Endless Dark

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

I don't think a game has ever made me feel such intense emotions as this game. The hope of the last arc, the crushing despair of the other arcs as I somehow barely scraped by while finishing the arc to keep progressing (Thank you dev for making it so that finishing the arc but not the voyage still counts, I think I would have actually lost my mind if it didn't) The only two real complaint I have is that 1: random damage really, really sucks sometimes but the next update (1.2 - Which is currently in public beta) is removing that entirely for a different system 2: While the music is amazing in my opinion it gets slightly repetitive after a few hours, but it was never so repetitive that I turned the music off to turn my own on so kinda minor in my opinion but I felt it should still be noted Robbie remains my goat, through and through

I figured this would be a wild ride just based on the trailers, but nothing could have prepared me for the actual secrets this game was hiding, or the emotional rollercoaster that it would take me on. The minute-to-minute gameplay is mostly just reading and picking options from menus, and yet this still managed to be one of the most stressful games I've ever tried out. A+, I wish I could rip out my memory core and experience it for the first time again.

Delightful roguelite that has kept me on my toes every game! Rarely do I feel like things are easy or 'solved' and I can coast to victory. Each character has its own set of decisions to make and strategies can be very different for each of them. Balancing risk against reward or possible negative effects can be a nailbiter. Especially if problems pile up and you start having to make choices between only bad decisions. I have played through most of the story arcs at the time of writing this review, and am slowly working through to the conclusion. In roguelite fashion, there are various perks that are unlocked through completing objectives or specific feats of strength. Some are even negative to allow taking even more- and there is an interesting 'continuity' between runs, which can make things quite interesting. I have not done too much as far as 'pushing the difficulty' though the Real-Time Mode has been siren-calling to me that it cant *possibly* be that bad, whats the harm.

Didn't expect this to be survival horror walle

I don't think a description can do this game justice. Instead, if the idea of a "existential horror game" clicks in your head, buy this! There are no jump scares, just atmosphere. Existence is the horror.

Sometimes I felt like I was abusing the games mechanics, that I found a strategy that made me as efficent as possible with ship maintenance while keeping my little custodian tireless, stress-free, and (relatively) sane. A perfectly efficent strategy. [b] Other times I felt the games mechanics abusing me.[/b] Due to the culmination of my insanities; I would dread to open any door, as my custodian might begin to spaz out screaming, gaining stress and leaving oil spills everywhere, which I would have to clean up, gaining fatigue, which can give even MORE STRESS. My custodian gained a need for destruction, I would break vital systems of the ship, then fix them immediately after simply because I NEEDED TO break things or it would become too resource-draining to repair. My map became useless, my task list became useless, My HuD TeXT becAME USELess, MY CUST00DIAN TURNED INTO A D00R, MY BREAKERS F0R THE D0ORS TURNED INTO DOORS, ALL MY SYSTEMS TURNED INTO D00RS. STRESS WAS PILING AND P1LINg UP, RISKING TEMP0RARY SHUTD0WN, I RAN OUT OF PARTS TO REPAIR THE SHIP, SO I HAD TO RELY ON EMERGENCY REPAIRS, WHICH WOULD GIVE [b] EVEN MORE STRESS!! BUT I NEED TO FIX THE ENGINE OR WE WON'T MAKE IT TO THE END IN TIME, I NEED TO FIX THE ENGINE, THE EMERGENCY REPAIR FAILS, MORE STRESS I NEED TO FIX THE ENGINE THE EMERGENCY REPAIR FAILS MORE STRESS I NE- [u] DO NOT ENGAGE IN INDEPENDENT THOUGHT [/u] 01010011 01010100 01001111 01010000 00100000 01010100 01001000 01001001 01001110 01001011 01001001 01001110 01000111

I HATE DOORS DO NOT ENGAGE IN INDEPENDENT THOUGHT DO NOT ENGAGE IN INDEPENDENT THOUGHT DO NOT ENGAGE IN INDEPENDENT THOUGHT maybe i should take a break DO NOT ENGAGE IN INDEPENDENT THOUGHT DO NOT ENGAGE IN INDEPENDENT THOUGHTDO NOT ENGAGE IN INDEPENDENT THOUGHT I FEEL LIKE DANCING

Little guy goes a little crazy on a little ship in the vastness of space :)

A neat little game with solid writing. WALL-E meets something like SOMA. It's a resource management game with it's focus on the narrative and themes of existencialism, hopelessness, anxiety and decay. That was quite the journey. The price of 8€ is justified. Oh and if you do not have a preference, narrative wise it makes the most sense to finish the story with FURY, then ANNIE, then ROBBIE. (reviewed version: 1.1. There is a big 1.2 patch incomming)