: a single line of text telling you that the room is cold and the fire is dead, and one button to light it. Keep the fire going and someone stumbles in from the cold. She can build things, if you bring her wood. From there the game unfolds one button at a time, and each new button changes what the game is about.

At first it is a quiet resource game. You gather wood, check traps, build huts and give the villagers who arrive work as hunters, tanners or miners, watching the stores fill up on the right of the screen. Strangers knock at the door, some with offers, some with bad intentions. Later you pack supplies and walk out into the world, an ASCII map full of abandoned places, where water and food run out, fights break out and every trip home brings back something new. What is really going on, and why the world looks like this, is something the game reveals slowly and is best left to discover by playing.

Michael Townsend wrote A Dark Room in 2013, inspired by the browser game Candy Box, and published it under the name Doublespeak Games. It became one of the best-known incremental games, and the source code, together with translations made by players into more than twenty languages, is open on GitHub.

Playing it here

Click Play and then light the fire. The game saves itself in this browser every few moments, so you can close the page and continue later; the "save." menu at the bottom exports your progress as text that you can keep or import on another computer, and "restart." starts over. The menu also has a language picker, sound on or off, a darker "lights off." look and "hyper." mode, which runs the game at double speed. On the Portuguese pages of this site the game starts in Brazilian Portuguese.

This is the game from the author's repository with a few changes: the analytics script, the links to the mobile app stores and social networks and a promotion for another game were removed, so that nothing loads from other sites. The game itself is unchanged. It is laid out for a computer screen and is shrunk to fit the player, so it reads best on a desktop or a tablet.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Watch the fire. Early on the fire cools down by itself, and a cold room slows everything. Stoke it whenever it starts to fade.

Balance the workers. Every villager you assign to a job eats, and some jobs consume what others produce. If a number in the stores starts to fall, move people around.

Pack before you leave. Out on the map, food and water are your clock. Bring more than you think you need, and use the places you discover to extend your range.

Read everything. The story is told in short lines that come and go on the left of the screen; it is easy to miss something important.

Credits and licence

A Dark Room was created by Michael Townsend and the contributors listed in its repository, who also wrote the translations; the music and sound effects were added in later versions. The game is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. "A Dark Room" and Doublespeak Games are names of their owners and are used here only to identify the game. The licence texts, the original source and our changes are linked from this page.