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A Dark Room is temporarily free on iOS in celebration of upcoming prequel The Ensign

The mysteries continue

A Dark Room is temporarily free on iOS in celebration of upcoming prequel The Ensign
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iOS
| A Dark Room

A Dark Room is one of last year's most surprising games on iOS. It's currently free for a limited time.

I wrote about A Dark Room last November, encouraging you to pay the £1.49 / $1.99 asking price, but being careful not to give anything away. "Take a risk", I suggested.

Now that it's free, that risk has seemingly vanished. Hence, I don't feel so bad about insisting you should buy it without saying much about the game.

Now, there's even more good news. The reason that it's free for a limited time is to celebrate the upcoming prequel, The Ensign.

Below I'll be covering what has been revealed of this prequel so far. This means there will be some A Dark Room spoilers in there, too - you've been warned.

Tough territory

We can thank Pocket Tactics, who spoke to developer Amir Rajan, for the current information we have about The Ensign. So, what do we know?

"This prequel is a brutally difficult rendition of the Dusty Path that covers the events directly before A Dark Room.

"I wanted to make a strategy game that had high replay value, as opposed to a game about discovery."

The Dusty Path that Rajan references is the part of A Dark Room that emerges once you've got a sustainable economy in your village.

It's when you start to explore the larger world of the game. The Ensign will be a "brutally difficult" reiteration of the Dusty Path, but with a focus on the events that came before A Dark Room.

So it will be a strategy game with high replayability that's all "about surviving against all odds and the moral implications for doing so."

"The Ensign throws you in at the deep end with an 'invisible leash', Rajan told Pocket Tactics.

"You learn something with every death, and hopefully the player realizes that each death was their own fault because of mistakes they made, not something the game did to them."

We can expect The Ensign to arrive soon.

Chris Priestman
Chris Priestman
Anything eccentric, macabre, or just plain weird, is what Chris is all about. He turns the spotlight on the games that fly under the radar.