RIMWORLD - A NEW GAMING ADDICTION

In a previous post I mentioned how a new Mac had finally allowed me to return to that perennial method of modern time-wasting: computer gaming. 

The gateway drug was Civilization VI, then back into the world of ultra-complex historical map games in the form of the magnificent Crusader Kings 3.

Well, I’m still going strong on the latter, totally obsessed, with 250 hours of game play logged on Steam already. I am currently the great grandson of Genghis Khan, finally powerful enough to be able to cast a covetous eye on the easternmost parts of Europe….

However, like all junkies, having got back on the horse, I was keen to expand my palette (to mangle some metaphors). 

I heard that Paradox, the company behind Crusader Kings 3, were going to release a new version of their flagship historical behemoth Europe Universalis - yippee! I’d previously played the third iteration of this title back in the day, and was really looking forward to getting back into a new version. Sadly, the company suddenly announced that, unlike all of their previous releases, EU5 was going to be Windows only. Damn and blast!

Well, I still needed a second game to be obsessed about, useful for when the situation is so bad in Crusader Kings 3 that I could gain temporary relief by staring a different screen full of pixels. You know, like when your family’s succession has gone tits up, a three year old is the new king, every vassal and their grandmother have risen up in revolt, the Bloody Flux is spreading like wildfire, the Pope has excommunicated you and the Holy Roman Empire is sending an army of 175,000 to ‘restore order.’

Now, I naturally gravitate towards extremes - be it in literature, music, or anything else, so I had a quick look around to find the gaming equivalent of Finnegans Wake or Napalm Death’s second album. 

Paradox titles like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings are already high up in the lists of ‘most complex games ever,’ but the top spot is always occupied by Dwarf Fortress, the nerdiest of the nerdiest, a game that until a couple of years ago was played on an interface made up only of ASCII characters, and despite having been in development by a pair of über-nerd brothers for decades, still hadn’t reached version 1.0.

Dwarf Fortress doesn’t run on Mac, which is probably just as well, but I noticed another title high up in the lists that was influenced by the aforementioned game of little peoples’ strongholds: Rimworld!

Rimworld. Yes, a game with an amusing title that makes immature persons susceptible to innuendo snigger every time they see it.

Rimworld is a colony / survival / story generating game. Much like Crusader Kings 3, it’s this role-playing aspect coupled with a wide-open anything could happen feeling that makes it so appealing. With each game being different, replay value is huge - I’ve played it for 25 hours in total so far, and it’s still my first attempt - and my colony is only two months old.

Also like Crusader Kings, there isn’t really a specified way to ‘win’ - it’s the story that’s important. 

So what’s it all about? Basically, a group of random colonists (three by default), land on a planet after their ship crashes. Your job is to guide them in surviving the nasty shit the game is going to throw at them sooner or later. Like other games, you have to build shelter, collect resources, research things and so on, but in Rimworld the psychology and character of your colonists is also very important. Something as trivial as not having a proper table to eat at can trigger a meltdown. And one meltdown can lead to a chain events that could destroy the whole colony…

All the while your little colonists are trying to build a decent shelter against the seasons, grow crops, hunt or tame animals, unpleasant random events will beset them. In my game, two colonists got into a fight leaving one bleeding and bruised. A few hours later, one of them got severe food poisoning due to an unclean kitchen. A few hours after that, with no intermission in which to recuperate, a hostile raider from another colony attacked. The poor sick colonists had to man the barricades, eventually killing the intruder but not before two had sustained further wounds. 

It’s hard not to get attached to your little pixelated participants after you’ve been through so much together…but disaster is always looming. It’s very telling that, although technically it’s possible for your guys to get off the planet after repairing / building a space ship, people with thousands of hours in the game report having only done it a handful of times, if ever.

And yet, the minimal top-town graphics and chill soundtrack somehow make this game very pleasant to play, despite the horrors that abound (slavery, cannibalism and pestilence can all rear their ugly heads, along with the run of the mill stuff like mental breakdowns and random violence). Not to mention the blossoming complexity as your original colonists expand into a much larger group, requiring much more micromanagement.

In short, it’s a welcome addition to my gaming arsenal, and while it’s not quite in the Dwarf Fortress league of nerdiness, it’s close…

I’m fully intending to play Rimworld the same way I play Crusader Kings 3 - not bothering to properly learn the underlying mechanisms the nerds are so enamoured with, and just stumble my way through in a glorious cloud of unknowing, adding to the realism by eschewing omniscience. After all, as Dwarf Fortress players like to quip, “losing is fun.”