A Dark Room goes free to light the way for The Ensign, a mysterious prequel

What rare kindling.

I mentioned A Dark Room in passing back in February, and the lack of front page attention since then shouldn’t be mistaken for an indicator of its quality. No, A Dark Room is one of the year’s most surprising games, but it also seems to have been specifically designed to vex reviewers.

This is a hyper-minimal game with some ascii graphics and a UI so basic it makes Dream Quest look like a Coding Monkeys release. It also has a hugely unpromising start that resembles Cow Clicker on fast-forward. But if you give it a chance, A Dark Room becomes an engrossing game that pours accelerant all over your imagination.

The game borrows ideas from Civilization and Rogue and (it seems to me, anyway) Cormac McCarthy. It is full of revelations about the player character and the world it inhabits and, as such, becomes impossible to discuss at length without trading in awe-sapping spoilers. I’m not a good enough writer to review A Dark Room without knee-capping its power to surprise.

So I’m not going to. I’m instead going to take the coward’s way out and suggest that you download A Dark Room right now while it’s free to do so. There’s also the original web-based version.

I heard from iOS edition creator Amir Rajan today about The Ensign, a forthcoming prequel game. What he told me about that is after the jump.

Now fair warning — if you haven’t played A Dark Room, I suggest that you don’t read any further. Just to reinforce how strongly I believe this, I’m inserting a demilitarised zone between this part of the article and the next. If you want to keep going, meet us after the Tanya Morgan song.

“I really loved traversing the Dusty Path in A Dark Room, more so than balancing an economy and upgrading gear,” Amir Rajan told me today. If it’s been a while since you played, the Dusty Path is the phase of A Dark Room after you’ve established a sustainable economy in your village and have started to explore the (post-apocalyptic?) world beyond.

“This prequel is a brutally difficult rendition of the Dusty Path that covers the events directly before A Dark Room. I wanted to make a strategy game that had high replay value, as opposed to a game about discovery. Again, this game is stupid difficult, but once you get good at it, you’ll find that you can beat it a large percentage of the time.”

But if Rajan’s claim to have ditched the discovery aspects of A Dark Room makes you worry that the best part of the game is on the cutting room floor, he’s promising us that the game’s sinister frontier morality will still be very much there.

“The Ensign is about surviving against all odds and the moral implications for doing so,” says Rajan. “A Dark Room gave you an incremental path of increasing complexity, The Ensign throws you in at the deep end with an ‘invisible leash’. You learn something with every death, and hopefully the player realizes that each death was their own fault because of mistakes they made, not something the game did to them.”

The Ensign is coming soon.