As if colony sim RimWorld doesn't already have enough ways for your sci-fi frontier adventurers to die, a new expansion titled Anomaly is goiong to add "all manner of monstrous, mysterious, and maddening threats". It's out in around a month, and will be paired with a free 1.5 update for the base game.
]]>Hot (weeks) off the back of Sons Of The Forest and the Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, we're celebrating your bestest best, most favourite survival games this month. Your votes have been counted and tallied, and your accompanying words of praise and affection matched accordingly. But which game has survived to make it to the top of the pile? Come and find out as we count down your 25 favourite survival games of all time.
]]>Colony sim RimWorld added ideologies in an expansion last year, prompting Nate to force drifters to knife-fight a unicorn (among other things). There have been other RimWorld expansions however, and while each has added a substantial new chunk of content, those systems have previously been unable to interact with each other.
That changed with RimWorld 1.4, which adds "cross-expansion integration", so now you can use the ideology system from the Ideology expansion to, for example, tell stories about people who have ideologies about the biotech from the biotech expansion.
]]>Sci-fi colony simulator RimWorld is capable of generating some scenarios that could make The Sims 4 blush, and the newly announced Biotech expansion isn’t likely to change that. Y’see, Biotech introduces pregnancy, child-rearing, and families. It isn’t stopping there, because there’s also genetic engineering now. Your character will be able to psychically command semi-living machines too thanks to a special implant, making them your thralls. That’s one word for it, anyway.
]]>A new RimWorld patch has brought "full support" for Steam Deck, updating the interface for Valve's handheld gaming PC. The excellent sci-fi colony-building sandbox is the sort of game I would most like to potter around the house with, maybe play a few minutes on the pot, so that's nice. Not that I would take a Steam Deck to the toilet. But in theory. Look, I'm just pretending this is about me so I don't have to accuse you of anything.
]]>RimWorld is a Dwarf Fortress-inspired management game, so it's no surprise that its modding community is also following in the footsteps of their dwarven forebears.
For example, this week saw the release of Yayo's Rim 3D via the Steam Workshop. It's a mod that lets you press a button to view your RimWorld camp in 3D. Come watch a video of it below.
]]>I had planned, today, to write a conventional review of space-western colony sim RimWorld's new DLC expansion, Ideologies. But I'm going to do something else. Because while RimWorld looks like it's about managing a settlement, it's not. You're more of a reality TV director than anything, watching a community of simulated chumps flail their way through a world of chaotic, intersecting variables, and nudging things towards the most interesting - or chaotic - outcomes. RimWorld is, as the game itself says, a story generator. As such, let me commend this new DLC to you, by telling you a story.
It’s a story about betrayal, foresight, and knife fights. Also, the industrial production of crack.
]]>RimWorld's latest expansion is out now, after having been announced just two weeks ago. Called Ideology, it adds customisable belief systems to the scifi colony sim, so your space colonists can become, for example, nudist cannibals who feel it's important to proselytize their nudism and cannibalism to others.
]]>Extraterrestrial colony sim RimWorld sure does have a spot on several "best of genre" lists [best management games, and best building games, and more] here in RPS territory and—would you look at that—the best only get better. RimWorld has announced its upcoming Ideology expansion which will let you create colonies of "tree-worshipping cannibals who carve skulls into every piece of furniture, or blind tunnelers who shun the light, or transhumanists obsessed with perfecting the human form using exotic technology". Ludeon Studios say they're looking to launch the expansion, and the major 1.3 free update alongside it in "about 2 weeks". Just enough time to plan exactly what kind of oddball ideological mashup you want to saddle your next colony with.
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>There's never been a better time to get into survival games on PC, as the recent revival of the genre means Steam is now awash in some truly great games, both in early access and in full release. There are more arriving every year, too, which is why we've done the hard work for you and ranked the very best survival games to dive into today. Fair warning - there are some early access games on this list, which mean they might be a little janky early on. Give them the time they deserve, though, and you'll find they often blossom into some truly great games over subsequent updates. We've only included the very best and most complete-feeling survival games on this list, though, so you can rest assured that every game here will leave you hungry for more. It's by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a nice selection of wolf-taming, base-building, carrot-picking action to choose from.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>If managing an unruly colony of idiots on an alien planet filled with hostile wildlife, raiders, aliens, and robots has somehow become easy for you: good news, you can now make RimWorld more difficult. Thanks to this week's free patch, you can fiddle with over two dozen difficulty settings to create your own 'playstyle' - everything from trades prices and friendly fire to the rates of disease and nasty enemy spawns. Some of the settings can make the game easier, but mostly this has been added for serious super-survivors.
