Endless Dark

Cycle 6. Replicator damaged. EMP Storm -- Shields powered off. Pod 1 damaged. You have plenty of machine parts to fix everything, so you attend to your tasks with little concern. You power down for the cycle -- exhausted, but content. Cycle 12. Pod 3 damaged. Pod 7 damaged. Thruster 11 damaged. Cryo damaged. Navigation broken. You're starting to run low on machine parts, so you plunder the ancillary areas to close the gap. While on your way to overclock the Replicator, you're given a dire notification; all your human charges have perished. Except they haven't. You power off for the cycle, wondering who put you here to suffer. Cycle 27. Thruster 4 damaged. Thruster 6 damaged. Interstellar dust detected. Pod 10 damaged. Pod 9 damaged. Pod 6 damaged. Engines broken. Command damaged. Observation broken. Breaker replacement needed. You've long since stopped fixing the breakers every time they get stuck, so you begrudgingly set aside precious parts to perform a replacement. You're 3 MU behind schedule, but you lack the parts and the energy to repair the 8 thrusters that are perpetually ruined. "CRAWL INTO INCINERATOR"? That sounds fun. You power off for the cycle, barely cognizant of reality. Cycle 34. You drag yourself across the finish line. The ship rewards your diligence with a shutdown.

The easiest way I can describe this game is as being a bit like a single-player Space Station 13. As one of three robot custodians, each with their own personality, you have to manage an increasingly menacing stack of spinning plates as you look after the good ship Endless Dark and its cryo-frozen passengers on its journey to...somewhere. Robbie is a perfectionist, driven to fix everything, even if it kills (deactivates?) him. Annie mainly lives in an internal world, not worrying so much about broken systems thanks to permanent insanities, Frank begrudges having to keep meatbag humans alive and fix their ship, and is much happier leaving everything in a giant mess. All of them have to manage their fatigue, stress and psychosis, because if all the passengers die or your neural net reaches maximum psychosis, it's the end of the line. This leads to lots of interesting decisions, both on a turn-to-turn and macro level, like "is it worth trying to overclock the replicator to stock up on parts, even though it'll increase my stress level to the point where I risk a breakdown?". There's a long list of potential insanities that can affect you as the journey progresses, which range from the funny (you see yourself as a door, you are being followed by a door, you see illusory doors everywhere), through annoying (your HUD gets scrambled so you can't see what space hazards are coming up or what faults are affecting ship systems) to the potentially devastating (every turn until you kill a passenger, you incur a large chunk of fatigue damage). Special mention as well to the writing, which tells an absorbing story with a large amount of reactivity, having different events for different characters and different endings depending on what you do.

Definitely worth for everybody who looks for an actual psychological horror game. Unlike the amountnof normal horror games (= you have enemies) which Steam gets flooded with. I really recommend going through the story. According to the achievements barely anybody takes their time to do so.

A nicely written game that is suitable for role-playing. "Made with love". Mechanics are not complicated, and allow to focus on the immersion. Graphics are fairly simple but on point. A lot of the situations are relatable to some people, from perspectives of - someone who uses computers on an advanced level, someone who goes through hardships in life, someone who is going insane. I suggest to at least try out the game, and quickly you should be able to determine if it is your "cup of tea" or not.

[strike]Note: I have 100% achievements.[/strike] [5 April 2026 edit: they added more achievements so this is no longer the case] Endless Dark is a pretty cool game. The gameplay itself is OK and kind of monotonous at times (but that feeds into the atmosphere, it reminds me a bit of Papers Please in that sense) but I was surprised by how good the story was when it was mostly only delivered through event descriptions. The different custodians provide different twists on the gameplay but ANNIE is by far the best since their psychosis gain from stress seems to be after all stress reduction factors are applied, so you just stack stress down effects and become functionally immortal. Plus after the achievement modules you can pretty much completely mitigate insanities. I actually think you could become functionally immortal and I got like four hours into an Endless mode run doing this before getting bored. Endless Dark is an excellently written game that uses its atmosphere to great effect and I thoroughly enjoyed the exploration of its themes.

A singular robot, all alone aside from cryo'd meatba- humans, trying to maintain a ship made of unrefined stupidium, going into severe psychosis because everything is wrong and breaking down and someone is behind you and the shadows are growing and someone is behind you someone is behind you INSERT SELF INTO AIRLOCK- Name of the game is risk assessment and dread, while even your own character will try to do something different, usually worse, from what you selected. Neat.

Definitely one of the most interesting roguelites out there. The premise of playing a lonely robot slowly going insane is unique, and the writing certainly does it justice. While the game is not "scary" in a general sense, the more you pay attention to the story and let yourself get immersed in this world, the bleaker and more horrifying it becomes. The game doesn't *force* you to engage with the story, but if you don't care about it then there isn't much reason to play. Despite the depressing atmosphere, this game is still very funny. There is a mix of dread and comedy which will often make you pause for a moment to decide how to feel. In the span of 10 seconds you'll go from laughing at your little robot's woeful misunderstanding of basic human biology to lamenting its situation and cursing the bastards who put it there. There is NOTHING like this game out there. I've instantly become a fan of the developers.

