As you may know, RimWorld is probably my favourite video game ever. It’s been at first place for time played on my Steam list, and the main reason second place, Europa Universalis 4, gets close is that it takes a looong time to play, at least for me. However, it’s been quite a while since I’ve last played RimWorld–over two months at this point.

Let’s back up for a sec. What is RimWorld, exactly? Well, obviously, it’s a video game. And a…mod processor, to a certain extent (more on that later). If you launch the game, though, you’re going to see something different. Directly under the title you’re going to see the words “a storyteller by Tynan Sylvester”. You can do whatever you want when you’re building your little little community. It can be good, evil, or however you feel that day. If you don’t feel like fighting off bugs, robots, and evil squirrels, you can just lower the difficulty and do what you want. If you just want to be a merchant empire, that’s fine. And if you want to the Master of Mechanics, that’s fine too. There are a thousand and one different ways to play with the pawns in your world, and you can choose whichever.

As for the mod processing I mentioned, well, there are a lot. Personally I don’t do many that make a big change to gameplay, except for an anti-zzzt one (ask someone in the community how much they hate that event). But I do have quite a few quality of life ones, and since I started a new run about a week and a half before a new DLC/update, I rolled the game back on Steam so they would still work. And I kept it back for months, because even once the mods had all been updated, I wanted to keep my run going, and the update was big enough that I didn’t want to take the risk that things would get a bit wonky if I changed it. Which brings us to my conundrum: I love RimWorld. But I don’t just love it, I love the people inside it. And I don’t want them to die.

I’m sure a lot more of you have played Mass Effect than have lived out on the rim, so let’s look at that for a sec. Remember who you want to keep on your team? Yeah, I know you do. Remember how hard it was to sacrifice a friend to save someone else? Hoo boy, I’ll bet on that. Can you recite a bunch of lines from your favourite character? I certainly know that turians don’t like the cold. That is what RimWorld is. But every single time you play, every new run you start, you get new friends. A new Garrus, a new Liara, a new Jack and Joker. And you want to be with them. You want to be their storyteller, you don’t want their stories to end. It hurts to see them die, and the little Savescum Fairy starts whispering in your ear. Hell, it even hurts to have pets die, one of my mods give animal prosthetics just to stop that. It doesn’t matter that they’re not real, they feel real. They’re real in their own little world, and you want them to stay real. But it’s not Mass Effect. You’ll get a lot more people when you start a new run. You’ll never see their randomized stories on the internet. When they’re done, they’re done. You’ll probably forget them, because unless you write poems about them, they’re gone. New people are coming. New people you’ll learn the names of, new people you’ll love like your old people, but new people who will make you forget the old people. And that’s where I am now.

I’m kind of…meh at RimWorld, and in my last run I’d gotten to a standstill. I’d be able to continue, if I wanted, but it would be tough. I’d probably gone a bit further than I otherwise would have, since I wanted the child in my game to grow up. But I knew it was basically over. And so, I stopped. I stopped because I didn’t want pre-teen William to die. I didn’t want Byark to lose her best friend Hovenburg. I didn’t want Sammy and Man to break up. And when I start a new run, which I’m finally going to do (and have done, as you can tell by the pictures), that’s all going to happen. I’ll remember them for a new while longer, but soon as I’ll forget them as I remember the new people. And I’ll of course will eventually want to remember those new people, of course they’ll replace the old people. But if I don’t create those new people, that will never happen. Weird as it kind of is, if feels a lot better to let them live in purgatory than to die. They are still dying this way, I’m never seeing them again. But they’re alive in death. The game tells me they are. I’m not looking at it to see that they’re alive, but they’re alive. Still, I need to kill them. I need to kill them in abandonment, by leaving them alive in the game. They need to be either alive in death, or dead in living. And it’s finally time for me to choose the latter.

Honestly, this is a lot shorter than I thought it would be. As soon as I started talking about RimWorld, I wanted to stop talking so I could play. I’m not going to bundle it with my Quick Thoughts, but really reminded me how much I love this game, and how much I need to jump over that hurdle of doing a restart. I play a lot of long-lasting games, that kind of peter out, and while I do come back to them, RimWorld is the one that I have the hardest time coming back to. Both because I don’t want to get rid of my old run, but also because this game gets me going so much in what’s happening RIGHT NOW that I forget what was happening before. How many times have a I started a new run? I don’t know, but it’s equal to the number of times I’ve felt like I have no idea what I’m doing. And that’s a great game.

Is there a game that grabs you so much it’s hard to stop, and hard to start? What is it? Be sure to tell us below, or over on Facebook!