Rimworld (2018) by Ludeon Studios

I have very little experience with basebuilding/colony sim-type games. The closest thing I've played to this is probably the extraordinarily popular Stardew Valley, which I loved, but which features some big differences from Rimworld.

One of the things I loved about Stardew was the added focus on the characters and their interactions, versus simply the cold, calculating efficiency of building a "base" (a farm in Stardew, of course, and a colony in Rimworld). The characters injected a welcome human aspect to the game, and Rimworld takes this approach one step further—and that's what makes it great, and what makes it stand out.

Rimworld eschews a more developer-handcrafted approach for a random, emergent system which guides its characters. The interactions between colonists and the game's encounters aren't scripted, but rather randomly generated. And while this typically feels far more artificial and less compelling in most games, it somehow works beautifully in Rimworld and really gives your colony the feel of an actual social ecosystem, rather than a bunch of video game systems mechanically and robotically at work. This is due to how deep and interweaved the systems of backstory, traits, and skills are, and how varied the social interactions between colonists can get.

I don't think I've ever played a game which facilitated my own 'head-canon' so strongly as Rimworld. This game's pseudo-random characters feel anything but random. For example, my prison Warden recruited a young native woman who was passing by, eventually fell in love with her, and married her. She's now one of my best shocktroopers, and as a great shooter, has an ongoing rivalry with my melee berserker, Linda, who wears heavy armor and beats people with a mace.

Doc Red doesn't care much for clothes, aside from his trusty helmet.

Then there's my colony's surgeon and doctor, Red; a medic with superior skills in medical and plants, but who is also a nudist, and is very unhappy unless he's treating his patients and tending his crops completely naked save for a steel helmet, in case of bandit raids (he switches to a winter hat when it's cold, but still prefers to be otherwise naked—even at temperatures of -5 celsius).

Or how about my father-and-son duo, Kaito and Dunc. They're two of my best colonists; they have some of the highest skills and are the most reliable workers. But despite being father and son, they have a pretty strong rivalry. They got into a fight in the workshop once, during which time Dunc bit off his father's ring finger. This was such an event in the colony that a separate colonist later built a wooden dresser with beautiful artwork depicting this fight and the climactic finger-biting.

The infamous Father vs. Son fight was a noteworthy occurrence in the colony.

Or, the colony Labrador retriever, Saffron, whom I mistakenly walled off from her kibble supply, which meant that she was forced to eat drugs to survive. Eventually, she developed an addiction, and then got pregnant with puppies. So now we have a drug-addicted, pregnant dog roaming the premises, constantly high and vegging out in the middle of the hayfields we grow for the horses.

The random events, which are variable in how frequently they occur, can be challenging and sometimes impossible. They add another layer to the lived-in feel of the world. I captured a promising native woman with a great skillset and successfully recruited her, only to have her brother and his friends come and attempt to raid me later on as retaliation. The fact that they were related, and that I was given time to get to know the woman before her brother appeared, made this such a more compelling episode than if I had simply been randomly raided by warlike natives.

These kinds of emergent stories are what make Rimworld so special. They somehow feel real and handcrafted despite their randomness, which is a really incredible accomplishment. You get a different story with each colony, and the options allow you to craft them to be as chill or as brutal as you like via the bevy of difficulty settings provided. You can turn off nearly all the challenge and just relax and build a nice colony, or you can crank them up and wallow in misery as your colonists experience firsthand the futility and hopelessness of building a colony on a rimworld full of deadly dangers such as death robots, cannibalistic raiders, and monstrous insects eager to consume their flesh.

And, of course, it goes without saying that the systems at work with the basebuilding are exceptional; the tech tree is very in-depth, the economy guiding your progress is stout and gives you a sense of 'earning it', and the supplies you must keep stocked are extensive enough to be challenging but not so overwrought as to be overwhelming. The caravan system, which I didn't even dig into until after 50 hours of playing time, also adds a mid-game system which is surprisingly deep and well-crafted itself. The Priorities system is incredibly addictive, and probably where I spend most of my actual gameplay time; there's something so compelling about endlessly tweaking my colonists' activities to try and gain the most efficiency possible.

If I did have a knock against this game, it's perhaps that it's got a steep learning curve. If you've played a game like this before, you're probably already halfway to learning its systems. I, however, had not, so I had to grind out the first 8 hours or so before I had a grasp of what I was doing, and I was often frustrated as I learned how things work by making drastic mistakes. My first colony starved to death due to my inexperience.

So, is it worth a purchase? Well, Rimworld is notorious for never going on sale, but that's not a huge deal in my opinion because it's such a compelling, deep, satisfying experience that it's worth the purchase at full price in my opinion. If you feel overwhelmed at the beginning, just push through. Soon it'll start clicking for you.

Or, you know, don't. And stay far away from this damned game. Because it's unbelievably addictive... Seriously. It's swallowing my life. Some people have heroin... I have Rimworld.

⭐⭐⭐⭐