Rimworld: Anomaly will kick things off when colonists provoke a super-intelligence, which then leads into monstrous creatures, sanity-destroying phenomena, and parasites make their way into the world. The expansion has been described by the studio as being inspired by horror works like Cabin in the Woods, The Thing, Hellraiser, and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

The Anomaly expansion will feature a number of horror-themed scenarios that players might face, like an invisible hunter that feeds on human souls, a massive flesh creature growing across the landscape, or even colonists becoming obsessed with a mysterious golden cube.

There will also be new things to fight in the expansion, including hordes of undead, new death machines, fleshbeasts, water-beasts, and imitations of human beings. Colonists can build new tools to help fight off these enemies, including items like flamethrowers and IEDs that can resurrect the dead.

“It was important to me that this not just be a collection of monsters to shoot at, because the base game already generates those feelings of combat tension and I wanted something new,” said Ludeon Studio founder Tynan.

“So we made sure to design the new threats to follow the arc of classic horror stories: The protagonists encounter a mystery, then realize it’s a threat, and try to survive while they learn more about it, slowly building advantage before they try to turn the tables. It’s a very RimWorld kind of chaos when several of these things are happening at once with different threats.”

The planned update for the base game, update 1.5, will bring with a host of new features as well, such as the ability for wounded colonists to crawl, trait-related possessions, organ decay, and the ability to build wall lamps, flood lights and hidden conduits.

Rimworld is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Developer Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 is an unforgettable adventure that can easily take up to a hundred hours even if you are rushing through the campaign. But the essence of the game lies in experimentation and seeing how your choices in not only the story but also the combat encounters play out in the long run. It’s a truly ambitious game with tons and tons of different possibilities, and there’s plenty of incentive to explore the game in depth which can take up to 1000 hours if not more.

Monster Hunter World

Monster Hunter World has established its reputation as a top tier action RPG that consistently delivers years after its launch. While the gameplay loop essentially revolves around collecting the proper gear before diving headfirst into a battle with a monster and doing it all over again, the sheer variety of the enemies and the engaging progression loop is what keeps it all enjoyable right through to the end. In addition to an already meaty base game, you also have plenty of DLC and the Icebourne expansion to extend your playtime even longer.

No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky might not have started life on the best foot forward, but Hello Games was able to turn the game’s fates around with a steady stream of meaningful content updates through the years. No Man’s Sky currently features an insane amount of planets to explore, wildlife to find, and bases to build which can easily eat up thousands upon thousands of hours thanks to a strong procedural generation system underpinning every moment of the gameplay.

Fallout 76

Talking about games that turned their fates around for the better, we have Fallout 76. Through its consistent efforts, Bethesda has turned this live service game from a massive failure to arguably the best way to experience the franchise. There are just swaths of content available at your disposal to keep you entertained for hours and hours upon end, and a constant slew of new updates make sure that Fallout 76 is a game worth sticking around with in the long term.

Terraria

Re-Logic’s Terraria offers players a sandbox filled with virtually unlimited possibilities, and its tagline of the world being your canvas stands true in every sense. You can explore the randomly generated worlds at your leisurely pace, craft all sorts of things with the many resources at your disposal, and fight a wide array of bosses peppered among a whole host of other activities. It’s not a really complex game but the engaging gameplay mechanics make you want to keep playing for hours and hours on end.

The Elder Scrolls Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was released well over a decade ago, but it continues to serve as a shining example of how to really capture the sense of thrill and adventure in an open-world setting. Set against the backdrop of a large kingdom adorned with mysterious caves, towering peaks, and lush jungles, Skyrim presents a compelling opportunity at every turn with loads of quests peppered throughout the map. In addition to the staggering amount of content itself, the game offers plenty of choices in terms of the gameplay ranging from different weapons to different skills and builds, and experimenting with that can easily eat up a ton of time.

Forza Horizon 5

Playground Games’ latest Forza Horizon 5 is a virtual playground for fans of car lovers. It’s a really enjoyable game on even a basic level with its quality driving mechanics and huge open world, but what makes it worth sticking around till the end is the quality and the variety of content on offer. You can take part in all sorts of events and races scattered across the map, and the progression systems always make sure to generously reward you for the effort – which can become a driving motivation to spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours.

Elden Ring

FromSoftware’s Elden Ring is the game that has catapulted the Soulslike genre to the mainstream with its impressive open world, and it’s precisely the reason why the game is on this list. The Lands Between is chock full of secrets ranging from hidden dungeons to abandoned fortresses to an entirely optional underground realm, and the fact that none of it is presented to you on a silver platter makes the exploration all the more engaging. Beating it alone can take up to a hundred hours, but seeing all the game has to offer while experimenting with different weapons can cost you more than a thousand hours without an inch of boredom.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t an extremely long game in terms of content; beating the main story will only cost you a hundred hours at maximum. But the beauty lies within the immaculately detailed open world, exploring each nook and cranny at a leisurely pace. Rockstar has employed a bunch of subtle design tricks and systems to reduce the pace of gameplay, and the game becomes all the more rewarding when you take every opportunity to smell the roses and soak in the sunsets – and that alone can skyrocket your playtime by an exponential margin.

