author: Bart Swiatek
RimWorld. Long single-player games to keep you in quarantine
Table of Contents
- Reason to play: each play through tells a surprising new story
- Completionist hour count: 298
- Dollars to hour ratio: $0.11
The second strategy game we propose is RimWorld, a fine sci-fi game created by Ludeon Studios, in which you have to manage an extraterrestrial colony founded by crash survivors. In this title, our main adversaries are not violent aliens or ancient sinister civilizations – we are primarily confronted with our own limitations and natural hazards.
Unlike many other strategies, the game emphasizes the micro scale instead of the macro scale. Our settlers all have different (randomly generated) background stories, expectations, and skills – and we have to make sure we put their talents and unique skills to good use, and provide them with all they need. Wasting their potential can be very unpleasant. Same as neglecting them. Besides, everything in this game can turn against us.
But managing a relatively small community does not mean the game is less complex – on the contrary. When playing RimWorld, you have to pay attention to a number of things and details that are completely irrelevant in other productions, such as burying the dead (otherwise the bodies quickly start to negatively affect the morale), or the general level of cleanliness of our base. The AI narrators are also an interesting mechanic – we can choose a character that tells the story of our colony. In reality, we decide between different scripts that select random events for the player.
