I'm honestly not sure how to explain this.

At first, Rimworld doesn't look like much. Graphically, it's not a AAA game. Mechanically, it's complicated to a point that new players can and will be turned off. It's as easy to lose colonists and colonies to mistakes you didn't know you were making as it is to events totally out of your control. The game is wildly unfair much of the time, and you will absolutely feel frustration and anger and sadness and agitation at the experience as you play.

The thing is, you feel those emotions because you quickly become attached to your colonists. Rimworld has an uncanny ability to make you feel for the little jellybeans on-screen, to make you really want them to survive and succeed. I have never once played a game that made me actually feel like I've genuinely lost something when a character dies. It may sound silly, but if you play long enough you will find yourself thinking the same way.

And then there's the mods. I have thousands of hours in this game, and I have managed to never get tired because each and every colony can be as different as I want it to be. Rimworld is less of a vanilla game and more of a mod platform these days, endlessly customizable to suit the tastes of literally any colony sim enjoyer. Want to be the Doom Slayer? Want a colony full of sentient snakes? Do you want to run a dark-ages castle manned by modern military soldiers riding flying horses that fire lasers from their eyes? We've got you, fam!

Look, I've been writing and erasing things from this review for a while, because Rimworld is one of those games that's too expansive and rich to fully explain in something as basic as a Steam review. If you like colony simulators, buy this game. It's the premier example of the genre for a reason, and you won't regret it.

Very much follows through on the storytelling aspect, but mods are almost required to let it reach its full potential. If you get invested in your colonists it's impossible to put down. Case in point, the "main character" of my eldritch deity-worshiping cult colony.

She's the child of the high priestess and a researcher, and the first of the colony's next generation. Her father is mauled to death before she's even born, and her entire childhood is riddled death and loss. The family of terriers she grows up with are eaten by wildlife one by one. She watches countless friends, teachers, and adults she looks up to die horrific deaths from raids or the brutality of nature, and countless more faceless victims of the cult tortured and sacrificed to the dark gods. On multiple occasions she has been forced to stand on the frontlines and fight for her life as the only person left. At one point she's given a pistol and told to hunt down refugees fleeing in the woods after a betrayal, and she's subsequently stabbed in self defense and left bedridden for a month. Through all of this, the one constant in her life is her mother: the cult's greatest warrior, it's leader, and the only source of comfort for a child whose entire life has been defined by loss.

During the last raid of a particularly brutal week, her mother is shredded by an lmg and starts to bleed out on a bridge as the battle rages on in the background. This poor child, not even 8 years old, desperately tries to carry her mom to the hospital while almost every other person she knows is bleeding out around her. But she's not strong enough to carry her away in time, so instead she tries to patch the bleeding until help arrives.

She manages to patch one of a dozen bullet holes, and all the effort bought her was 20 more minutes with her mom, who couldn't even say goodbye if she wanted to because her jaw has been blown to pieces. Her mother bleeds to death in her arms. Any moment to grieve is cut short by the lmg crew making another push, and she spends the rest of the battle weeping in the storeroom.

In the wake of this trauma she develops a passion for medicine, seemingly resolving to never let her mother's tragedy happen again. In time, she becomes the colony's best doctor, and eventually assumes her mother's role of high priestess as she reaches adulthood. During her rise, the colony goes through similarly tough times, but it never loses someone after a battle's over. She stays true to her word and becomes loved as a result, eventually having a daughter of her own with one of the hunters.

The trouble starts when they finish their marriage ceremony, and history comes knocking when a horde of maddened lynxes descends upon the colony. Her husband is torn to pieces before she even has a chance to help. After the battle, everything seems peaceful, until lightning hits the toxic waste freezer on the outskirts of the colony and forces everyone to rush to put the fire out. The colony's top mechanitor runs inside to extinguish the wastebags, but they explode from the searing heat and his body rots before it even hits the ground. As a result, the robotic half of the colony's military loses control, and so while everyone's running around trying to patch wounds and stop the toxic fumes from reaching the base, they have to worry about getting the robots back under control before they go rogue and start killing everyone.

And as this state of emergency starts causing people to crack, a horde of neanderthals marches over the horizon, and the cult's story ends with a final desperate stand in the streets as they fall under the cumulative damage of scars, toxic fumes, and angry cavemen. The ending for the main character almost made me cry because she's the first one to go down, and so she has to watch, barely conscious, as everything she ever knew and everyone she's ever loved is burned to the ground. Also her baby starves to death in the crib since everyone else got shot with a hundred arrows.

10/10 would traumatize a fictional child again

Its alright.