]]>Halloo, gentle reader. Since we're half way through the entire year of 2020 (yet somehow it is also still March?), we decided to run down, lasso and tie up some of our favourite games from the last six months, and force them into a nice list for you.
2020 still has plenty of new PC games to come, of course, but these are the ones closest to our little hearts so far. We've got strategy, we've got card games, we've got systematic reclamation of scraped spaceships. And, since Nate Crowley is one of the contributors to this list, we've got fish. Statistically speaking, there's bound to be at least one game on here that you'll ruddy bloody love too!
]]>Colony simulators can be overwhelming. Games like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld use migration as both a fuel and a pressure valve, delivering caravan after caravan of fresh colonists at regular intervals to ensure the centre of balance of your community is always tipping forwards. Space Haven, which is set not on the filthy ground but in that big empty boob we call space, flip-turns the usual template upside down. You command a ship that quite literally is always moving forwards, resources are scavenged from passing derelict hulls, and fresh crew pilfered from other ships.
]]>The Dune-esque psychic warriors of RimWorld's Royalty expansion are great, but what if you want your spacewizards to not be dukes and lords but rather monks, hippies, or goths? The latest update has you covered. It revamps psychics by making them mediate to charge their wizardbrains, and different types of character will use different focuses. Sure, lords will still love their thrones and that, but maybe you'll have a tribal lot who love a big psychic Avatar tree, a spooky wizard who mediates around graves, or other weird wizzes.
]]>May day! May day! It’s May Day, get it? I constructed this list of the 7 best distress calls in videogames so I could make this joke, and I refuse to back down now. Even if the 1st of May is associated with pagan spring festivities, and nothing at all to do with things going badly wrong in space or at sea. Even if the piece of radio lingo “mayday” has more to do with the French term “m’aider” than the one day per annum on which Morris dancers are allowed out of their cages. I refuse to acknowledge the longwindedness of this joke, and invite you to read this list article with a similar bullheaded attitude. You’ll enjoy it more that way.
(Warning: some spoilers for the games mentioned.)
]]>RimWorld is a calamity simulator, where things can go so wrong so quickly that you’re left with everything on fire and Donald Glover looking confused in the middle of it all. You’re in charge of growing a small colony of newly landed pawns on a hostile planet, and everything from the elements to squirrels can take you down.
It’s great, but that’s not the only way to play. I’ve been looking around for mods that will give you a bit more control in all the chaos. That’s not to say things will be easier, as there are a number of mods that could result in more trying circumstances, but you’ll be playing RimwWrld with just a touch more information about what’s happening, and with some of the busywork dealt with. After a few hundred hours (you can’t play RimWorld for less than that), you deserve to have some help.
]]>Times are strange and frightening. But one point of great solace for me has been hearing people celebrating things in their lives. It feels especially important right now to hold on to what makes us all proud about what we do and who we are. And what I really love is people showing off things they’re proud of making.
So I’ve been asking a bunch of developers to pick out something they’ve created that brings them pleasure to look back on. And here they are, including Harvey Smith remembering his input on Deus Ex and Dishonored, Derek Yu on one of his first-ever games. There’s pride in doing something for someone else’s game, in the power of details and in little inventions, and ah gosh, shut up, let’s just tuck into a big slice of escapist positivity.
]]>Since there's good odds you're either stuck at home right now or are soon to be, I thought it might do us all good to have a bit of story time. And today, I want to tell you the story of King Beef. It is a tragedy: a tale told by an idiot, full of mace duels and uranium armour, and signifying nothing. Nothing except, perhaps, the psychological dangers of taking social distancing a bit too far. King Beef is one of my personal library of custom RimWorld scenarios, and I talked about it in a post last October. And with the recent release of RimWorld: Royalty, I figured it was the perfect time to wheel out the King once more, and see how he would fare in a galaxy where genuine kingship was now within his reach. He fared appallingly, as it turns out - but let's take a trip together, and find out how:
]]>It's been 28 years since 1992's Dune II, and like many people out there, I'd long ago stopped seriously hoping for another videogame to do justice to Frank Herbert's legendary science fiction series. So it's with surprise and delight, then, that I can tell you the best Dune game in three decades is here... and it's a procedurally generated sitcom, played through a colony management game. Because while RimWorld: Royalty, the first DLC for Ludeon Studios' space settlement hit, isn't jaw-dropping in terms of the raw bulk of features it adds to the game, what it does for the game's atmosphere - for me at least - is properly magic.
