Restless RimWorld

I don’t like anything about RimWorld. The graphics are ugly, the music is dull, the story’s recycled. Yet I’ve spent more time in this game than any other I’ve ever played. I find myself back there constantly, watching these broken people who crashed on some random planet try to build a life, only to have someone—usually a depressed pyromaniac with relationship problems—burn the whole thing down while they’re sleeping.

What makes it work is the mods. Complete freedom. You want to harvest organs from prisoners and trade them for nuclear weapons? Done. You want to breed an army of cannibalistic anime girls that only fear cute cats? Done. You want to build a golden castle full of violent nude people with terrible hygiene and worse temperaments? Go ahead. There are no real limits.

The strange thing is that the game itself is hard to explain. It’s not that the graphics are great or the soundtrack is good or the story is compelling. It’s that you’re building these scenarios—these specific ways for things to fall apart—and then just watching it happen. You’re designing the conditions for chaos. That’s where the addiction comes from. You play for what you think is an hour and suddenly the sun’s coming up. You’ve spent all night watching a naked old woman castrate screaming cyborgs to pay for her drug addiction. That’s the moment you realize you’ve got a real problem.