The colony simulation RimWorld is one of the top games on Steam with 98% positive reviews. The darkly humorous simulation will receive its fourth expansion, “Anomaly,” in April 2024. The developer promises many ideas that players know from horror movies: wriggling masses of flesh, ghosts, parasites, and madness will play a major role.
This is the situation:
- RimWorld is an innovative colony simulation that is rated extremely well on Steam with 98% positive reviews. Players control the inhabitants of a colony on a hostile planet, expand their base, and must regularly deal with increasingly difficult problems.
- The game has received 3 expansions so far, each taking it in new, unpredictable directions: in 2022, “BioTech” brought genetic manipulation, animal-humans, and bizarre experiments to RimWorld.
- After 2023 passed without expansions, the “Anomaly” expansion has now been announced for April 2024.
Inspiration: The Thing, Cthulhu, and Cabin in the Woods
This is known about the new expansion: Anomaly will be a horror expansion for RimWorld that references themes such as the Cthulhu mythos, “The Thing,” or “Cabin in the Woods.”
The developers already reveal: The colonists will awaken a “Dark Monolith” and thereby provoke a mad machine spirit that will plunge their world into fear and terror:
- You will be able to hunt “invisible soul hunters” that scream outside the walls of the colony.
- Players will fight a “massive flesh creature” that covers the entire map with a “squeaking mass of flesh.”
- Discover a parasite that infests colonists and takes over their minds – but it will be difficult to find the right colonists, as they will camouflage themselves.
- Colonists may become possessed by a golden cube that they worship.
When is all of this coming? The expansion is supposed to come “in a month,” which would be a release date like April 11 or April 18.
In addition to the expansion, a new patch 1.5 will also be released.
Players will trust their colonists even less than they do now
This is what it’s about: The developers of RimWorld are drawing on motifs from horror movies and are quite open about it.
Cabin in the Woods
is itself a meta-horror film that packs together known monsters from many other horror films.
Anomaly
definitely sounds like a logical expansion for RimWorld, which will again expand the already great game in new and interesting ways.
Those who know RimWorld can already imagine how the ideas will be implemented in the game: The developers are toying with the idea that the player cannot trust their own colonists anymore. This is already something that can be seen: Because in RimWorld there are colonists with certain traits like pyromaniacs or cannibals that regularly cause trouble when you don’t keep an eye on them for two seconds.
With Anomaly
, inattention could pay off, as the unreliable colonist not only burns the base down or digs up and consumes a few corpses but then transmits the alien parasite to the next colonist.
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