A Dark Room by Doublespeak games is a very interesting beast. It is a game made for browser and iOS using java and HTML. The game is of a genre only known as a "folding" game. This means the longer you play the game, the more features and game play is revealed. The folding game genre is heavily reliant on waiting and slow progression mixed with eventual discovery to drive the player to continue playing the game. This makes the player want to play the game simply because they want to know what mechanic or feature is going to be revealed next. This is not unique to games as other games have attempted and very rarely successfully managed to make waiting interesting (Farmville, many Facebook and iOS games) but a folding game like A Dark Room doesn't try and make the waiting in itself exciting. In fact, it does quite the opposite. The game makes the waiting boring, agonising. The game makes you hate the waiting, but makes the end goal of the waiting, which is that primal discovery. Even finding just one little hint that there is something more than what you are currently playing makes the player anxious to continue. But I think I have reached the limit as too what I can talk about without actually talking about the story.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR A DARK ROOM AHEAD, READ AT OWN DISCRETION!
Like I said earlier, A Dark Room is slow. This isn't just in game play, but in story. The game reveals very little to you early on and continues with the mystery until the very end. The story told to you in the beginning is that you woke up in a dark room (surprise, surprise) with a burnt out fire and a mysterious woman. You light the fire and are immediately caring to the woman, in the same we she is caring to you. The woman tells you she can build things like houses and traps and you have to gather materials like wood and furs for her so she can build them. This introduces the new mechanic of gathering materials which has a progress bar that fills, allowing you to gather materials when full. When you gather the materials to build houses, people start to take residence in them, giving you resources over time relevant to what job they have in the village which you can assign to either a gatherer or hunter. By building traps you gain another progress bar to check the traps and gather furs. You eventually can build a trading post, which allows you to trade furs for other resources needed to build like scales and cloth. You are then able to build structures like tanneries in order to make leather and such. These structures give you extra job positions to give your villagers that have them use other resources like furs to make leather. You then are given the opportunity to buy a map in the trading post. Upon buying it, you are given an extra option that is one of the most fundamental parts to game play, exploring.
Exploring lets you venture out into the wilds around your village from a top down map view. You have a food and water levels that deplete slowly for every space you move, meaning you have to come back to your village or starve to death, In these wilds you are exploring are bushes and trees and paths, all displayed through ASCII art (using letters) and when you travel through the wilds, enemies will randomly attack you, sending you into combat. Combat consists of an RTS variant of turn-based combat. This once again constitutes the waiting mechanic as both you and your opponent have progress bars that can be tapped/clicked when full to attack (the opponent auto-attacks) This is the combat in the beginning, but you can eventually get weapons that do more damage, armour to take more hits, and water/food containers to travel further. You also loot enemies or building when finished with them. You take their items and can then use them. You have to watch out, though, because you have a very Fallout-type inventory that can hold a certain amount of weight, and better items tend to weigh more. This exploration mechanic is very important to the game as it allows you to know explore and discover at a more controlled pace. There is still a lot of waiting, but now you can explore the map faster or slower depending on how confident you are. The game now starts to expand on the narrative, not only revealing character traits of the protagonist through his interaction with the mysterious girl and his villagers (whom later he calls slaves), all the while giving you items that are very interesting and mysterious, but you have to wait to use them to their full extent
So I think I have competently explained the mechanics and narrative of this game. And in doing so I now hope to talk about the second half of the title, Unfolding games. I brushed over the subject before, but i want to go more in depth in how these games vary from triple A games of today. The games that are released yearly, let's use the example Call of Duty, vary from unfolding games because of the differences even in the first ten minutes of the game. The first ten minutes of A Dark Room consist of huddling around a fire and next to no game play. The first ten minutes of Call of Duty is usually an action packed romp through whatever setting the game has chosen, explaining all of the game play features and narrative in one big tutorial. The tutorial is meant to tell you everything, so that the game can use the mechanics it's taught you and hopefully expand upon them. Unfolding games have no tutorial as the whole game tells you how to play it simply by throwing you in the game and expecting you to know. Yet while this works in A Dark Room, if the next Assassin's Creed did this it would be crucified. This is in part because an unfolding game gives you the game play in bite-sized portions, and the next AC game will most definitely have a million and one game play features. Yet I think that games with tons of features can learn to teach game play through game play instead of tutorials. in fact a good example of that is in Mega Man X, which you can watch here. The game doesn't tell you how to play so much as you figure it out in a learning scenario. This can be a great asset to games nowadays, as instead of a "Press A to jump" tutorial, games can learn to teach you fluidly.
So I hope this post was informative and makes you want to play A Dark Room. The game is on iOS and browser, and you can find the browser version here. So go check that out and hopefully have fun. And if you enjoyed this post, be sure to leave a comment below and tell me what you think of Unfolding games.
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