Sandbox games have always had a following and Darkout continues this tradition with a science fiction themed game.

You find yourself on a procedurally created planet that is bathed in almost total darkness, but fear not there is just enough light for you to appreciate your alien surroundings. Stuck alone you have to quickly set about harvesting your surroundings to gather resources which can be used in building crafting and research.

You start out the game with little and Darkout encourages you to first build your shelter, following which you start to build furniture. These are the first steps in your journey which will involve an awful lot of resources gathering, researching and building. There is a tentative storyline which goes along with the game, but this is easy to ignore as you can still continue to explore and build without even needing it.

Things are not plain sailing as the dark contains a number of monsters more than happy to take your life and you quickly discover than light is your best friend. If you have not played a sandbox game before the learning curve can be a little daunting, but Darkout is a game which becomes more rewarding the longer you play it and with the right investment of time you could find yourself addicted.

The game is controlled via the keyboard and for the most part this works well, especially with your tools which will automatically change depending on whether you’re digging or chopping down trees. If the game has a fault it’s that it could have done more to provide the gamer with an overall motivation to continue to build and dig.

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Charles Packer