Need something real depressing to go with your seasonal affective disorder, northern hemisphere friends? Well, have I got a game for you!
Endless Dark is “an existential horror game in which you are tasked with keeping a sleeper colony ship intact. No enemies or NPCs share the ship with you – only creaking metal echoes and endless dark.”
In it you’re a robot intelligence called The Custodian, a fully self-aware machine whose job is to keep a travelling colony ship full of sleeping/frozen passengers going to a new planet. You’re also the only thing awake, totally alone, cursed to live for decades of absolute loneliness and isolation.
Keep your passengers alive the whole time and you win, slip into depressed, incapable “robo-dementia” and you lose. It’s a simple game with a lot of writing—some 350,000 words of events and crises and damage to fix or fail at. It’s made so that while you might fail a few times you’ll tease out new threads of the story each time—or even find new angles after you’ve beaten the game.
There are of course other things for your little robot to do. Like tweak its chassis with personal touches, and, you know, gaze in to the endless dark of space.
Endless Dark is fully playable with mouse and keyboard, keyboard only, or gamepad.
You can find Endless Dark on Steam for $8.