The default game mode has three colonists crash-land on a planet, attempt to survive, and eventually build a new craft and escape. RimWorld, as you may be able to tell, is a space Western survival strategy game. What’s special about RimWorld is that all of these things are transparent game mechanics, interacting with one another, building strategic Jenga tower that has piece after piece added and taken out. The fourth holed up in the freezer and refused to leave, the infected colonists and the prisoner died, and with it, my glorious tropical colony of Stonkley, destroyed by infection, fever, and madness. Two more developed infections, and the pain and hatred of their vomit, dirt, and blood-spattered barracks sent them into a daze. He went berserk on arrival, attacked, and was beaten unconscious. And so they writhed and bled in my tiny barracks, loathing one another. They had to leave the freezer to collapse in their beds to have their wounds tended. But they had to go outside to take care of the prisoner. Because of the heat wave, my colonists hated everything. It wasn’t a tough battle - my colonists took a few gunshots, but captured a pirate and quickly shoved him into a makeshift prison, a little walk away from the base.

Instead of going outside to work, my four colonists huddled in the freezer, eating my stored rations for the days it was inhuman outside. Then the “Heat Wave” message popped up and temperatures soared to 50º Celsius. The next stage was to create an efficient base: digging out the tunnels in the local mountain to build safe apartments and a hospital, and then get to clothing and weapons and research and art. I’d set up a good base: a barracks, a couple of stockpiles, a kitchen, crops, some solar panels, and a walk-in freezer.

One of my most promising RimWorld colonies, Stonkley, was destroyed by a single heat wave. Ludeon Studios’ RimWorld, recently released on Steam Early Access, does this magnificently, setting new standards for survival strategy games. The idea of a weak person or group (controlled by a player), dropped into unfamiliar territory, learning the land, surviving it, and eventually thriving upon what was once so dangerous, crosses most genres.ĭespite that, games haven’t often succeeded at that core experience - of creating and managing a thriving colony. Not the colonial in the historical sense, of plague and destruction and seizure, but the ideal of the colonial.

Rimworld freezer