Rimworld

Rimworld is a special game. The creator doesn’t even call it a game, he calls it a “Story Generator”.

What is Rimworld about?

In Rimworld you manage your colonists, and these colonists are unique, they have different strengths, backgrounds, traits and more. This will mean that some of your colonists will focus on different things such as cooking, construction, farming, combat or more. But that is not all, some might prefer staying indoors, eating other humans, or are unable to do dumb labor.

Goal of the game is to leave the planet. This can be done by doing research, gathering resources, and improving your colony. Reaching the ending takes a lot of time. Each DLC of Rimworld also adds a new ending, but more on that later.

Wild stories & funny tragedies

The fun of Rimworld comes the various possible events that happen. Colonists might start social fights, go on a food binge, or set your base on fire. Such a fire might damage your freezer, ruining your food stockpile, forcing you to deal with hunger in a cold winter. In fights they might lose an arm, develop a severe infection, or die.

You try your best to make your colonists happy, but they don’t always listen, and unfortunate events can have tragic consequences.

My experience

I originally dismissed Rimworld. I tried it once, and stopped playing after a few minutes. Then I tried again, and stopped quite quick.

But after reading Tynan Sylvester’s book on game design, the creator of Rimworld, I found new motivation to try once more. Maybe it were the better tutorials that had been added by then, or my new mindset, but this time I found the game much more enjoyable. I found it helpful to not try to understand everything, to not go too deep into optimisation, and to just enjoy tragedies.

Problems

Although Rimworld is fun, it is not without its problems.

It’s hard to get into. The game is complex with many complex systems, it takes time to understand what really matters. Many aspects of this game also don’t help in understanding it, the UI could be much better, e.g. which crops you are supposed to grow for food. You are overloaded for options and numbers, when in reality you have to choose between three that only differ in yield and growth length.

It’s not visually appealing. The simple and non detailed art style is a great decision, since this allows the creation of the complex systems quickly. Details of interactions and events are left to the players imagination, which is a good thing. By sticking to a simple art style and communicating more detailed states and events through interfaces the gameplay is improved.
But nonetheless, visually the game doesn’t look amazing, and that has nothing to do with the smart decision for a simple art style.

It gets repetitive. It will take some time to get there, but I found after enough time the structure of building your base doesn’t change much, and the usual interruptions of different events don’t stay interesting. It’s also the fact that you will manage the same resources, and letting your colonists do research for progress is always the same.

Amazing mods & DLCs

A large upside of Rimworld is its ecosystem of amazing mods. There are many mods that allow you to tailor your Rimworld experience to your liking.

Rimworld has been out for some time now, but it keeps itself fresh with its DLCs. These DLCs are a fair way to finance further development and add new elements to the game.

Conclusion

Rimworld is a overall well-designed game. It appeals to players looking to manage a colony of stupid colonists that are truly imperfect, but whos imperfections create fun generative storylines.

Similar games to Rimworld are Songs of Styx or Dwarf Fortress.

But sometimes I also like base-building but having full control, such as games like Factorio or Anno 1800.