Christens Fair Shake

Re-Playability	5/5
Plot Design	5/5
World Design	5/5
Character Design	N/A
Graphic Design	4/5
Audio Design	5/5
Accessibility	4/5
Platform Compatibility	5/5
Developer Support	5/5
Community Vibe	5/5
Innovation in Genre	4/5

Rimworld serves as a microscopic lens on surviving in a world bent on destroying itself. Players can opt for a standard start or one of the many alternative starts with full difficulty and world customization prior to embarking onto the game map. Standard Rimworld game play is a vicious cycle of growth and survival governed by a dynamic AI that responds to the players progress and current condition, always supplying an ample challenge, even for veteran players. With inspiration drawing from the likes of Dwarf Fortress and Firefly, Rimworld provides thousands of hours of harsh, gritty entertainment and is a gem within its genre.

The story of Rimworld is told through one of the various AI Storytellers that are chosen as part of creating a new game. Currently, base Rimworld contains three Storytellers: Cassandra Classic, Phoebe Chillax, and Randy Random. In brief: Cassandra is the typical Rimworld experience; Phoebe yields more time between raids and major events, but they hit harder when they occur; and Randy is effectively just a random number generator that pulls events from the global event pool at random. The game features various victory conditions, but similar to Dwarf Fortress, often players just choose to set their own goals. Players must develop their colony from essentially nothing to a thriving metropolis while fending off raids from enemy factions, trading with neutral and allied factions, dealing with natural events such as cold snaps, heat waves, and radiation waves, as well as handling a plethora of dynamically generated quests – all introduced by the Storyteller.

Characters in Rimworld are often referred to affectionately as “Pawns”. Players embark with anywhere from one to five pawns depending on what they select in the new game customizer. Players are given the choice of selecting from a set of randomly generated Pawns each with their own traits, specialties, flaws, health, and relationships, all of which play into the overall story as it unfolds. Additionally, players may select any individual Pawn and randomize just their traits employing additional randomization filters should they wish to have Pawns with more specific builds. No single Pawn is definitive to the story and they should all be treated as expendable. It is their collective effort and interactions with each other and the world that defines the plot as it is told.

Visually, Rimworld has a flat, matte-style color palette for background elements and in-game objects. To stand out against the game map, sharp colors are generally reserved for events such as lightning strikes, fire, gunshots, etc… This can lead to some muddling of colors and undesired blending that can make important details such as Pawn paths and mining outcrops difficult to see. Building construction features a planning mode that allows the player to place planning squares on the world grid and depending on the terrain, these can also be difficult to see. Speaking of the terrain, certain elements such as the transition from shallow to deep water as well as muddy versus dry terrain are also difficult to see. Rimworld does make effective use of filters to signify important ongoing world events such as radiation storms. Additionally, Rimworlds UI includes switches that allow the player to toggle filters for useful information such as terrain affordance and soil fertility.

Rimworlds UI is suitable for a colony management game and is similar to other games in the genre. It does not get in the way (for the most part) and provides all the information needed to manage the colony in a tight form factor. Related UI elements are grouped into appropriate subgroups accessed via a row of groups located at the bottom of the play screen. The construction subgroups are searchable allowing players to easily find what they are looking for, which is overall a mandatory feature since research can make the individual construction menus cluttered. Research in Rimworld is divided up based on technology level and the research screen makes attempts to group research based on technology level. Primitive technology starts on the left of the screen, and scrolling right advances to higher technology levels, with victory condition technologies on the far right of the screen. Hovering over technology with prerequisites will trace back to the technologies needed to research the hovered technology.

One complaint that I have about Rimworlds UI is event notifications. As the Storyteller throws more events and quests at the player and as more events happen with Pawns and the colony, the right side of the play screen quickly becomes cluttered with individual events. Clicking on these events will refocus to the event target, if the target is a Pawn, animal, or other element on the game map. For relevant events, this will additionally popup a box detailing the event. Unfortunately, clicking on the event also dismisses it. Dismissed events are buried on the History screen, accessible from the main button tab at the bottom of the screen. This view only lists the 200 most recent events and messages – which for most people, should be fine. This can be extremely frustrating for raids where enemies will enter the map and attack either immediately or after planning/setup. If the attack event is dismissed without noting the imminence of attack, the player is then required to dig through the UI to see how the raiders are deciding to attack.

