by CJ Quines • on
No one warned me about RimWorld
and i have now sunk 87 hours
Factorio is one of those games people warned me about. You read the reviews and the top ones are all about how addicting it is. I have twenty Steam friends who own the game, and I remember three instances where different people told me that, once I started playing Factorio, I would disappear and wash up after a month with two hundred hours in the game.
So that’s one of the reasons I haven’t played Factorio. I have a day job, after all. It also helps that the game’s never been on sale. My usual process for buying a game is wishlisting it, waiting for at least a month, and then if I still want it after a month, I’ll get it on sale. I’ve also been told similar things about Dwarf Fortress, and well, I look at the gameplay screenshots for the two of them and can see why people say the same things.
Around a month ago, Silksong came out. I spent fifty hours over ten days to 100% it, and afterward, I was still in a gaming phase. I set my sights on Hades II, but I had to sense to exercise some caution. I had eighty hours on Hades, and I knew Hades II had the same latent dangers. Plus, I had an excuse to delay playing it: my friends weren’t talking about it as much as they did Silksong, so I could wait until it went on sale.
Instead, I knocked down a few other games from my library and wishlist. I played thirteen hours of Ori, six hours of Consume Me, and twenty hours of Date Everything, all fantastic games. I finished playing each one and I still wanted more. So I took the next game on my list that seemed interesting, RimWorld.
A month later, I have 87 hours in RimWorld, and I still want to play more.
RimWorld is a base-building colony simulator. You start with a few people and guide them to survive in a dangerous world, building structures, fighting raids, growing crops and raising animals, researching and travelling.
The game bills itself as a “story generator”, which I ignored at first. But the colonists have different backstories, traits, and skills. They develop relationships with each other, have specific needs and passions, grow old, get sick, break up, break down, and die. Your former princess won’t do menial labor, but they’ll have good social skills for trading. Your former mercernary is a great shot, but a bad researcher. But sometimes you force people to do the things they don’t want to do anyway, to survive.
You’d think that a colonist dying would be a minor mishap, not a devastating tragedy. Everyone’s replaceable to an extent. But there’s a small emotional sting when it happens, supported by the gameplay consequences of everyone in the colony being a little sadder. You give dead colonists proper burials to avoid further mood consequences for your pawns… but something about the game forcing you to bury them properly, adding a small ceremony to the whole thing, gives a sense of closure too.
It’s also kinda funny how strange optimal gameplay looks like sometimes. While harvesting the organs of your prisoners will make your colonists less happy, it earns you more money than selling them outright. Further, mood is a linearly additive thing, and you can offset large amounts of mental anguish with careful applications of drug usage. If someone does get addicted, you can wait for the addiction to clear out, and perhaps remove both their legs so the withdrawal symptoms don’t drive them to relapse. Rational mechanics.
RimWorld has an “ending” of launching a ship, but it’s as much of an ending as killing the Ender Dragon in Minecraft. The game is open-ended enough that pursuing the ending is something that many players won’t even do go for, a lot of the time. Much of the joy I get from playing RimWorld comes from growing a colony and keeping it alive.
While we’re doing Minecraft comparisons, I’d be remiss to not mention the sheer activity of RimWorld’s modding community. There’s QoL mods ranging from new UIs to subtle changes in work logic. Some of the most subscribed content mods do things like add furniture, add a whole hospitality mechanic, add a hygiene need, or add more random events.
Anyway, hopefully that’s a pitch that’ll either scare you away from the game or get you to play it so we can both complain about how good it is together. I’m gonna go back to playing RimWorld.