A game comes around every now and then that sits you down and gently breaks it to you with a smooth mellow voice that it will be taking up your every waking minute for the next two weeks. At first you disagree and may even fight back with exclamations of needing to do this or that life chore but eventually you succumb just as the game knew you would. The game then gives you a cup of tea and pats your head.
That game for me this month is RimWorld.
RimWorld is a deep, addictive and always surprising strategy game appearing in 2018 for PC, now ported to consoles by Double Eleven.
Your colonists are not professional settlers – they’re crash-landed survivors from a passenger liner destroyed in orbit. You can end up with a nobleman, an accountant, and a housewife. You’ll acquire more colonists by capturing them in combat and turning them to your side. So your colony will always be a motley crew.
If you're looking for a game that breaks expectations in terms of depth and discovery, RimWorld Console Edition will sate that storytelling hunger.
I went ahead and got this game, and three hours in and there’s nothing happening. It’s just the same three starting characters mining and trying to plant rice before it eventually gets blight and I have to cut it all down. I’m clearly missing something. And research takes forever. Three hours of one colonist dedicated solely to research and it’s maybe 13% done
