The Ensign is the prequel to rope-playing text-based game A Dark Room. Awake. Head throbbing. Vision blurry. Come light the fire. A Dark Room was not really welcomed. It received many 1 out of 5 star rating when it first came out. Many people calling it a waste of money. At the price of USD$1.99 many people thought that it was a cheap game thus buying it. But after playing the game for a few minutes, they clearly were not impressed at all. But after a few minority of people completed the game, they were amazed by the storyline. This lead to the game A Dark Room becoming popular.
The main reason why A Dark Room is considered one of the best games in the app store, is because of it’s storyline. It starts out with nothing but a fire that you need to stoke to keep yourself warm, that slowly expands out in an unexpectedly large and depressing adventure.
The Ensign will give us a clue on the events that took place before A Dark Room. But The Ensign is a different game from A Dark Room in terms of it’s gameplay. In A Dark Room, you had to explore A Dusty Path and slowly expand your base of operation and explore the wasteland. You also had to do town management, you had to build huts with the materials you gathered and send workers to either chop wood or work in the mines. But whereas in The Ensign, it focuses much more on the exploration side of things. There will be new dungeons that won’t simply lead you in one direction, weapons will break if you are not careful and a new enemy will be stalking you all over the mad.
Another huge difference is that The Ensign will be extremely difficult. You will die alot. But the main purpose of it is for you to learn from your death and advance further each time you die. If your character dies it shows “Time Paradox” instead of “Game Over” then the game restarts from the beginning.
If you are looking for something that takes the mechanics of A Dark Room and builds on it this game has very less to offer to you. But if you are really interested in the games story and would play it again to fill in a little bit of details, or you would like to play a RPG game with much higher difficulty, you can spend your money guilt free.
So, overall I would give this game a rating of 7 out of 10, I really expected more from The Ensign. It had a great storyline but the gameplay could have been better. But because I am a A Dark Room fan, I would not mind spending a little bit of money to experience this game.
Photo Courtesy of: http://images.jayisgames.com/dora_theensign_2.jpg
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