RimWorld First Impressions

10 December, 2018

The rest of the world has already played and finished with RimWorld, which I think has been in Early Access for quite some time, but I just started playing it. I happened to see Sean Sands from Gamers With Jobs playing it on their YouTube channel and thought it looked amazing, so I picked it up. I didn’t even wait for a sale, because I wanted to jump into it while I was interested. I have a habit of losing interest in things within days or weeks.

Also, it’s clearly well worth the full price of $35 and I don’t mind rewarding them for a good product (I actually think it’s a one-man project, which is even more impressive).

It’s a bit like Banished, a game I loved, where your job is to set up a working colony. Base-building is the core mechanic. But there’s also an RPG element in that your colonists have traits and leveling and pseudo-personalities, which adds a lot of variety and entertainment to the experience. Each game is like a story that plays out.

It’s really a fascinating experience. It’s got a lot of depth and complexity and micromanagement like an RTS if you want it, but you can also just sort of sit back and watch your guys go about their business autonomously if you want, which is just as satisfying for me. (Although colonies would probably die out pretty quickly without *some* intervention.) It’s a great palette-cleanser kind of game. I’m pretty burned out on third-person RPGs right now so it’s right up my alley.

It’s also a fun game to watch people play on YouTube or Twitch, because you can see a colony’s story play out without all the fussy fiddly bits of actually clicking on the stuff.

P. S. This is my first post written in the new WordPress 5.0 editor. This might come as a shock, because I’m sure nobody else will have this opinion, but I don’t care for it. The editor is reasonably straightforward, if excessively busy, but it’s harder to get to and edit the meta-data like category, tags, and excerpt.

This page is a static archival copy of what was originally a WordPress post. It was generated from Markdown files with Hugo, a static web site generator. There may be formatting problems that I haven't addressed yet. There may be problems with missing or mangled images that I haven't fixed yet. There may have been comments on the original post, which I have archived, but I haven't quite worked out how to add them to the new site.