A Dark Room starts with almost nothing: a cold room, a dead fire and a single button. You light the fire, keep it fed, and the story slowly opens up around you. A stranger arrives, a forest appears, and a few huts grow into a working village. Later you leave on foot to explore a ruined world. Everything is told in short lines of plain text, which leaves the bleak setting to your imagination.
How to Play A Dark Room
Lighting the fire costs five wood, and each stoke costs one more. If you let it die down, the room gets colder and the log on the left tells you so. Soon a ragged stranger stumbles in. Keep the room warm and she recovers, then offers to build things.
When the wood runs low, a path into the forest opens. Gather wood there and spend it on traps, carts and huts. Traps bring back fur, meat, scales and teeth. Huts draw in villagers, and you give them jobs such as gatherer, hunter or tanner. Most jobs turn one resource into another, so the village slowly runs itself.
The trading post sells a compass. With it you pack food, water and weapons on the Dusty Path and walk out onto the world map. Every step uses supplies, so refill water at outposts and head home before you run dry. Clearing a mine lets you put villagers to work as miners. The final stretch takes you off the map entirely, and your stores and ship decide your score.
A Dark Room Controls
| Action | Keyboard | Mouse |
|---|---|---|
| Use an action (light fire, gather wood, build, trade) | — | Click the button |
| Switch between locations | Left / Right arrows or A / D | Click a location name at the top |
| Walk on the world map | Arrow keys or W A S D | Click the map on the side you want to move toward |
| Steer the ship during the escape | Arrow keys or W A S D | — |
| Double game speed, dark theme, save code, restart | — | Click "hyper.", "lights off.", "save." or "restart." in the bottom corner |
Tips and Strategies
- Keep the fire high at the start. The stranger only gets better while the room is warm, and you get no builder until she does.
- Save scales and teeth. The compass costs 400 fur, 20 scales and 10 teeth, so do not spend every trap catch at the trading post.
- Balance the job list. Charcutiers burn wood and meat to make cured meat, and tanners use up fur. Watch the income numbers and add gatherers or hunters when a total starts to fall.
- Pack more water than you think. You drink on every step but eat only on every second step. Plan a loop past an outpost.
- Bring armour before going far. The game warns you when you walk eight or more steps out without iron armour, and the creatures get tougher with distance.
- Use hyper mode during slow stretches. It halves most timers while you wait for stores to build up.
Features
- Autosave in the browser, plus an export and import code for backups.
- Hyper mode that runs the game at double speed.
- A light and a dark theme, switched from the menu.
- Random events around the village, from wandering traders to beast attacks.
- A carry-over reward: after you finish, a new game can lead you to supplies left from your previous run.
Tested and updated:
