RimWorld turns disaster and loss into a chaotic but hilarious party

polygon.com:

My once happy space colony has completely gone off the rails. People are fighting in the dining hall, prisoners are trying to break out of a small structure I’ve called the Friendship Room, and a bunch of robots just broke through the residential quarters. The entire situation is a monument to my hubris and arrogance, and at the end of the day, only the strongest will survive.

I’ve been coping with the chaos of the real world by sinking a ton of time into RimWorld, a colony simulation game and story generator that is also very chaotic in its own way. In other simulator games you can fully run the show, but in RimWorld base building is balanced by random events and quests. You might be able to save someone from raiders, and they’ll join your group — or a nuclear winter will set in, or a malevolent AI will make everyone angry and paranoid using psychic rays. Mondays, am I right? A colony of three people can quickly swell up until you have a couple dozen pawns running around, each carrying out their specific tasks.

To start, RimWorld assigned me a few randomized pawns, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. My motley crew of survivors included Trovatelli, a research wunderkind who grew up on a glamorous world, so she was great at anything intellectual or social but refused to do hard labor. She was joined by Sally, a spaceship tactician with anger issues, and Maverick, a former office drone.

These pawns need to survive, so I set to work building them a little base. They grew their own food and medicine, tamed horses and put them in a pen, and had beautiful little bedrooms crafted to their taste. It’s possible to play RimWorld entirely like Stardew Valley or an Animal Crossing, where the player focuses entirely on