]]>New psychic combat abilities and new quests are among the features that might be added to RimWorld's Royalty expansion, lead developer Tynan Sylvester has said. Today he issued a wee update on plans for the sci-fi colony management sim's first expansion, which launched last week alongside Update 1.1. He explained that while he's tended to operate quietly before rather than raise players' expectations and risk dashing them when plans change, now he's going to be a bit more open. He also noted that big-numbered updates for RimWorld aren't over, with at least an Update 1.2 coming at some point.
]]>Out of nowhere, sci-fi colony management sim RimWorld launched its first expansion today. Royalty is its name, and adding a spacemonarchy with courtly flair but futuristic gear is its game. Befriending the monarchy sounds exhausting, with their posh demands and their harpsichords, but they can deign to give you access to high-tech troops and gear including technopsychic warriors and plasma swords. It all sounds somewhere between Warhammer 40K, Dune, and Louis XVI? Today also brings Update 1.1, the one adding geese, to all players.
]]>While splendid spacecolony sim RimWorld may have left early access in October 2018, creator Tynan Sylvester has always insisted that didn't mean it was done. And here we are today, with a public beta build of Update 1.1 for spacemanagers to test. Look forward to new items, UI improvements, performance optimisations, new modding capabilities, and new animals including ducks, goats, yaks, and -- oh no -- geese. As if a goose weren't enough trouble in an English village, now we're letting them into space too?
]]>Here we stand in the dark neo-year of 2020. The spam bots have risen to prominence, the governments of the world are bickering over follower counts, and history class has been renamed "meme studies". Somewhere, in a dusty room in the RPS treehouse, a rogue human is compiling a list article for a crumbling PC games website. It is a warning to all those who read it. A prophecy of the terrible things to come. Wars, invasions, disease, heat death. Videogames, it turns out, have predicted all this and more. Here we replicate this cautionary pre-chronicle, your guide to the harrowing times ahead. Here are the 11 worst years in our future history, according to games.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>‘Tis the season / use a brolly / tra la la la / la la la la.
Hello, it's me, the list goblin, here in this festive first week of December to deliver a big black bin bag of presents to you. And by presents, I mean a single irrevocable inventory of the most disastrous and terrible winters in the videogames of recent history. Yes, there will be cannibalism. Yes, thousands will die of exposure. But from this great compendium of coldness will come knowledge, strength, and, okay, at least one adorable puppy. Here are the 9 harshest winters in videogames. Wrap up.
]]>Since colony sim RimWorld left early access at the start of the year, it hasn’t changed. And that’s fine. It can be hard to remember, when so many sandbox-type games are constantly having new content shovelled into them like coal into a furnace, that games sometimes just… get finished. Still, when you’re used to coming back to a game and falling in love with it all over again every time it gets new content, it can feel weirdly sad when the developer decides their work is done.
Nevertheless, I keep finding reasons to come back to RimWorld, and I want to share a few of them with you. Even without the cornucopia of bizarre mods available, the game offers a ludicrous potential for finding new ways to play. With your starting colonists, equipment, location and even game rules open to complete customisation, you can make it into whatever settlement management game your heart desires. Some gimmick playthroughs - for example, the dreaded Ice Sheet Challenge - are famous, but I’ve got a few recipes of my own I think you’ll enjoy. Here’s five of them:
]]>To this day, the jaunty static of the opening jingle to Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town brings me back to a simpler time. Summer evenings spent hunched over my Game Boy SP, a pane of glass between me and nature’s suburban bounty as I tilled my little squares of land, pet my happy little chickens, and bribed a town’s worth of reticent heartthrobs into falling for my little blonde avatar, Pepper, with an onslaught of ores, animal products, and various culinary delights (but never cucumbers, ya’ gummy-mouthed fish-man).
Harvest Moon was about as wholesome as wholesome gets, my first videogame love, but as the days turned to years, we grew apart. Since then, I’ve filled the hole in my heart with the usual suspects, (Stardew Valley, Rune Factory, and so on) until there was only one thing left to do: make my own Harvest Moon. And so began my ongoing personal quest to turn every game I own that is unfortunate enough to not be Harvest Moon into the farming simulation game they were always meant to be. Here, in true naturalist fashion, I present my field notes in the hope that we may go on to tame this new frontier together.
]]>OK, look, it isn't a Red Dead Redemption 2 edition, because Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't out for PC yet. But if I keep typing Red Dead Redemption 2 into this Google is going to be SO TRICKED and the clicks will pour in and Graham will give me a promotion!
