This is a game about being a depressed and lonely robot maintenance worker on a deep space colony ship.
Northern Hemisphere friends, do you need something truly depressing to complement your Seasonal Affective Disorder? Well, I have a game for you!
Endless Dark is an “existential horror game in which you are tasked with keeping the ship of a sleeping colony safe and sound. No enemies or NPCs share the ship with you – only creaking metal echoes and endless darkness.”
In it, you are a robotic mind called the Guardian, a fully self-aware machine whose job is to maintain a traveling colony ship full of sleeping/frozen passengers heading to a new planet. You are also the only one awake, completely alone, cursed to live for decades in absolute solitude and isolation.
Keep your passengers alive at all times and you will win, become depressed, incapacitated by “robo-dementia” and lose. It’s a simple game with a lot of text – about 350,000 words about events, crises and damage that must be repaired or failed. It’s designed so that while you may fail a few times, you’ll discover new story threads each time, or even find new angles after you beat the game.
Of course, there’s plenty for your little robot to do. Like adding custom touches to its chassis and, you know, looking at the endless darkness of space.
Endless Dark can be played entirely with a mouse and keyboard, keyboard only, or gamepad.
You can find Endless Dark on Steam for $8.