Audio is one of the areas where Rimworld shines. Music outside of special events and raids lends a relaxed atmosphere to the overall game play, and transitions are handled well between successive tracks. Omnidirectional audio cues play whenever events happen on map, and sound effects such as gunfire and explosions implement a noticeable Doppler effect. More over, the soundscape is not cluttered or mushy. Music and sounds effects are clearly distinct from each other, and even in scenes with heavy usage of sound effects such as large firefights, individual weapon and Pawn effects can still be picked out and identified.

As stated earlier, Rimworld is a Colony Management game. To rehash, players start the game with one to five colonists on a game map of their choosing from a randomly generated world with a starting technology level and appropriate equipment based on what they selected in new game customization. Players face raids, trade with neutral and allied factions, research new technologies, recruit or capture new Pawns, as well as many other game play features. Rimworlds strengths lie in its depth of game play. Compared to a game like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld offers a greater variety of ways to play the game with more clearly defined victory conditions detailing what is needed to officially complete a run. Even base Rimworld is essentially infinitely re-playable without the need for mods.

Central to Rimworlds Storyteller and the severity events is Colony Worth. Colony worth is increased by acquiring new Pawns, developing the skills of existing Pawns, acquiring trade goods and armaments in stockpiles, building new structures, and laying flooring in addition to other means. Decreasing colony wealth effectively means reversing what was done to increase it. It is normal over the course of a run of Rimworld for colony wealth to trend upwards, and as it does, the Storyteller will throw more serious events at the Player. New players generally fall in the trap of not managing their colony wealth appropriately and build too fast. This results in being sent events that are too strong for their Pawns to handle, effectively ending a run. But this is less a criticism of Rimworld and more part of the overall learning curve of playing the game.

Understandably, Rimworld was designed to be played using a keyboard and mouse and does not officially support any other forms of user input. Rimworld features basic accessibility options allowing the player to customize text and UI scale, but other than that, it does not expose much other accessibility options. Fortunately, the Rimworld community has created several mods that modify the UI to be more accessible and user friendly, though in my opinion, these mods are mostly unnecessary and are largely more convenience to the user rather than a genuine improvement.

Rimworld is built on top of the Unity game engine, commercial off-the-shelf software that comes with a fully-integrated interactive developer environment, asset designer and shop, debugging environment, scene-graph designer, and much more. Recent controversies surrounding pricing aside (which I won’t talk about here), Unity is a high-quality, professional game engine and allows developers to quickly iterate on titles while offering modularity and extensibility, usually not available from in-house developed engines. Rimworld itself additionally leverages the Steam Workshop for mod management and the community has created a plethora of mods that offer texture replacement, game play alterations, quality of life improvements, music packs, and much more. Rimworld comes with basic Steam DRM when purchased on through Steam, but the game is also available DRM free through GOG. It does not contain any invasive kernel-level anti-cheat software such as Easy Anti-Cheat or Nprotect Game Guard.

Rimworld was released over ten years ago, and at the time targeted relatively low-end to medium-end hardware. It spent a good deal of time in a public beta period which allowed players to provide feedback to the development team and as a result the game was fairly well optimized at its launch into stable release status. Today, Rimworld runs moderately well on even integrated graphics cards. The minimum system requirements recommended to play the game should be easily met even by low end consumer laptops. Performance overall remains steady even into the late game, a problem that Dwarf Fortress noticeably struggles with if the player is not careful in their fortress design.

Rimworld is an excellent entry in the Colony Management genre. It is highly accessible, runs all major Operating Systems and hardware configurations – including Linux (though Steam Deck support is a bit much to ask for), and has nearly infinite re-playability. All official DLC are sold as independent expansions, meaning they can be acquired separately from each other and largely played on their own without requiring other DLC, and the Tynan and the development team react to bugs and issues faster than most AAA development teams. I completely recommend Rimworld and believe that anyone should at least play it once, if not just to appreciate its depth, complexity, systems and mechanics, and the customization the game offers the player.