]]>Please check to see if your cats are laying down with dogs, and if your downs are presently up, because it'll only further confirm this week's Steam Charts' signs of the end times. SEVEN new or re-entries, no GTA, no Counter-Strike, no Witcher 3 - and please, look, sit down, make sure a relative or loved one is close by - Plunkbat is at #6. With literally nothing making sense any more, let's just try to get through this - however much "this" there is left - together.
]]>RimWorld is a game of perfect catastrophe. Not simply a homage to Dwarf Fortress, or a skin graft of Prison Architect, it has spent five years of early access becoming its own simulation of farce, hopefulness and inevitable disaster. Today, it's finally "done". It starts as an opaque management game about the marooned survivors of a sci-fi shipwreck. But it quickly harnesses the darkness and humour of an absurd Yeatsian apocalypse. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, Landoa has raided the drug stash again. And through all this, what rough beast slouches toward your settlement in a manhunting rage?
Oh, it’s a tortoise. It's gonna take a while.
]]>Sci-fi colony simulator RimWorld is getting its official 1.0 release date on Wednesday 17th October, the developers announced today. The game’s been in early access for five years, generating stories about crash-landed space explorers trying to survive and thrive on strange planets.
]]>The "Ah c'mon don't pretend the possibility of cannibalism isn't part of why you were interested in spacelife in the first place" colony simulator RimWorld has launched a big early access update focused on expanding the most important thing in life: being near water. Beta update 19 lets players build bridges and build light buildings atop them, and baselords can also build power-generating watermills and run power cables under rivers. Let us abandon this terrible landlife. The update also adds new turrets, lets you rename animals, and lets your beloved Cow spot get diseases. Happy days.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>Sci-fi colony catastrophe sim RimWorld is finally almost ready to leave early access and launch in full with a shiny version 1.0, creator Tynan Sylvester has said. It's a game that one could keep adding to forever, he says, but after five years of development he's ready to draw a line in the sand and call it ready. Sounds fair, really. He still plans to work on it, mind, but it will officially be finished. Additions and tweaks coming with v1.0 include reworking caravans, a water-driven power generator to make rivers useful, and improved loading times for mods.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>RimWorld has left its awkward alpha stage, blossoming into a beta with update 18. It’s called A World of Story, but the update really dabbles in everything, from crazy weather to orbital super weapons. Hitting beta also means that it’s in the final stretch, says developer Tynan Sylvester, and there won’t be any “major” new additions like entirely new systems before launch, though there will still be future updates.
]]>I don’t know how I finished Far Cry 3. Luck and perseverance, I suppose. It’s hard to play when you’d happily take a bullet for a dog, though. The island paradise is full of them, and for some reason they are extremely aggressive. But I refused to harm a hair on their precious little heads.
]]>The planet is full of aimless people. Dozens of non-descript robots silently going to and fro, with no discernable purpose or meaning. Yes, I’m at Gamescom, the annual gaming conference in Germany, but I’m not talking about the visitors on the show floor. I’m talking about the on-screen player bots of Dual Universe [official site], a sci-fi survival MMO making big promises about player numbers and control.
“This is going to be unlike anything else you’ve ever seen before,” says Jean-Christophe Baillie, founder of studio NovaQuark, “because it’s a giant sandbox shared by everyone at the same time where they can build everything they want.”
Like nothing I've ever seen before. That’s something I’m hearing a lot these days.
]]>Digital store Itch.io is tightening its policies -- just a touch! -- after some high-profile naughtiness where an unknown scoundrel uploaded and sold RimWorld as their own game. Part of why Itch is so great is that it freely lets all and sundry sign up and add their games, which does also bring the risk of antics like this but the Itch team usually catch them quickly. This blaggard achieved prominence by getting the game picked up by a discount-tracking website, sending trusting bargain-hunters to buy, er, a bootleg copy of someone's Steam RimWorld folder.
]]>'Terrible' only in the sense of their gaming capability. Honestly, I'm sure your laptop is lovely to look at and it was definitely a extremely sensible idea to spend all that money on it instead of buying a holiday or helping to save the pandas. Truth is, though, that playing recently-released games on the vast majority of laptops is about as effective as starting an online petition to uncancel your favourite television show.
A little discretion goes a long way, however. Sure, you may be denied the glossiest of exploding viscera, but it is entirely possible to keep up with the Joneses even on a Terrible Laptop that has no dedicated graphics card. Here are but twelve contemporary games - either recently released or still-evolving going concerns - that will indeed run on your glammed-up toaster. Additional suggestions below are entirely welcome.
