The Story Simulator Game: RimWorld Review

Have you ever had the urge to commit several unforgivable war crimes of significant magnitude? Did you ever think that there's too many restrictions in sim based games that claim that they truly let the players do everything they want? Do you want more personal stories of your own creation, but don't have the creativity to do so? Then RimWorld might just be the game for you.

The game is described on the steam page as a "sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Firefly and Dune." How I would describe it however, is by saying the game is a Story simulator.

STORY:

RimWorld is a colony sim management game at its core. You select a scenario, select your settings and then get thrown into the game proper. The default story, that every playthrough more or less follows, is one where you follow a stranded set of colonists that crashed with their space ship into the planet of RimWorld. You're alone in the wilderness, surrounded by nature and the dangers that come with it, and you only have one goal in mind: SURVIVE!

There isn't a traditional narrative structure in RimWorld, as it's more of a "make your own story with what you're given" by the game, but, that being said, there are a few rules added to give it a bit more structure. 

When you start the game, you first get to select your story teller AI. The AI's job is to randomize all the events and characters that you will both start with, and interact with during your playthrough. 

For example, it could give you a character that happens to have had a broken home as a child, which in turn made him into drug addict when he grew up... Such a story is actually pretty common, as most people that end up at the Rim do not have the most positive backstories, but it is just one of many possibilities. This system works kind of like a Dungeon Master for table top RPGs, and makes every playthrough unique.

As for the different AI story tellers: 

First you have Cassandra Classic, she will throw dangerous events at you in regular intervals, but will give you enough breathing room to prepare yourself for the next encounter. 

The second story teller is Phoebe Chillax. She will give you a lot of time before getting hit by a dangerous situation, so if you're more down for a chiller base building experience, she is the AI for you. 

Lastly you have Randy Random, and his rules are that ARE NO RULES! He is truly as random as his name suggests, and he doesn't care at all if you barely survived the last encounter. He can, and usually will, throw another one at you right away! If you like pure chaos and unpredictability, then he is the guy for you.

Technically there is an ending (a few of them if you buy the DLC expansions), but the most common one is to either find, or build an spaceship to leave the Rim planet. What you had to sacrifice to get there however, is up to you and your colonists decisions.

GAMEPLAY:

After selecting your Story Teller, you get to choose a scenario for your colonist, and this will change how you start your life in the Rim. For the sake of this review, I will only talk about the default scenario where three colonists crash land on the world together. . . But on a quick side note one, of the scenarios you can select is one where you start of fully naked and alone Tarzan style! (I just thought it was too funny to not mention.)

Anyway, once a scenario has been selected, you get to generate your own version of the planet you will attempt to survive on. With different factions, nature and dangers, the silver lining is that you at least get to choose where on the planet you will start. Of course depending heavily on the nature of the area you choose, you will either have an easier time or a fairly hard time surviving, but it is completely your choice. Sure, you can start at basically this planets North pole with purely ice and polar bears surrounding you if you want to. . . . I wouldn't recommend it.

Last but not least, you also get to select your colonist(s), but even here the game will randomize their traits, stats and even age. All of these stats are either used for combat, or for maintaining the colony in different various ways, but thankfully most are self explanatory, and the game does a good job explaining what each stat actually means and does.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed? Yeah, that's also how I felt when I started the game. Thankfully the game does have a tutorial mode that quick starts a playthrough, and then teaches you step by step how to maintain your colony and survive, and you can always re-read the info at any point in time; in case you forget anything.

However, there is too much to fully go over, as RimWorld is very open when it comes to how you want to survive, what you want to do, or even with what kind of story you want to experience. You could survive by farming for food (which is what most players do), or you could decide that your colony is a bunch cannibalistic murderers that will kill anyone they see, and then butcher them into yummy meat. That being said, I'll try to summarize it a bit.

Your main goal at the start is: Build a living space for your colonist, find or make a food source, mine or gather materials so you can make your living space better (or to make crafting benches to gear up your colonists), gear yourself up for attacks, and lastly, keep your colonist happy. 

Your colonists have a mood meter that you will have to constantly keep tabs on, and which gets affected by several different factors. Most notably the meter is controlled by the living space quality, aesthetics, and if they ate raw food. A colonist's traits also can affect their mood, and that too is something that needs to be managed at all times. The reason you want to keep them relatively happy, is because the lower their mood is, the higher the chance it is for them to have a mental break down, which will make you loose control over them. 

You wouldn't want to allow poor Bob, who happens to be a psychopath, to go on a murderous anger fueled rampage in your colony now would ya?

This is the basic start of your colony, but whatever happens afterwards is fully up to you, the player.

RimWorld doesn't stop you from doing anything that can be a bit . . . Lets call it. . . Ethically questionable towards human life, if that is the route you want to go with; however, the story teller is going to react to your choices with different consequences. If you angered your neighbor by throwing all of your toxic waste onto their lawn, then you can betcha that they will either raid you, or send even more toxic waste onto your lawn instead!

