The Dark Room

A gleefully weird foray into the past

The Dark Room is the culmination of many years work for comedian, John Robertson. John has toured the world with what he calls the world’s only live-action videogame, and now he is bringing it full circle by releasing it as – wait for it – an actual videogame.

The Dark Room started as a parody of old-school text adventure games (think Zork), focussing on the painful difficulty of navigating them. The live show sees John presenting audience members with a scenario – “you awake to find yourself in a dark room.” From here, the audience member chooses from up to 4 options on the screen as they inevitably navigate their way to their demise, at which point a new audience member takes over. Laughing at audience members repeating the same mistakes as other players and being berated for it is undoubtedly one of the funniest things I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

So, how does this formula for an amazing live show translate to video game form? I’m pleased to say that the currently available early access version is very promising. John Robertson has spent many hours in a motion capture suit bringing his very essence to the game and his performance is definitely not short of any of the theatrics you would get with the live show. Sure – some of the animations are poorly stitched together in its current release but I have high hopes this will be fixed prior to its full release.

My only concern for the game is how well the brutally difficult-to-navigate room translates to an actual video game. This approach works extraordinarily well as part of the live show as the audience all very quickly start to join in on sledging the unfortunate soul whose turn it is to make the decisions. Having presented this to a small group of friends who haven’t seen the live show, the fierce difficulty became annoying very quickly – perhaps this game will really make its mark in the world of Twitch streaming, but time will tell. It is a testament to John Robertson’s charismatic performance that these friends were still quoting the oh-so-sadistic host for many days afterwards – the echoes of the words, “ya die, ya die, ya die, ya die, ya die,” seemed to be popping up at some very inopportune moments and I don’t see that stopping anytime soon.