]]>I'd quite happily write and read about Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld [official site] all day long. There might even be time to play them every now and again as well, though I've become accustomed to enjoying them vicariously, reading about other peoples' virtual lives and escapades. A new RimWorld update arrived today and it's a big one, changing the way that worlds are built and operate at a fundamental level. Simply put (and nothing about RimWorld is actually simple), worlds are now modeled as spheres, and you can travel across them, nomad style. Or warband style. Your call.
]]>Reed’s having a bad day: her spaceship crashed, she’s one of three survivors, and the other two won’t stop hitting on her. Unfortunately for her, she’s beautiful, which means that they’re immediately enamoured with her; unfortunately for them, she’s gay, which means the feeling is definitely not mutual. Her life is a constant hellish stream of corny pick-up lines and work for the colony.
RimWorld is a scifi colony management sim that seems to effortlessly weave dynamic stories around the player's attempts to survive on an often harsh alien world, but when it comes to sexuality, romance and gender, it tells variations on this one story far too often. We dug into the code to find out why that is.
]]>We sent Brendan into sci-fi disaster simulator RimWorld [official site], where he quickly established a failing hotel in the middle of a scorching desert. In the final part of his diary, things fall apart.
Is everybody ready? Okay, let’s smoke this shit. I order the staff to smoke their flake, and one by one they light up. Then we immediately move onto the next drug. Okay everyone, I mutter, get your Yayo into you, we haven’t got a lot of time here.
Everyone snorts their Yayo.
All right. I think to the screen. Now, the plan is to get down there and kill those aliens.
]]>We dispatched Brendan back into sci-fi disaster simulator RimWorld [official site], where he quickly established a failing hotel in the middle of a scorching desert. Last week, the hotel staff were in the grip of drugs and cancer. In part two of this three-part diary, a tragedy brings the hotel to its knees.
Wide-eyes Pete was on another one of his binges. He’d gotten his hands on some Wake-up thanks to a passing group of merchants and after spending the previous week in withdrawl he was now sucking it down like sugar. In terms of work rate, this is bad because you can’t control RimWorld’s cartoon men and women when they enter a state like this - they just refuse to do their jobs. But in terms of happiness, I would rather Pete get high every day and stay chipper than descend into a spiral of withdrawl. That’s why I bought him the drugs. He’s better like this.
]]>RimWorld [official site] continues its march through early access, adding drugs and enticing modders, almost as if it wasn’t already wonderful. We sent Brendan back to the planet’s surface, where he decided to set up a hotel in the middle of the desert. In part one of this three-part diary, the colonists struggle to establish themselves.
Shinichi needs a new kidney. He has been walking around in the blazing desert sun for days, dismantling any ruin he can find and leaving the bricks for someone else to carry back to the hotel. And now he has a cancerous growth in his kidney. He needs a new one but the chances of a group of crooked merchants passing by with organs on sale is slim. He goes home and lies down in his bedroom, which is actually a cave. His bed - made from granite - offers little comfort. This was supposed to be a hotel.
]]>Meer stared at himself in the mirror. Was he really a man anymore? Or was he just a machine made of meat that endlessly pasted the same handful of game-names into a CMS post, week after week until he died?
Or was he dead already? Was this hell? Yes, that must be it. What else could writing "a href="https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/Grand-Theft-Auto-V" for an eternity possibly be?
Yet still, there was faint hope in those dim, anguished eyes. Hope that one day there might be new games, new hyperlinks, new opinions to be expressed. One day. But not today.
]]>Change! Actual change! Other than, y'know, the three games that are here every single week, every single week I have to include them, every single week, they're there, undying, changing, every single week, every single week.
Yeah! It's the top ten best-selling games on Steam last week.
]]>Hullo! One day later than usual because I spent yesterday on a beach next to an industrial estate, but as always, here's what sold best on Steam last week. It is ever so faintly possible that you might have a very slight inkling as to what is number one. I could not possibly comment myself.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, RimWorld [official site].
Every player will have stories of their RimWorld colonists. Dramas set amid cabin fever, raider attacks, depressing decor, infected limbs, cannibalism and bloodthirsty local fauna. Personal dramas, tales of threat and victory, of small things and large things, tragedy and comedy. This colony-building game is designed very specifically to generate such stories. But while it feels as if they arise from deep simulation, all watched over by an AI, they’re actually the result of something both more powerful and simple. RimWorld tells great stories because it uses:
THE MECHANIC: Apophenia
]]>You might have noticed all your friends' avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That's because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let's you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs - without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.
