Ah, Mars. We just can’t quit you, little red buddy.
I hate the environment. It’s where Nature comes from, and Nature is the worst. Seriously, Nature will sting you (with wasps and scorpions), burn you (with lava and the sun), eat you (with sharks and bears), break you (with rocks and rolling logs), and cut you (with claws and other, sharper rocks). List goes on.
Look, we went to a lot of trouble to stop being gorillas, and we did it to get away from the environment. Birds and meerkats and stuff, they chose not to evolve. Human beings said, “the environment is being kind of a dick with the rain and the tapeworms; let’s invent ‘Inside.’”
The price of Inside was a hundred thousand years of miserable self-awareness. Air conditioning? Hot Pockets? Insect repellent? We bought those things, my friends. And by God, we paid for them.
I badgered Jay into writing this series. I felt that if anything needed his particular treatment, his uniquely Dobryvian acid humor, it was RimWorld. He’s outdone himself. But then, he always does.
“I did something different with Part Four,” Jay said. “Sort of a tonal shift. The pure humor angle wasn’t working.” What he has done instead is circle back to the point he made in Part One: that the player creates unique internal stories within each game, and that’s what makes RimWorld so memorable. This, the final chapter of Death in Fire, is one of those internal stories.
Anyway, consider yourself warned: the series title is not necessarily ironic in meaning, and if that comes as a surprise then you haven’t been paying attention.
— Steerpike
An escaped sex slave, a one-armed builder, an “herbalist”/sniper, and a cat-lover head into their third week of survival on a forgotten world. Hilarity ensues. Or perhaps blood. Bloody hilarity?
If you’re new to the series or need a refresher, go check out Part 1 or Part 2. Steerpike still owes me a Swedish massage, or at least a bag filled with money and drugs. (I promised him a cookie bouquet and nothing more —S)
If you’re new to Death in Fire, go check out Part 1. Otherwise, welcome back to my band of merry Black Mesa-ians!
So, I suck at RimWorld. Steam tells me I’ve played just over 100 hours now, and I’m personally responsible for the immolation of at least 25 human beings.
I love a good city builder, particularly classical or medieval-themed ones. From Caesar III to Tropico to Grand Ages: Rome to Hinterland to Pharaoh to others that escape me and must therefore not have been overly memorable, if you’ve made a game about putting together and running a city, chances are I’ll be in line to buy it. So when Rock, Paper, Shotgun shared what was – for me – the first gameplay video of Shining Rock Software’s Banished, the question was less whether than when.
Does it live up to my hopes? Read on to find out!