RimWorld (2018)

I dove HARD into this over the course of a week, multiple restarts as I learned the mechanics, but I was loving the exploration and how deep the game got.

The generated worlds, characters, and events means every play through is unique and different, and the ability to pick different biomes for drastically different starts gives it a TON of replayability, not to mention different game modes.

My favorite part of the game is the early parts, where you are struggling to survive, every anime kill, mined resource, or newly built building is precious. Even a crazed rat is a big threat in this stage of the game and it is enthralling.

Like many sim games, as your colony grows and adapts, new challenges arise and the scope of what you want to do gets bigger. Exploring for scarce resources, trading, and even thinking about starting a second settlement become a reality. Enemies start attacking in groups. I didn't enjoy this stage of the game as much as the early part, but it was still a blast.

This game is incredibly deep, with characters having stats and traits influencing everything they can do. There is SO much you can do, and a lot of it has hidden mechanics that you need to discover through trial and error, often thru spectacular failures, OR by looking them up online.

The stories of your colony failing can be as much fun as successes. In one of my early attempts, I had what felt like a pretty good colony going, when a cold snap started, and snow started to pour over the map. Its then I discovered that batteries for your power grid need to be covered, otherwise they explode when rained or snowed on, causing massed destruction, fire, and power loss, all in the middle of a storm... hooray, but it was a pretty amazing story.

There is an end game I hear, I haven't managed to get to it. But I still have a blast with the game.

If I have one complaint, it is that there are too many colony ending things that can happen. There are ones you can control, like covering your batteries, and ones you can't like radioactive fallout, which kills all your crops and forces you to relocate or stay inside, or crops becoming diseased which spreads super fast and is a pain to fix. These events can be mitigated with base building, but then usually you leave yourself open to other crisis. Its not a trait that ruined my experience, but it does mean you end up either A pushing through the issues and trying to survive, or just restarting a lot.

Best game ever love committing war crimes daily. Drowning sims in the pool was just a training for this masterpiece :*

You will enjoy it way more if you actually like reading objects history and descriptions and making histories on your head. One has to be a bit dearranged to fully enjoy this game I think, but that is not a bug, it's a feature.

As a roleplayer, something I really, really like about this game is how the story just writes itself with some points of beautiful unintended narrative cohesion.

Two of my colonists, Crystal, the social expert of the colony, and Barret, the medic, had just happily married after quite a long time of lovers. Their colony was not the greatest home ever, falling apart at the seams, always dangerously low in food and wood, but they had each other and they were happy. Even with sort of a tense mood in the colony, with one of them in the middle of a mental break and refusing to get out of her room while everybody else were having fun, it was a nice moment of quiet and calm.

They got to enjoy their honeymoon and then everything went to shit.

A raid attacked the very next morning. Only three people with shotguns. Outnumbered, but uncaring.

The defenses failed. The attackers managed to bypass the barricades and sandbags and hit hard.

Two of the five colonists were gravely hurt, only surviving by Barret stopping fighting and dragging them to bed to tend their wounds. Another, still locked down on her room and not having joined the fight, would later recover and get out just to see the colony having fallen to hell. A guest staying for a few days on the colony was kidnapped by the retreating attackers and later killed.

Crystal died. She managed to take down one of the raiders, fighting among her slowly bleeding friends before getting shot down herself. She died in the spot, without even a chance to being tended and cared like they were. She rests on a beautiful sarcophagus now, built by her grieving husband. With three quarters of the colony too hurt to fight, barely any food, and no medicine left, he may join her soon.

I had no direct input on any of the above, except for drafting and undrafting in battle. Everything was the game building an story via random events, and I love it.