Hello again, prisoners of the Dark Place!

It's finally out, after an extra five years! I'm thrilled to call Welcome To The Dark Place done, at long last. This game has been wandering in a no-man's-land for almost a decade; development started around 2017 as my first game outside Roblox. Then it was scrapped and restarted in 2019, and that version is the one I've been working on until today. The project became a Ship of Theseus as I continually learned from it and outgrew it, and now it's a collaboration between myself and many different, less-mature versions of myself. I've yearned to move on and leave them behind. Yet I did not want to throw it out and let it go to waste, so I've finally pushed this project through the finish line. I've had to accept that it will never be complete, and it will never be perfect.

This game is a bit of a warning of what can happen when you do not place limitations on yourself creatively--although that was the whole point. I wanted to take advantage of the text-based genre to make a game unlike any other. And it has allowed me to try out bizarre ideas which I would never give a second thought otherwise. But it has also become such an unwieldy, tangled maze; working on it for long periods of time becomes disorienting and disheartening, as if falling into a coma, wondering if there's even a point.

However, throughout the world of the Dark Place there are pearls of honesty--moments of sharp, lucidity among the dream-like madness. And the Dark Place has been the spawning ground for most of my other finished ideas, such as The Upturned. So it deserved a proper send-off of its own.

I will be making improvements and bug fixes over the next week. Most improvements will be to make the game easier to beat and just a tiny bit more forgiving of mistakes, which is an area where I think it falls short right now. (If you are trying to complete it, I would not blame you for resorting to a guide or collaborating with friends.)

Thanks for playing, and WELCOME!