RimWorld

RimWorld thrusts players into a sci-fi world inhabited by colonists and space pirates, and tasks you to forge your own destiny in a world wrought by all sorts of dangers and threats. At the heart of RimWorld lies an intelligent AI storyteller who carves out a tale based on the decisions that you make throughout your journey, and that level of unpredictability is what ultimately makes it hard to put dow

Stardew Valley

Eric Barone’s Stardew Valley is an innately therapeutic experience where the fun comes from seeing your farm transform from its humble beginnings to a full-blown mechanized magnum opus, and that journey can take you anywhere from just a few dozen hours to hundreds upon hundreds of hours depending on your personal goals.

Factorio

Factorio is a game about building Factories, and while it doesn’t sound all that exciting at first glance – it is anything but. You start out simple by building humble manufacturing plants, but the game soon ramps up the intensity by tasking you to build towering monuments of capitalism and use your intelligence to optimize the manufacturing flow and cut down costs wherever possible. It has a steep learning curve to its many aspects, but Factorio is definitely worth a try if you are looking for an engaging game to really sink your teeth into.

Destiny 2

Bungie has been doing a fantastic job with Destiny 2, and it’s one of the very few live service games that have managed to not only survive but consistently thrive in the modern AAA gaming space. And a lot of that could be credited to the immensely satisfying gameplay, a compelling progression loop, and interesting world design that will keep you coming back for more with each new expansion. It’s a game overflowing with swaths of content to the point that the developer is vaulting off old content, but what’s here will serve you well for thousands of hours and well beyond that.

Escape From Tarkov

Escape From Tarkov is a first-person shooter with some pretty brutal shooting mechanics, and despite the game having a rather simplistic suite of game modes – the fun comes from dynamically creating strategies for and applying lessons from past runs to make it to the finish line. There’s quite a steep learning curve to Escape From Tarkov, and add up an even higher skill ceiling – and it becomes a game that’s worthy of your undivided attention.

Kenshi

Lo Fi Games’ Kenshi is a really ambitious RPG where you get to create a custom character and forge your own destiny in an open world that spans over 800 square kilometers. Kenshi offers a ton of freedom to build out your character how you see fit, make critical decisions in quests, and much more. The primitive graphics hide a ton of depth beneath them, and fans of flexible RPGs should definitely give this one a try.

The biggest feature in Biotech is the addition of families to RimWorld. With the expansion, players can now see their colonists have children and raise their own families. A number of options are available, including surrogate birth, and even the ability to gestate embryos in machines.

Along with the addition of families comes the addition of children to RimWorld. Players will be given plenty of tools to help raise children, keep them happy, and educate them by allowing them the ability to spend time in class, explore nature, or even chat on the radio, among other things.

Other features in Biotech include the addition of new xenohuman factions, the addition of the vampire-like Sanguophages, and the ability to turn colonists into a mechanitor—a person with brain implants that lets the psychically command semi-living machinnes called mechanoids. There are also new super-mechanoid bosses, as well as new pollution mechanics.

Ludeon Studios recently released update 1.1 for RimWorld along with its first paid DLC, Royalty. The studio is working on hotfixes for other issues over the coming weeks but has plans for a content add-on to Royalty. Creator Tynan Sylvester noted some of the things he’s considering adding, and also reminded players that “none of this is decided 100% so please don’t take any of these are promises.”

Some concepts include a way to renounce a royal title that the player may not want; additional bulk production recipes; more combat psycasts; and additional content for quests since it would be “nice to have a few more variations.” A way for players to avoid fighting mech clusters and what could result from just having them on the map is also under consideration. Players can expect tests in the “unstable” branch of Steam in the future.

Sylvester also confirmed that RimWorld will have a version 1.2 “some day”. Unlike the current version, this one will cause quite a few things – like mods – to break. “We’re going to try hard to avoid unnecessary code breakages and keep documents about changes for all future updates, and without such a big Unity update, I hope mods in general will be easier or trivially easy to update than the 1.0 -> 1.1 shift. However, things will still inevitably need updating.”

Long story short, things are happening and the developer will update fans over the coming months. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

Ludeon Studios’ colony management/story-telling engine RimWorld has received its first major post-launch update. However, in an unexpected twist, it’s also received the first paid DLC pack with Royalty. The latter sees a faction, the Empire, joining the world and bringing their own brand of advanced technology to the Rim.

The entire purpose of the DLC is to complete some quests until eventually, you can hose the Imperial High Stellarch and his guards (before subsequently protecting them from any enemies). Eventually you can earn a royal title which also provides an Imperial psychic amplifier. It confers psychic abilities like mind control, paralysis and even inducing vomiting.

