Horrible things are afoot in RimWorld. More horrible than usual, I mean, and RimWorld can already get pretty horrible. What with the cannibalism and all.
Sorry, what were we talking about? Right! RimWorld's announced a new expansion called Anomaly, and promises "all manner of monstrous, mysterious, and maddening threats". It centres around what happens when your hapless colonists anger a "mad superintelligence," giving rise to all sorts of Lovecraftian horrors that are determined to make their bad mood everyone else's problem.
The expansion claims inspiration from the likes of Cabin in the Woods, the Cthulhu Mythos, The Thing, and Hellraiser. RimWorld – Anomaly looks set to swarm your colony with all sorts of horrible new challenges. You'll have to build proximity alarms to detect an invisible, soul-eating hunter; deal with parasites that infect your colonists and turn them into infectious Manchurian candidates; defend against a growing mass of flesh as it envelops the land; and suppress the "filthy energy" of a "pulsating obelisk" near your base, which thankfully isn't a metaphor for anything.
My favourite new addition has got to be a "beautiful golden cube" that can obsess your colonists. "They build statues of the cube. They worship the cube. They love the cube," reads the description. Hey, this cube doesn't sound half-bad! I'm thinking maybe I oughta to get into the cube myself.
Lucky for you, the expansion brings all sorts of new tools to ward off these new threats. There's all the stuff you'd expect: Flamethrowers, new guns, that kind of thing. But also, RimWorld studio Ludeon promises "IEDs that resurrect the dead" and "flesh-mutating pulsers that transform living creatures," which all sounds very ethical: The flesh-mutating hellgun that Albert Schweitzer would use. You'll also be able to research bits and pieces of the new threats in hopes of finding new ways to counter them.
Ludeon's founder, Tynan Sylvester, says he's branching out into horrors unknowable because he "wanted to give players new kinds of emotions they haven’t encountered before in RimWorld… I wanted to provoke new emotions—dread, psychological tension, suspicion and mystery. The horror theme unlocks a new emotional landscape for us to explore.
"Plus I saw Cabin in the Woods and I thought the monster lab was awesome."
RimWorld – Anomaly doesn't have a specific date on it yet, but it's "Coming soon" next month. If you want to keep track of its development, you can follow it over on Steam.
Update: This piece has been changed to more specifically note that the expansion is due next month at some point.