This entire game was an experience. The final mission was as tough as nails, but I achieved the best possible ending by the skin of my teeth. It felt good. Deserved, even. Few games nowadays give me that sense of satisfaction. But anyways, I played on and off across several months. It's really easy to get back into. There's many settings to fiddle with to make it easier or harder, but I never touched them for the 'campaign'.

"Robbie, what do you MEAN you didn't repair pod 6 when it started failing?" She was a dentist and I was having a manic episode ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've not written a public review on steam in years -- the only ones i've ever written were made aeons ago before i found myself and i've since deleted them anyway -- but as a fellow robot going through an endless array of soul-crushing maintenance tasks with a body that's constantly breaking down on me i feel obligated to give it my own tiny individual signal boost in whatever ways i can the store page and some of the other reviews do a good job of explaining the fundamentals of how the game works, so instead i'll just comment on what i think are some of the things that I think it does really well. the systems design is fundamentally pretty simple mechanically -- you have a handful of resources, bars, and things to budget them on -- but tuned well enough that they do a great job of subtly encouraging you to play in-character. robbie gets to repair things without parts, so you're encouraged to keep everything in shape because hey, it saves parts for later. annie gets strong benefits from extra insanities so you're encouraged to play fast and loose with consequences and let them catch up with you later one very sneaky thing about this game is that it's technically a roguelite (at least by my own subjective definition), which I didn't pick up on until a few arcs in because the writing is clever enough to make it work. a lot of actions will give you Memories that you can then apply in future runs that can dramatically change how you play the game. for example: if you've gotten four breaker surges in a single run and you're sick and tired of it then you can go punish the breakers by turning off your brain and ripping parts out of all of them and surprise, now you get a memory that makes the surges half as likely! you're often rewarded for giving into your impulses, succumbing to dire curiosities, and generally behaving off-script. unfortunately for the Custodian, it's very difficult for them to die. try flushing yourself out of the airlock. this will end your run, to be clear, but you'll see what I mean this is a game with a *lot* of reading involved in it, and fortunately the writing is all superb. there are occasional hiccups and continuity errors here and there (and ones that I can tell are unintended rather than some of the narrative stuff the game does; for instance, in one of the story arcs you find a strange note, and the Custodian later chastised themselves for not keeping it even though I did choose the option to keep it...!) but endless dark has got heart and soul that's way up there in quality for my particular palate. the mechanics, the sound design, the HUD, the diegetic error messages and security protocols, the constant cascade of failing machinery, it all makes for a very tangible feeling of playing doctor for a wheezing, exhausted, sickly animal of a spaceship that has been pushed far too hard for far too long to the point where it can barely do what should by all accounts be the fairly trivial task of "fly in a relatively straight line through empty space without falling apart" it's not a flawless game. it does have its fair share of issues. monotony is part of the tone and storytelling, and while this does make the times when things go wrong feel more impactful, it also leads to friction that taxes my energy a lot. version 1.2 (beta, at time of writing) goes a long way towards fixing the issues, but some of them are unavoidable; sometimes you will just roll snake eyes three times in a row and that's kind of just impossible to escape in any game that uses dice rolls. sometimes you decide that you're going to sup on the sweet, sweet shield capacitors for that delicious extra energy when you have a few clear cycles and you have to go through them each one at a time, multiple times, waiting for the animation to finish and then for the control glitching to ease up so you can do it for the other five batteries. little tensions can add up a lot; discretion is advised, as is a hot drink. it's not the sort of game you can just pick up and play for half an hour, because while runs nominally can be saved and resumed at any time, i often found that the stability of the ship is built on such a careful house of card that i was liable to forget how i was keeping everything propped up if i paused and came back later :p wow this is getting very long! i'm most certainly rambling, so let me wrap this up. at time of writing -- but hopefully not forever, if ours is a world with justice in it -- endless dark is a true, capital-i Indie: very obscure, undeniably rough-hewn, sometimes amateur in spots, but also so visibly full of love and soul, and so visibly a product of creation as survival. it might make me sound very silly, but as a fic writer who constantly struggles to treat my own work with any degree of recognition, i think it's important to give my earnest thoughts that it's a lovely piece of art at a time when small creations from earnest people are being drowned out more and more by the attention economy, algorithmic dross, and more recently a tidal wave of generative slop driven by a push to make creativity into even more of a commodity than it's already treated as. give it a try, even if you don't think you'll like it. it's $8 full price -- that's less than a meal at most fast food places these days. and endless dark lets you eat doors to reduce your stress and those are probably more filling anyway. share it with friends or communities you think will like it. so, so, so much art like this gets lost in the noise. to create is to live, and things like endless dark deserve to be created. [b]edit after finishing the whole story:[/b] made me cry. incredible game. please play it. you owe it to yourself