RimWorld’s new horror expansion also happens to be its best

In RimWorld, you play as crash-landed survivors who must eke out a brand new existence on a hostile planet, surviving and maybe thriving between raider assaults, AI uprisings, and swarms of hostile bugs. The sport has a handful of expansions with new occasions, and the newest, Anomaly, is the scariest one but. In the event you solely have the spare scratch to choose up one RimWorld growth, Anomaly is by far your most suitable option.

RimWorld is a sport about rolling with the punches, that are doled out by the sport’s storyteller, who manages the speed at which random occasions happen. For instance, Phoebe Chillax traits towards the Stardew Valley facet of the sport, permitting the participant to construct farms, stockpile meals, and give attention to the colonists’ day-to-day lives. Cassandra Traditional, in the meantime, slowly ramps up the strain with escalating occasions, solely pausing after notably powerful encounters.

A tricky colonist would possibly be capable to fend off a raider assault solely to get a lethal an infection. I would encounter a temple stuffed with riches just for it to be stuffed with killer robots. A jail warden will get so mad over his girlfriend saying no to a proposal that he punches a turret till it explodes, killing him immediately. It’s this inevitable tragedy that makes RimWorld so compelling.

The sport’s different expansions are Ideology, Royalty, and Biotech, every of which provides new methods to construct up your colony and alter your colonists. Having to observe a set of non secular tenets in Ideology makes for a captivating social problem, and I all the time have enjoyable creating new genetic templates for my colonists in Biotech. However not one of the expansions really feel like they dramatically change the cadence of the sport. I all the time simply construct up my base and watch for bots, bugs, or bullies to assault me. As soon as I win that battle, I put out all of the fires (each bodily and metaphorical) from the aftermath and construct again up — rinse and repeat. It’s definitely enjoyable, however on a protracted timeline, it makes the sport really feel somewhat stale.

Picture: Ludeon Studios

Enter Anomaly, an growth impressed by The Factor, The Cabin within the Woods, and different horror media. New settlements are all the time full of ruins and sources, however now there’s a brand new characteristic: an ominous monolith. Attuning a colonist to the monolith triggers Anomaly occasions. This contains new enemies, after all, like stealthy shadow figures and large slugs that may gobble down my poor settlers in a single gulp. If I need to overcome these new challenges, I have to construct containment fields, seize these baddies, after which examine them for brand spanking new applied sciences and rituals.

As anybody who has ever watched a single horror film is aware of, this can be a scenario that’s completely ripe to go flawed. However there are tons of recent, non-monster-related occasions that dramatically change the sport and drive me to play in an entire new manner. I management the escalation of occasions by learning the monolith; the extra I poke at it, the larger an issue it turns into. This implies I can’t get too overwhelmed by new occasions, and I’ve to take my time learning check topics and getting ready for the following step of escalation.

Take, for example, the troubling occasion of the golden dice. I bought a name from a trusted ally asking me to take one thing off their palms. They’d even give me an entire bunch of additional provides and navy gear as a thank-you. Maybe I ought to’ve been suspicious, however I’m a giver at coronary heart, so I agreed. They despatched a cargo pod, and inside was a fist-sized golden dice.

At first, all the pieces was nice. My villagers preferred to have a look at it, and it put them in an excellent temper. I had my lead researcher take a gander at it, however she didn’t see something alarming at first look. However issues shortly bought sophisticated. My settlement’s cleric started to cease doing her common duties in favor of wandering round and pondering absentmindedly concerning the dice. Then, she began constructing little dice statues from grime and metallic scrap. Lastly, she stopped engaged on issues altogether. Different colonists began to affix her, and earlier than lengthy, you couldn’t stroll a couple of steps in my settlement with out tripping over a dice.

Picture: Ludeon Studios

Stricken colonists weren’t doing something productive as a result of they had been too targeted on the dice. They couldn’t depart the colony, both, or they’d get too upset about leaving the fantastic dice behind. By the point my researcher realized there was a strategy to break the bond, an excellent chunk of my inhabitants was troubled. Breaking the bond made all of them go berserk, and a civil conflict broke out in my colony between the cube-afflicted and the cube-immune. I misplaced my cleric and a few different guys, however I made positive the funeral was good.

You’d assume that’d be the top of my troubles, however shortly after, one other faction provided me a nonspecific reward. This time it was a mysterious obelisk that duplicated my finest miner, Paul. I now had two equivalent miners, each of whom claimed to be the actual Paul. This appeared like an incredible useful resource, and I began harnessing the facility to pump out a mess of Pauls. However then I realized every clone would inevitably get organ failure. Fortunately, RimWorld permits you to harvest organs out of your enemies, and raiders nonetheless sometimes confirmed up at my base. So I managed to improvise an answer for Pauls’ varied failing organs, and all it required was for me to arrange a shady harvesting room.

This wild number of occasions in Anomaly signifies that RimWorld feels far more recent. The opposite expansions will have an effect on what occurs in your downtime, however the common circulate of fight and battle feels the identical. Anomaly provides so many bizarre and absurd occasions, and few of them could be boiled right down to “a bunch of dangerous guys are operating at your base.” These new types of battle can come from inside, as a The Factor-style entity takes over your cultists’ our bodies, or they’ll come from beneath, as an enormous pit stuffed with fleshbeasts opens up within the floor. Both manner, I like these new and horrible tales that emerge from Anomaly, and it feels important for shaking up a well-worn RimWorld expertise.

RimWorld Anomaly was launched on April 11 on Home windows PC. The growth was reviewed on Home windows PC on a Steam Deck utilizing a model purchased by the author. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media might earn commissions for merchandise bought by way of affiliate hyperlinks. You’ll find extra details about gamerjive’s ethics coverage right here.