Stop the Darkness is a deceptively simple strategy game made by Florian van Strien where players are required to stop the Darkness invading the world before everything is wiped out by it. To accomplish this task the player will need to harvest increasingly rare resources and build advanced cities and structures that can keep the Darkness at bay long enough for them to figure out how to stop it for good.
This won't be an easy task as players are given very little information to go on at the start and must figure out how to best utilize what they have at their disposal to survive and upgrade the map in way that lets them defeat the Darkness before it spreads too far. Oh, and the whole thing takes place in real time to boot... meaning you're on the clock from the moment you press start. The only question that remains is... can you stop the Darkness in time?
The game can be played on several different gaming sites such as Kongregate here
.
Stop the Darkness provides examples of:
- Dark Is Evil: The Darkness is an invading force that slowly covers the land and renders anything in its path lost and inaccessible until it is either repelled or defeated. If it manages to cover the whole map its game over.
- Fungus Humongous: The Mushroom Forest and Mushroom City structures are big enough to be comparable to trees, lighthouses and skyscrapers.
- Lighthouse Point: The Lighthouse is one of the very first advanced buildings a player can make and encourages them to quickly start developing more technology units as soon as possible due to its powerful effect of slowing the spread of the darkness. The Lighthouse also serves as the icon for the medium badge on Kongregate.
- Light Is Good: The only things that can affect or hinder the Darkness in any way are advanced technology, powerful magic and light-based structures such as the Tower of Light.
- Magitek: A few of the higher tier structures such as the Great City of Tech and Magic provide a large boost to both Magic and Tech resource generation.
- Mushroom House: The Mushroom City building type is a whole bunch of these made from an extension of the Mushroom Forest biome.
- Place of Power: Each map starts with a Stone Circle near the center that can be upgraded to fight against the Darkness by investing large amounts of Wood, Stone and Magic. It's pretty resource intensive to fully upgrade but its also one of the few structures that doesn't require any Tech to finish.
- Power Nullifier: Certain structures such as the Tower of Light will temporarily push back the Darkness and return some of the buildings that have fallen under its control to the player. A few of the higher tier structures such as the Stone Circle can also do this when upgraded to a certain level.
- Resources Management Gameplay: There are 4 different types of resources available in the game including Wood (common), Stone (uncommon), Magic (rare) and Tech (very rare). As the Darkness spreads it quickly covers up anything in its path, rendering it unavailable until the Darkness is pushed back or destroyed. As a result players should be wary of maps that have most of their rarer squares near the outer edge as once the player loses access to too many resources their defeat becomes unavoidable.
- Science Fantasy: The game combines classic fantasy tropes such as magical villages and potion factories with advanced modern technology such as scientific research centers and electronic lighthouses.
- Technicolor Magic: The Magic resource and most of the structures that utilize it are colored purple or feature purple somewhere in their design.
- Treetop Town: The Treetop Village is a rare structure that provides a good supply of both wood and magic.
