The next RimWorld expansion adds a hefty dose of Lovecraftian terror

polygon.com:

I’ve fallen in love with sci-fi colony management RimWorld, which is unparalleled at creating wild stories through random gameplay events. RimWorld has a few expansion packs, adding things like royalty, religion, gene-editing, and child rearing to the game. Today, Ludeon Studios announced a new expansion pack is on the way, and it’s going to be the scariest one yet: Anomaly.

Anomaly’s content begins once the colonists “accidentally provoke a mad superintelligence,” according to the release blog. “From then on, madness manifests: Monstrous creatures, mind-bending mysteries, infiltrating parasites, and sanity-shredding phenomena that twist the whole world around you.”

RimWorld is already a fairly horrifying game but less in a supernatural or paranormal way, and more in being a showcase of man’s inhumanity to man. It’s a game where you can harvest organs and menace your slave population by putting dead bodies in terrifying cages, after all. But Anomaly looks much more focused on providing an external horror threat that your colonists must band together to survive, a la The Thing.

Ludeon shared some tantalizing scenarios that the player may encounter during a playthrough, and I’m already excited at the possibility of encountering the beautiful cube. I crave cube. The rest of the scenarios are chock full of classic sci-fi and horror inspiration.

At night, hear the screeching of a psychically-invisible hunter that feeds on human souls. Build proximity alarms to detect when it’s near, but you can only fight it when it chooses to reveal itself. Chip away at its health every time it returns, and collect and study chunks of its flesh. Turn the tables, become the hunter and kill it where it lives.

A massive flesh creature is growing across the landscape, consuming and covering the whole map with a quivering mass of meat. It defends itself with beasts and acid. Fight it to get samples of its nervous system, then study them until you can venture to its heart and kill it for