Ahhh, Rimworld. Also known as Ribaorld, or War Crimes Simulator, or That Game With Human Leather Armchairs. It's great. Possibly the most evil and morally bankrupt game imaginable. Almost cartoonishly so. And cartoonish is the right word for it, because when people are asked to envisage a game that is utterly immoral in every way, they go all Jack Thompson and think of murder simulators and classic 2000s edgelording like Postal 2. Hah. Postal 2, Hatred, GTA, Succubus - these are mere play compared to the depths of degradation and depravity and brutality that you can get up to in Rimworld, despite its comfy, cartoon-like, minimalist aesthetic.

The conceit is this. It's the year 5500. Well we think it is, we don't know. Humanity has spread to multiple star systems over several thousand light years but never mastered true faster than light travel. As such, interstellar travel is only possibly via cryosleep or generation ship. Human occupied or terraformed planets over this period have gone through periodic cycles of growth, development, discovery and rediscovery of technologies, flourishing, then nuking themselves back to the Stone Age, followed by being reclaimed by nature, and then rebuilt, usually several times. Some of them escape the cycle and become utopia-like "glitterworlds," ecumenopolis planets where everything is technologically advanced and rainbows and unicorns, and then the singularity happens and they become uninhabited sentient planet-sized computers called archeotechs that are unknowable. Despite this, there is travel between planets and star systems, but no major polities that extend across more than a single or possibly a handful of very close star systems. Alien life does not exist but over the centuries humans have genetically engineered all manner of weird and wonderful things, both in terms of wildlife and subraces of humanoid with strange and unusual characteristics, including colonies of giant insects that hitch rides between planets and stars by getting their eggs onto ships, semi-sentient robots known as mechanoids who are also the mortal enemies of the insectoids and are a sort of machine life, and other things that have gone out of of all control and comprehension and become eldritch horrors. Nanotechnology also exists but how it works is only tangentially understood and manifests as a form of psychic power. So, basically, it's a right old mess of a setting.

You and your friends are on a rimworld. This is a planet at the edge of human occupied space that has been through the cycle of development (usually to industrial era stage) and mass extinction a couple of times by now. You could be a bunch of people who made it to the escape pods on a doomed spaceship and crashed here, a tribe whose village was razed to the ground by mechanoids, or even a bunch of pirates. Your mission is to survive and maybe thrive by any means necessary and find or construct a ship to get off this rock. Unfortunately, there are other people here, and they aren't necessarily friends, and then there's the wildlife, the mechanoids coming back to finish the job off, insects burrowing through your floor to munch on your people and lay eggs, eldritch horrors, still functional cryosleep containers containing still living soldiers from centuries old wars who have gone all Hiroo Onoda, temples guarded by all of the above, and so forth. Oh, and there's always the prospect of your people just losing it and turning on each other. So... yeah. You do this by building out your base on a grid and building walls, floors, objects to go within it, and ensuring a steady output of food, resources, tools, and weaponry, and things to make sure that your peeps are happy and healthy. You can also burrow into mountains and build elaborate underground bases, which are my favourite, and are less resource intensive if you have peeps who are good at digging than building a surface base, but they have the added risk of potentially attracting insectoids who can be very dangerous. You can also send caravans to trade with nearby settlements and faction bases or to attack them, or to investigate leads on quests. The climate can also range from the polar ice sheets to extreme deserts and you can finetune the climate of the planet to alter your preferences at the outset, so if you want a cognate of Arrakis from Dune or Hoth from Star Wars, you can.

Now, you know the bit I mentioned about by any means necessary? I wasn't joking. Here are things you can do in Rimworld, all of which I have done either because I had to for my people to survive or I just fancied twirling the ol' moustache:

  • Capture and brainwash enemy or even friendly peeps into joining you
  • Capture and enslave enemies for use as labour - I have one run where I literally built an ergastula
  • Capture and enslave female peeps as baby factories - yes, you can forcibly extract their ova and IVF them once you've researched cloning vats, then sell the offspring into slavery
  • Extreme cannibalism - human leather armchairs are indeed a thing
  • Create your own religion whose precepts require cannibalism
  • Create your own religion where attacking and enslaving other settlements is obligatory
  • Human sacrifice and gladiator death matches to appease the gods
  • Feeding your enemies to a pack of tame panthers because it's too much effort to bury them and you don't want to waste energy on a crematorium
  • Capture an enemy raider, forcibly replace his heart with a barely functional prosthetic, steal his kidneys, then release him back to his home faction and spin it as an act of mercy
  • Use weapons of mass destruction on grass-skirted, poorly armed tribesmen - and because they are isolationist cannibals who raid everyone, be rewarded for it by all the other factions
  • Kidnap an abhuman pirate and forcibly put him through a DNA extractor to pull out any potentially useful genetic traits he has

Basically, if you can think of something appalling to do in Rimworld, you can do it, and so long as you can manage the consequences of same, the game passes no judgement on you for it.