If you’re not interested in dropping $20 for the Royalty DLC, then the new 1.1 update should have enough to keep you busy. It offers a new quests tab, improved mod management, better UI scaling, new weapons, new animals and much more. Check out some of the patch notes below for more details.

New features

• UI now looks sharp at UI scales over 1.0. Great for 4K monitors.
• New Quests tab provides information about available, active, and historical quests.
• Added a new data-driven quests generation and management system.
• This should make it straightforward for modders and us to add or change quests without programming.
• UI now uses colored text to highlight important words like character names, places, and rewards.
• Improved the mod management interface and code.
• Mods now have a global package ID which lets them refer to each other.
• Mods can now define other mods they must be loaded after or before.
• Added a tool to automatically sort the mod list.
• Mods can now define other mods that they depend on. Shortcuts allow the player to easily download required mods.
• Mods can now define other mods that they are incompatible with. The interface will warn players about incompatibilities.
• Added loading screen tips. These are short bits of text helping the player understand an obscure aspect of the game. They’re displayed during loading.
• Loading screen now displays present and active expansions and mods.
• Added room stats gizmo, which displays the stats of the room containing a selected building, at a glance.
• Added recon armor, a lighter variant of marine armor.
• Added EMP launcher weapon. It fires EMP grenades a long distance.
• Added smoke launcher weapon. It fires smoke grenades a long distance.
• Added smoke grenadier enemy.
• Added a planet population slider to the planet generation parameters.
• Added animals: Bison, donkey, duck, goat, goose, guinea pig, horse, sheep, yak.
• Added ‘tortured artist’ trait. The character has a permanent mood debuff, but gets art inspirations from low mood.

Destiny

For many of us who never really got into MMOs but enjoyed first person shooters, there was Destiny. Launched in a disappointing state but possessing solid gun play and excellent mission design at the highest level (read: raids), the very nature of Destiny pushed us to obsess about it. When is Xur coming, what Exotics will he have, doing the Nightfalls and raids at reset time, a secret quest that’s been discovered – Destiny just scratched that itch to an insane degree.

Ludeon Studios’ RimWorld, a sci-fi survival/base management title inspired by the likes of Dwarf Fortress, has left Steam Early Access and is available now for PC. Having begun as a Kickstarter project in 2013, RimWorld has gone on to sell over one million copies. Check out the launch trailer below for a better idea of what the game is about.

As three survivors of a shipwreck, you’re tasked with survival. That means building a base, hunting, farming, mining, and so on for resources (depending on your surroundings). Sooner or later, other colonists will join you, and each has their own character to manage. On top of repelling attacks from enemy factions, players will witness relationships formed and broken, and ultimately plot their escape from the world.

One of RimWorld’s biggest hooks is the AI Storyteller, a personality that affects the random events that occur. Three Storytellers – Randy Random, Cassandra Classic, and Phoebe Chillax – are available, and they bring random chaos, balanced difficulty, and a relaxing experience, respectively. If you already own RimWorld, then the 1.0 version is the same as Beta 19, but with tons of bug fixes and the ability to control the food that colonists eat.

Ludeon Studios’ RimWorld, a survival/colony management/base building title that was inspired by Dwarf Fortress, will finally hit its 1.0 release on October 17th. Though the developer hasn’t really discussed what’s coming after launch, there are, according to them, “a variety of interesting directions to go with the game.”

Considering RimWorld has been in development for more than five years, we wouldn’t put it past the studio to gather their bearings before laying out a roadmap. However, players who have been involved since Early Access began will get one big new feature: Food restriction. “1.0 is mostly the same as Beta 19, with a lot of bug fixes. The only significant new feature is a new food restriction system that allows you to determine what your colonists and prisoners are allowed to eat,” the announcement states

Though RimWorld has many of the same rudimentary principles as Dwarf Fortress, it has its own little quirks and interesting additions. Players can have different AI storytellers who can guide the direction of a single playthrough’s narrative. You can choose between something completely random, a more relaxing time, or a steadily building challenge curve.

New features added to RimWorld since Beta 19 include new automated turrets, water mills, and even a gauntlet of sorts before finally escaping. What are your thoughts on RimWorld finally releasing? Let us know in the comments. For more information on what to do with a modded playthrough, head here.

Rust

Before people associated “building” and “killing random strangers in a wide-open map” with Fortnite, they were doing these things in Rust. Many of Rust’s structures can be fairly simple, usually ramps, ceilings, doors, gates and so on of different materials. However, these can be combined in different ways to craft absolute fortresses full of storage boxes with code locks, automated turrets, barricades and much more.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain’s open world was okay and not exactly a shining example of the genre. However, where it delivered was in the number of ways players could exploit the systems to crazy effect. Guards could be distracted with inflatable decoys, players could surf down slopes with boxes, collapse towers on top of enemies, the list goes. The sheer variety in tackling objectives, whether through pure stealth or crazy ingenuity, also made up for the conclusion.