I would show a picture, but my second colony had a cremation oven, so there are no graves around it, and I think it says a lot about RimWorld’s theme that the developer made a cremation oven a part of the game. Hell, my first colony on RimWorld had nearly 100 graves surrounding it filled with raiders, tribals, and the occasional colonist who died in a firefight, were struck by disease, or had been involved in a terrible hunting accident involving an ostrich. There is considerably less death in Stonehearth (well, excluding the Goblins.) It’s not unheard of a village having 40 Hearthlings and having zero combat casualties on the way there, but in RimWorld on pretty much any difficulty that’d be nearly impossible. I wouldn’t consider Stonehearth to be an emotional game, to me it’s always been more about building and leveling up your town than trying to survive in a hostile environment. Stonehearth, only the other hand is more of a gradual investment of time and energy. There are absolutely no “non-lethal” weapons in the game, so if you find yourself having to stop one of your pyromaniac colonists from burning down one of your village, your only options are to shoot or stab them until they stop, and hopefully not kill them in the process. Your colonists can have mental illnesses and suffer breakdowns where they unintentionally harm themselves or others, and your characters can build relationships only to watch them fall to pieces when a marriage proposal goes wrong or someone is horribly scarred in battle and the other party suddenly finds them ugly. Besides the combat mechanics, there are tons of other really dark aspects to the game. As I watched my colonist get dragged away by pirates, I found myself really upset, and I had to put the game down for a little bit. I’ve had a situation where I had two critically wounded colonists, with only one able bodied colonist nearby to rescue them, and enemies coming straight at me so I had to pick which one to rescue and one to leave to be captured and sold into slavery. The random storytelling and mechanics of the game can put you in some sticky situations, and it can be pretty grim. Cannibalism, slavery, harvesting organs, imprisonment, mental illness, and dealing with indigenous tribal peoples who don’t like you are all part of the game. As the player, you can do stuff that usually makes headline news or was a hot political issue in the 1800’s. You’re survivors from a plane crash, Lost style, so things are about to get ugly pretty much the second you land on the planet. I originally was going to say that RimWorld’s theme and narrative are dark. The RimWorld storytelling (or narrative) is great, but it’s great because it’s really emotional. I have so many great stories from this game I tell them to some of my non-gamer coworkers and they genuinely enjoy them to the point where one asked me today what new happened in “my game last night” and asked me for a health update on “Kimmy”, my favorite colonist who recently lost her hand to friendly fire. RimWorld likes to call itself a “colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller,” and I really want to emphasize the storytelling part. I’m assuming most of you haven’t played or even heard of RimWorld, so let me start out with this warning RimWorld is very different from Stonehearth. Well, let me start out with the underlining theme and narrative.
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