The other most notable thing about the game is its enormous scope for creativity. Although the ultimate aim is to clear the tech tree, build or obtain access to a starship, and then escape offworld, in reality you are not forced to do this and the game is increasingly intended to be an ongoing thing. The sheer number of construction and customisation options and factors and stuff, all of which interacts together, makes the gameplay almost incredibly baroque, yet because of the 2D grid-based and minimalist aesthetic of it, it doesn't feel baroque. Your peeps manage to look all distinctive and have distinct personalities and around 15 different skills because there's variations of head and body types, tattoos, facial hair, beards, and so forth, and that's before we get into genetic engineering and the abhuman traits they can have. While you only start with a handful of guys, you can gain others by having them join you as a reward, rescuing sick or injured travellers and nursing them back to health, or even capturing and converting attacking enemies. The AI storyteller does tend to make it difficult for you to get more than around 18 people though unless you picked Randy Random, which just causes things to happen by rolling on a random effects table all the time. Your people are also not controlled directly most of the time; you set priorities for the types of work that they can do and then either place blueprints for construction on the map or add recipes and bills to the queues at production and crafting facilities but in emergencies you can order someone to prioritise a particular job. If there's an attack by enemies, wild creatures, or anomalous entities though, you can "draft" them and they can be controlled in a real-time-with-pause manner to go to specific places, fire on specific targets, and so forth. You can also set research priorities and put down recreation facilities because all work and no play makes Midori Contreras (names for your people are randomised and can be quite amusing; there's also developer and backer created people who have the same skills and traits and backstories and are always the same) a dull war criminal. You also have to keep your people sane because despite all the baroque nature of everything, the Rimworld is a dangerous place and life is not easy on it. Overwork, injuries, seeing friends die, nearly being eaten by lions, lack of sleep, having to shiver all night because the generator's packed up and nobody has any spare components, and eating without a table all take a toll on their mental health and if their mood is too low for too long they can lose it. This can be in minor ways such as sulking in their room for a while, objectionable ways such as digging up a dead body and throwing it onto the kitchen table or smashing things up at random, to genuinely awful ways like turning literally feral (to the point at which to get them back you have to have another person with animal handling skills tame them like they're a creature) or picking one of your other people and setting out to murder them (which can be catastrophic if they, or their chosen victim, are your only person with medical skills.) The relationship between people in your base also has to be managed carefully. Some people just don't like each other for whatever reason. Others, however, will fall hopelessly in love and get themselves pregnant repeatedly, while you're struggling to feed everyone already in the base, and locking them away from each other might just make them dangerously angry.

Then, because of the way game mechanics all interlock, a single mishap can result in a whole failure cascade. The aforementioned Midori Contreras might be upset that you won't let her have sexytime with the handsome tribal traveller Blue Dinosaur you just recruited, and might start smashing up her room in frustration. Unfortunately her room contains a main power conduit to the rest of your base, and this causes the cold storage with all your food in to not be cold any more. So while Riesling Bacchus (your main cook) tries to feverishly turn all the gently rotting meat you've stored into pemmican at a huge rate of knots, she gets frustrated with overwork and shouts abuse at Frank Clarke, who is your only doctor. He gets pissed off and punches her in the face and the resulting fight leaves them bleeding everywhere. And this hurts everyone else's mood, being hungry and hurt, and Clarke slowly tries to patch everyone up but one of his cuts gets infected. This means he's laid up trying not to die of sepsis and unable to patch up Blue, Midori, Bacchus, and the rest of the gang when a load of pirates attack. And - HOOONNNKKKK - the game has decided that is now.

To survive, therefore, especially on higher difficulties, requires an awful lot of redundancy. You took prisoners from a raid? They better have worthwhile skills or they're being sold into slavery or sacrificed to your fell gods. Medical skills are important, but arguably the most important skill is constructing and crafting, because having top drawer weaponry really makes all the difference in some of the later game raids, where enemy factions will drop in in drop pods in the middle of your base, set up siege camps with artillery, and even try to tunnel into your base through rocky outcrops. And that's before we get into the serious threats like insectoid infestations (if you've built an underground base) or mechanoid clusters, or some of the nastier anomalous entities like chimerae and metalhorrors (for the latter, basically think Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Rimworld has its base game, and has to date four expansions:

  1. Royalty. Adds the Empire as a faction, who are sort of a feudal future society with Byzantine trappings a bit like in the film Krull, introduces noble titles and psychic powers, and ultratech weapons. Generally pretty good, though you don't have to advance through all the titles and you can turn your people into psykers via other means. Tribal peeps can gain psi-powers from anima trees as well, which can make up for their difficulties at technology and research if you want to do a tribal run.
  2. Ideology. Adds religions and religion-related quests. The best expansion because the things it adds are incredibly compelling and allow you to customise your base and your people in really interesting ways so you can have theme colony. Also contains the biggest moral turpitude. Slavery was added here, as was human sacrifice.
  3. Biotech. Adds children, genetic engineering, and also the ability to study and construct mechanoids of your own, which can be very powerful assets but have the side effect of causing pollution which contaminates land and sickens your people. I never got the mechanitor aspect of it but the children part is excellent. There was a theory that every expansion would be named something beginning with the next letter of RIMWORLD and I suspect this was originally going to be called Motherhood or Maternity but then they added GM and mechanitors.
  4. Anomaly. Possibly my least favourite expansion because if it's activated fully it takes over the game and turns it into more of a horror dungeon crawl than an open ended thing. Adds eldritch abominations and horror entities and also books, both Necronomicon type and mundane books as well. I suspect it was going to be called Weirdness at one point given the above. Yes, this is why the game is sometimes nicknamed Ribaorld.

I don't know what the next expansion will be. I'm hoping for Oceanography myself. Water! Fishing! The ability to build boats and go up and down rivers or even build bases out at sea on artificial islands! That would be cool. It could tie in with Anomaly as well by having Cthulhu or suchlike, and Biotech by having the ability to have aquatic people with gills and fins as well.

I recommend you give it a go. It isn't too graphically intense so it can run on even old PCs. It's a brilliant game. It also makes you wonder just how moral you really are and in a way asks what you would do to survive. Or just allows you to be moustache-twirlingly evil for its own sake.

(IN24/29)