RimWorld’s new horror expansion also happens to be its best
In RimWorld, you play as crash-landed survivors who have to eke out a new existence on a hostile planet, surviving and perhaps thriving between raider attacks, AI uprisings, and swarms of hostile insects. The game has a handful of expansions with new events, and the latest, Anomaly, is the scariest one yet. If you only have the spare scratch to pick up one RimWorld expansion, Anomaly is by far your best choice.
RimWorld is a game about rolling with the punches, which are doled out by the game’s storyteller, who manages the rate at which random events occur. For example, Phoebe Chillax trends toward the Stardew Valley side of the game, allowing the player to build farms, stockpile foods, and focus on the colonists’ day-to-day lives. Cassandra Classic, meanwhile, slowly ramps up the tension with escalating events, only pausing after particularly tough encounters.
A tough colonist might be able to fend off a raider attack only to get a deadly infection. I might stumble upon a temple full of riches only for it to be full of killer robots. A prison warden will get so mad over his girlfriend saying no to a proposal that he punches a turret until it explodes, killing him instantly. It’s this inevitable tragedy that makes RimWorld so compelling.
The game’s other expansions are Ideology, Royalty, and Biotech, each of which adds new ways to build up your colony and alter your colonists. Having to follow a set of religious tenets in Ideology makes for a fascinating social challenge, and I always have fun creating new genetic templates for my colonists in Biotech. But none of the expansions feel like they dramatically change the cadence of the game. I always just build up my base and wait for bots, bugs, or bullies to assault me. Once I win that battle, I put out all the fires (both physical and metaphorical) from the aftermath and build back up — rinse and repeat. It’s certainly fun, but on a long timeline, it makes the game feel a little stale.
Enter Anomaly, an expansion
Read more on polygon.com
