A Dark Room

[Dracos]

http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

In the vein of Candy Box ( http://candies.aniwey.net/ ) A dark room is a fun resource RPG/Adventure game.  The Adventure game is unlocked in the latter 2/3rds of it, so it's not necessarily obvious at the start how things will shape up.

It's got its flaws (Namingly some of the end game math seems poorly calculated), but for a free game to play for 2-6 hours, it's pretty good.

[Dracos]

And now some hints:

Spoiler: ShowHide

It almost always pays off to investigate or be nice. 

Bad things will happen to your traps and villagers.  Nothing to be done, just rebuild/resupply.

You can't actually lose.

When starting the adventure:

Spoiler: ShowHide

You do have to make it back to town or you die.  Don't just wander in a direction or you die and you will lose all your stuff.  Work out from town slowly, since each victory can provide roads that make further travel easier.

Equally: You keep nothing if you die.  So better to throw everything at a dangerous enemy rather than lose.

You eat while walking, whether or not you have damage.  So healing at the end of the fight means you spend food to heal, then spend it again while walking.  Healing while walking is more efficient when you can swing it.

Alien Alloy is precious.  Never risk losing it, and in any B or F where it could appear, don't even go for it if you can't solidly make it back.

Some things are only gettable once or twice ever.  I never found the highest attack gear in all my runs.

You can bring multiple weapons.  This can be very offensively effective, though it will eat a lot of your available space.

Thoughts on end game:

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I kind of found some of the math got a bit squirrely.  Sure, the only encounter once stuff was annoying, but there was too much dependency on wood in the late game, and also many of the trade goods were just impossible to get.

Buying an alien alloy doesn't seem sanely possible, mostly due to the enormous demands for scales that you can never craft or get with your villagers.  Monster drops or random chance only makes the huge request number weird.  Given you need to gather a bunch to beat the game, that seemed like a poor decision.

Certain resources would go through periods of being completely useless (and stocked to huge numbers).  Meat in the early game is one and fur and wood in the late game is another.  You'll get tons of these things but it doesn't do you any good.  There's no way to convert effectively from things you have enormous quantities of into anything that would help you or your village, even just narratively.

A surprising amount of 'chance' type stuff for a game which is otherwise very mechanics driven.  Found that pretty odd.  The difference between someone who drew the 'find this guy' at the right time and someone who didn't can be enormous.

[Anastasia]

Gave this a whirl. It's interesting - not my thing, but interesting.

There's a sharply defined gloom over the game that I find well done. It's delivered by brevity more than anything else, but it works. I liked what little setup there was to things and the descriptions. On the down side, I didn't care much for the actual mechanics. Getting your town going is largely waiting around while bars tick down and resources accumulate. It's impressively tedious! The exploration left me meh, though I didn't go deep into it.

[JonBob]

Beat it. I did get an energy rifle, but never used it much. I explored the whole map but never had some of the encounters (catch the thief!). The ones I did helped a lot (melee damage, precision).  The end game for me was mainly: how far out can I go before I extend myself too far and run out of food/water? Near the end I decided to get 1 more alloy (from the trading post) so I farmed scales in the grasslands and turned all my furs into scales.

[Empyrean]

Beat it. As a personal challenge I decided to see if I could visit every outpost in a single trip. It can be done if you plan your route well and you've got a lot of food/water storage.

Trading to convert resources is stupidly expensive. You can get 20 or so alien alloys just by hitting the various explorable sites on the map, which is more than enough to get you through the last stage of the game. The mysterious wanderer shows up in your camp at random intervals, and you can get one perk from him each time. I'd get the melee boost first; it helps loads. Guns aren't really necessary; their damage output isn't all that great and they're rather heavy, plus with the various perks you can drop most anything in two rounds of combat or less using only melee weapons, if you bring one of each. Bolas are a lifesaver until you're tough enough to not need them.

[Brian]

Well, the map is randomly generated.

Also, the game in general is very RNG heavy.  I never got a mysterious wanderer.