Rimworld

Imagine having a rectangle with a few of the simplest geometric shapes on your screen, and your task is to keep a couple of pixelated creatures alive moving around in it. That's the essence of Rimworld in its original 1987 form — a minimalist colony simulator that's stubbornly firing away at today's world.

It's a text-based colony simulator on some distant planet. You have a group of survivors who must cope with a fabricated environment: hunger, disease, boredom, relationships with each other. No animations, no movie effects — just numbers, text descriptions, and schematic representations of buildings and characters. Your goal is simple: build a functioning community and eventually escape in a spaceship or complete some surprisingly trivial mission.

You play it through menus and command lines. You click on individual colonists, assign them tasks, monitor their needs in lists. It's not sexy or fun in the classical sense — it's work. But it's precisely in that brutally clear calculation that the fascination lies: every decision has consequences. Build too close to the mountain? Creatures arrive. Don't secure food? Starvation sets in. Work people to death and they spiral into depression. The game doesn't shout at you what to do — it just shows you what happened.

This Rimworld never had the self-aware presentation of its more famous successor from 2018. It's pure mechanism, without stories and without dramatic events. Boredom might set in for a while, but then you realize you've managed to produce twelve units of grain and a horse. And that was everything. The game had a chance to become a legend, but it was forgotten, and only after thirty years did the name Rimworld come alive under a completely new face.

Today it can only be found as a historical curiosity. It's not a bad work, but an archival record of a time when simulator meant truth on paper and poor graphics, and when fun consisted of watching your settlement either be born or dig its own grave. Those who feel like understanding how it all started will try it in a browser — but I'm not saying you'll play it for long.