I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man's Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.
]]>Last week's best-sellers, today. Most of the recent mainstays are still hanging on in there, but it's goodbye to Dead by Daylight (for now, at least). We do get two intriguing new entries, one glowering and one that is ALL THE FISH. Number one, meanwhile, is probably the number one you expected. That's right: Limbo of the Lost is back-back-back!
]]>We're well past the halfway point of 2016 now, and there are several games which have been in the Steam top ten for almost every week of the year so far. I feel a bit ill thinking about all the money involved. This week's - or rather last week's, this chart reflecting sales up until Sunday just gone - is a bit of a remix by recent standards, at least.
]]>Scifi colony sim RimWorld arrived on Steam last week and has done quite well for itself, if the Steam Charts are to be believed. And not without cause either, as Brendan's recent look at the game suggests its producing Dwarf Fortress-style anecdotes. Its creator Tynan Sylvester popped up on Reddit yesterday for an Ask Me Anything post and I've been enjoying browsing the answers this morning.
]]>Phew, finally we get some new names in the Steam top 10 (previous weeks here'n'that), after the chokehold of the Steam Summer Sale is loosened. I did not expect that number 1, but I really did not expect that number 10.
]]>Every week Brendan scours the wastes for an early access title to tame and take home with him. This time, the haphazard space colonies of RimWorld [official site].
Before I tell you about RimWorld, let me tell you a story that happened in RimWorld. It's about that girl up there, drinking a beer. If you're not convinced to jump in by the end of this tale, then we have nothing more to talk about. We can't be friends. Everyone else: we're still cool. So here it is, the story of Min, a pop star with a privileged upbringing, who is about to come crashing down to earth.
]]>When I last played top-down sci-fi survival-strategy RimWorld, it was barely playable at all. When Alec last played RimWorld it had grown into an impressive blend of Prison Architect and Dwarf Fortress. When Adam last played RimWorld, which was more recently than Alec, he sang its praises to me privately.
So I'm excited, then. And more so after watching the update video for alpha 14, which is coming July 15th alongside a Steam early access release.
]]>The last few times we looked at top-down sci-fi survival-strategy (is that a thing? Genres are becoming so tricky lately) Rimworld it was merely flirting with the idea of being genuinely playable, but recent buzz had it that the Rimworld was now inhabitable at last. It doesn't take much to convince me to starve to death on an alien world, so I thought I'd check in.
]]>Pound the discovery alarm, it's yet another game I probably should have heard about already. Despite appearances, Rimworld is not a particularly complex Prison Architect mod, but in fact a low-fi space colony sim more along the lines of Maia. To further use comparisons, the characters and events that occur are governed by a Left 4 Dead style AI Director which takes into account your colony's wealth, health of your survivors and so on to create storylines. To that end, dev Tynan Sylvester dubs them "storytellers" and says the game's goal is just that - to create interesting experiences, rather than provide a win/loss state. In the latest update video, he outlines the most recent additions to his still-early KickSuccess.
]]>RimWorld is a space colony sim in which you begin with a small team of survivors on an alien planet and, through Dwarf Fortress-ish indirect control, manipulate your crew into building themselves shelter, growing food, and dealing with an array of dynamic obstacles. The latest video update for alpha 3 shows that the game is growing quickly: it now has a faction system, improved AI, and after alpha 2 added mod support, a buttload of community content to try out.
Check out the explanatory video below for the full set of updates and features, while I try to avoid sounding like I'm brown-nosing.
]]>Already pretty close to its $20k goal in just a day (at the time of writing) the Kickstarter for Prison Architect-in-space, RimWorld, looks like a done deal. As I mentioned previously, I had a play of this and it was shaping up spectacularly, even though there is a frown to be reserved for the game's creator quite brazenly copying the sprite art style from the Introversion work in progess.
You can watch the pitching video below, if you want. But it doesn't look like this one will need much egging on.
]]>Ludeon Studios send word of their forthcoming space colony game, RimWorld, and by Uranus it looks like Our Kind Of Thing. In short: it's Prison Architect reworked as a space colonisation game. In long: it's a great big Bullfrog/Dwarf Fortress-inspired indirect control game, which makes the game developer in my curse that Ludeon thought of it first. If anything shall make small piles of real world dollars, it's this.
Trailer and some thoughts south of here.
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