A Dark Room

 Switch
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  1. nusco
    May 5, 2019
    6
    I was lucky enough to buy A Dark Room before Nintendo removed it from its shop due to an authorized easter egg. It's a weird game–an experimental work that must be commended for doing things that are rarely attempted in gaming.

    A Dark Room plays with time, sometimes requiring immediate action on your part, at other times encouraging you to put down your Switch and come back later (and    I was lucky enough to buy A Dark Room before Nintendo removed it from its shop due to an authorized easter egg. It's a weird game–an experimental work that must be commended for doing things that are rarely attempted in gaming.

    A Dark Room plays with time, sometimes requiring immediate action on your part, at other times encouraging you to put down your Switch and come back later (and in that sense, it shows its web/mobile origins). It plays with genres, starting off like a piece of textual Interactive Fiction, suddenly turning into a resources management game, and finally coming full circle, revealing itself to be story-based. It plays with the reinforcement cycles of mobile gaming, by hooking you into a very addictive loop, only to break it down almost entirely close the endgame. Above all, it plays with your expectations, surprising you with multiple left turns during its short gameplay time. After getting one of the "bad" ending, I'm curious to see what the other endings look like.

    As interesting as A Dark Room is, it's weighted down by a few annoying details. On my Switch, the game kept insisting that I should play with the joycons off–and that, besides not making any sense for this type of game, is also false, as I could reconnect the controllers and play just fine. The game is also very light on "quality of life" features. For example, the interface is ideal for a touchscreen, but the buttons are so small and cramped that I often ended up using the joycons instead.

    Overall, A Dark Room is an interesting experience that will stick with me. The game builds an atmosphere with a minimal toolset, and ends up being more immersive than its minimalistic interface suggests. I just hope that it will come back to the Nintendo Store, and possibly get an UI refresh.    … Expand

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  1. Pure Nintendo
    May 31, 2019
    80
    A Dark Room succeeds because just when a part of the game gets familiar, it switches gears. The game keeps pushing you to explore, but why? In most other games, exploration is simply something you do because… well, it’s a game! You’re supposed to explore! But as A Dark Room hints more secretive reasons for your actions, you might wonder if you ever really had a choice at all.
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