Here’s a little adventure game/roguelike built entirely using iOS system interface elements and text. I say roguelike but not because you have to try n’ die many times, but because half of the game is walking around a map represented by Ascii art, which is what Rogue means to me (although I only spent a short time playing Angband). In fact, it’s only superficially roguelike. In fact, forget I said anything.
A Dark Room shows how you can tell a story and present a compelling gameplay experience in a very minimalistic way. There are no pictures, I don’t think there’s any music; it’s all progress bars, text, standard iOS buttons, and occasionally varying the screen brightness for effect. What you get is a strangely engrossing town management sim/turn-based RPG in a post-apocalyptic setting.
It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, to borrow a phrase from high school English. It’s about the protagonist’s loss of humanity in their search for answers and power in a ruined world. It’s also about loot and progress bars, which I love, having had a phase of playing Progress Quest (and I had to use a Windows emulator to do it, too).
Like I say, it’s impressive how much can be communicated and accomplished with so little. But I also like games with pictures. This one was, however, short, sweet, and memorable.
