A Dark Room is a text based browser game in which player’s manage resources and build a village. At first glance, A Dark Room looks like a simple text based story game for the browser, but quickly evolves into a recourse management game in which players manage resources like wood, meat, and fur to build and grow a village. The Aesthetics I would use to describe it are Discovery and Fantasy. I see Discovery as this game’s primary aesthetic because of it’s exploratory nature, as the main draw of the game is to explore the options that it provides to you. Fantasy would be another aesthetic of the game because of the world in which the game builds around your character.
The mechanics of A Dark Room, while simple at first, slowly grow to be more and more complex as the game continues. At the beginning your only mechanics are stoking a fire and waiting for the game to continue it’s narrative. Eventually you unlock the ability to scavenge for wood, and setup traps to earn meat and fur. These actions also have a predetermined cool-down period in which you need to wait before doing again. Further into the game you have an even larger list of mechanics, such as creating buildings with your supplies and attracting villagers that you can assign to various tasks to acquire supplies. Additionally, there are random events that can disrupt your normal flow of gameplay, such as animals coming and killing some of your villagers or breaking your traps. As well as traveling merchants and beggars asking for supplies. Eventually players will unlock the Dusty Road which has a whole new system of mechanics for the player to play with, adding a grid based map to explore with RPG elements and a simple click to attack combat system . For this, players equip their character with supplies and begin traveling around the map discovering new locations as they make successful trips.
The Dynamics of the game come down to the way in which you use your resources to further your progress. As the end goal of each player is the same, the choices in which they make merely affect the speed at which they meet those goals. For example, when a player first unlocks the huts they may wish to ignore the creation of other buildings and continually dump their wood into creating more huts. This way, they are able to draw in more villagers faster and earn more supplies in the long run. Additionally, some players can take a highly active approach by scavenging logs and checking traps as often as possible, while other players may wish to take an idle approach in which they let their villagers gather their supplies and only check up on the game to make changes every so often.
