RimWorld

Plenty of games promise emergent storytelling. Almost none of them deliver it as consistently, or as viciously, as RimWorld. Nearly eight years after its 1.0 release, Ludeon Studios’ colony sim remains the reference point the rest of the genre gets measured against, and returning to it now — with five expansions layered on top of an already dense base game — makes the case that it’s still improving rather than coasting.

The premise hasn’t changed: three survivors crash-land on a hostile world, and you’re responsible for turning them into a functioning colony while the game’s AI storyteller decides exactly when to make that miserable. What has changed, expansion by expansion, is how much texture surrounds that premise — genetic engineering and mechanoid hives, ideology and psychic phenomena, space travel and orbital mechanics, all bolted onto a base game that was already one of the most tightly designed simulations in strategy gaming.

The storyteller is still the star

RimWorld’s central trick — an AI director choosing which events to throw at you based on tension pacing rather than a fixed script — remains its best idea, and one very few games have matched since. Choosing between Randy Random’s chaos, Cassandra’s rising tension, or Phoebe’s gentler pacing genuinely changes the shape of a playthrough, and the way small systemic details compound (a wounded leg here, a jealous rivalry there, a psychic drone during a heat wave) is still capable of producing stories no scripted narrative would think to write. This is the game’s whole pitch, and it has aged extremely well.

Underneath that storyteller is a simulation with real depth: individual body parts that can be wounded, replaced, or harvested; colonists who form and break relationships based on actual accumulated history rather than a hidden affinity number; a mood and mental-break system that turns simple logistics — food, sleep, room quality — into constant, meaningful pressure. Very little of this feels like padding. Almost all of it feeds back into the storyteller’s ability to generate a memorable run.

Expansions that earn their price tags

Five expansions now sit on top of the base game — Royalty, Ideology, Biotech, Anomaly, and the recent Odyssey — and to Ludeon’s credit, none of them read as cosmetic filler. Biotech’s genetic engineering, Anomaly’s horror-adjacent threats, and Odyssey’s space-travel additions each meaningfully expand what a colony can become, rather than just adding more of the same systems. The catch is the price: the full package runs well past $150, a serious ask on top of an already substantial $34.99 base game, and newcomers should be honest with themselves about starting with the base game alone before buying in further.

Where it still shows its age

The presentation is the one place RimWorld hasn’t kept pace with its own systems — the pixel-art style is functional and has its own charm, but it’s not going to win anyone over on looks, and the UI can become a genuine chore once a colony scales past a dozen or so colonists with layered production chains. The learning curve is also real: newcomers unfamiliar with the genre’s expectations around failure and loss will likely need a few false-start colonies before the game clicks, and RimWorld is not shy about letting an early mistake spiral into a colony-ending catastrophe.

Verdict

Almost eight years on, RimWorld hasn’t just held up — its expansions have made a genuinely great base game into one of strategy gaming’s most complete simulations, still anchored by a storytelling system nothing else has quite replicated. The dated presentation and steep entry cost for the full DLC set are real considerations, but the core game alone remains an easy, enduring recommendation for anyone who wants a game that writes better stories the more you let it fall apart.