Review Insights · App Store
A Dark Room
Amirali Rajan · 2,641 ratings · ★ 4.8
4.8
★★★★★
2,641 ratings
📋 All 4 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
Waste an evening in someone else’s moral experiment
A Dark Room is less a game and more a blunt philosophical experiment. It hides its mechanics, offers almost no fine-grained control, and forces players into major moral consequences through opaque, all-or-nothing systems.
What frustrated me most is that it gives you almost no ability to practice nuance. You can’t reassign labor, reprioritize systems, or gently tune anything. When something goes wrong, it doesn’t teach you… it just escalates, often with heavy moral weight. It feels like being trapped inside someone else’s thought experiment rather than being invited to build your own.
I don’t mind difficult themes. I mind when a game removes agency and then lectures me about the lack of it. I wanted to build something humane, but the game doesn’t really let you do that with intention, it only lets you discover, through blunt force, what happens when systems go bad.
That may be powerful for some players. For me, it wasn’t satisfying.. it was irritating. I don’t want to be trapped in a machine to learn empathy. I want tools to practice care, not just witness its failure.
Interesting idea. Not my love language.
What frustrated me most is that it gives you almost no ability to practice nuance. You can’t reassign labor, reprioritize systems, or gently tune anything. When something goes wrong, it doesn’t teach you… it just escalates, often with heavy moral weight. It feels like being trapped inside someone else’s thought experiment rather than being invited to build your own.
I don’t mind difficult themes. I mind when a game removes agency and then lectures me about the lack of it. I wanted to build something humane, but the game doesn’t really let you do that with intention, it only lets you discover, through blunt force, what happens when systems go bad.
That may be powerful for some players. For me, it wasn’t satisfying.. it was irritating. I don’t want to be trapped in a machine to learn empathy. I want tools to practice care, not just witness its failure.
Interesting idea. Not my love language.
love, but
bring back the old UI as an option please
Too different from desktop
Not only that but you’re forced to be evil. Even the “good” route is evil. Don’t bother, play on a browser in “Request Desktop Mode”
Nooooo lost my save data with update!
Why did updating to this latest version remove my save data ?!??
Sentiment summary
94%
Positive (4-5★)
1%
Neutral (3★)
4%
Negative (1-2★)