The Naked Grandma’s Castration Business
Nothing about RimWorld should work. The graphics are ugly in a specific, unloved way—functional isometric tiles with the aesthetic ambition of a 2003 freeware project. The music loops until you hear it in your sleep. The premise, building a colony of crash survivors on a hostile alien planet, has been done and done again. I have logged more hours in it than any other game I own.
The basic loop is this: a handful of psychologically damaged survivors land on an alien surface, you build something resembling civilization, and then you watch it fall apart. Someone develops a crippling mental illness. Someone falls in love with the wrong colonist. A pyromaniac with fresh heartbreak wanders in from the edge of the map at three in the morning and sets fire to everything while everyone sleeps. You start again. You always start again.
With mods installed, the simulation stops pretending to have moral guardrails entirely. You can harvest organs from captured raiders and trade them for military-grade weapons. You can unleash an army of cannibal anime girls on your colonists—girls who fear nothing except cute cats. You can build a golden fortress populated by bloodthirsty nudists whose terrifying reputation barely precedes their even more terrifying appearance. None of this is encouraged. None of it is discouraged. The game generates conditions and watches what you do with them.
The moment I knew I was in real trouble came at the end of a twelve-hour session that bled into morning. I looked up from the screen and tried to summarize what I’d spent the night doing. A naked grandmother had been systematically castrating captured cyborgs and selling the proceeds to fund a colony-wide drug addiction. I had watched this happen in real time, making small logistical decisions to support the operation. It was nearly six in the morning. The coffee was cold. I closed the laptop and opened it again almost immediately.
RimWorld is a genuinely strange object—bad in almost every conventional sense and bottomless in the one sense that actually matters. You can’t explain it to anyone who hasn’t played it. You can only describe the naked grandmother, watch the confusion on their face, and know that they’ll either understand immediately or never understand at all.