This is what makes this game so dang addictive and fun. 

I haven't played, or really seen, another colony sim management game that allows me to have this much control over the how and why when it comes to decision making. You can really do almost anything that comes to mind, but again the catch is that the game will react to your actions both positively and negatively.(It all depends on what choices you made in the different scenarios the Story Teller generated for you.)

It becomes a very charming "create your own storybook" type of experience, and you'll get fairly attached to your colonist depending on what happens to them throughout the playthrough. You don't fully control them outside combat, but instead, you give them orders, or set presets for them, and assign schedules. After, they do mostly follow these orders, unless you neglect your own job and they are have a mental break down. 

 

However, as I just mentioned, there is combat in the game, and that is because the Rim is filled with a lot of dangers of all kind. Be it raiders, bugs, ancient machines, or even feral squirrels, they all want to destroy your colony!

 

Whenever a dangerous situation happens you can manually draft your colonist to gain direct control over them, and when they are drafted, they can only do combat related tasks (be it fighting, carrying or using med packs to heal or to eat a meal, etc). 

 

During combat you do have to take into account how good your colonist are with either the shooting or melee skill. Typically you will want to put melee fighters in the front line, while placing the shooters behind them or behind cover. You do not "have" to, but it is the "smart" thing to do. On top of this, you also have to keep in mind that, depending how good they are at shooting (or rather how BAD they are at it), they could hit your melee colonist at the front (there are ways to mitigate this by having a good old shield belt and good positioning!)

 

It becomes a rather addicting and fun real time strategy game when you have to think on your feet for each encounter, and thankfully the game does let you pause whenever you want. So you can survey the battle field, and plan your next step carefully if you need to. Though, if you were smart during the building of your base, you could have made a proper "kill room" or combine it with traps so that you don't have to fight the full force of the raiders attacking you. You can take down quite a few of them purely with traps as well, with the remaining ones dragging their bleeding legs towards you ready to be finished off.

 

This combat style further enforces how RimWorld is all about figuring out how to tackle each problem your own way, and how to literally build for the future to ensure your colony survives. No playthrough will be the same as last, and anything can happen (especially if you choose Randy Random as your Story Teller)!

PROS AND CONS:

To reiterate, the game is really addictive and fun, and you can very easily lose countless hours of your life to it. You're allowed to tailor the difficulty to your own liking, so you can choose between a relaxing colony sim building management game, with some minor fighting every now and then (recommended for beginners), or you can choose to increase it to max and have to fight what is essentially a world war.

If I had to give some things to consider when it comes to cons, is it that the game is overwhelming even with its pretty nice tutorial. It will take you a few failed colonies to start to grasp how to survive, and you may want to look into beginner guides written by the community before you start. The other con would be that the game rarely goes on a big sale, at most -20%, which means if you want the full experience RimWorld today, it's going to cost you as much as modern day Triple A release. It is worth it however.

For this review I only focused on the base game and one expansion, and thankfully you don't have to buy all of it in one go. As for what the expansions really do, well, they expand on the base game! Haha.

 

If you had to only choose one DLC however, I would recommend Biotech, as it adds the most to the base game in my humble opinion. After that I would go with Ideology and then Royalty. There is also Anomaly, which is more of a single campaign on its own, and a different kind of experience. I would only recommend it if you really like what you see in its trailer. The game is also currently available on Playstation 4 and Xbox One but I can't verify what kind of state they are in since I only played the PC original release.

 

I have to take a moment to talk about the games soundtrack, it is really good, chillingly so I would say. It blends guitar with space to create a space western themed soundtrack that is both calming and yet keeps you on your edge. It tells its own story alongside what happens in the game, and effectively conveys how even if you're in a dire situation between life and death there is still beauty in the Rim, and hope to survive. Honestly look it up and take a listen its a good time (personal recommendation is the song named Alpaca).

One last major thing: RimWorld has one of the most passionate modding communities in gaming, rivaling the likes of Terraria and Minecraft. I could spend hours talking about all the different mods that exists for it, but I'll just say this; the developers support the modders even allowing some of them to officially get paid through Patreon. One of the more noteable mod series is named "Vanilla expanded" which adds a TON of new ways to experience the game, and even more story tellers with their own quirks! (For the review I didn't play with any mods, but definitely gonna do it in the future! Also note that mods are only available on PC version of the game).

SUMMARY:

If it didn't become clear enough, I really love RimWorld. It's a game I waited too long to play because of the price tag, and I am not usually that into colony management games in general. However, a friend heavily recommended the game for me, and now I am stuck!  

 

(Fair warning this game is addicting once you start it!)

There aren't that many games that I can call "forever" games, or games I will come back to constantly like Terraria, but RimWorld, if anything, has enough content to last you for a long while depending on the kind of gamer you are. I strongly recommend you give it a chance if you can!