Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and procedurally generated story telling

I actually enjoyed Rimworld. I tend to only play AAA games (I'm a big fan of graphics) but given the high amount of reviews for Rimworld, I gave it a go. It was pretty interesting to see how the "story" played out. To start you build a party of randomly generated characters (single or multiple) that have both positive and negative stats and attributes and pick a spot on a map to begin. The world location adds different difficulty elements to your game - northern regions are cold (heating and outside exploration will be challenging), jungle regions are hot and characters are more prone to sickness.

Once you crash land on your chosen location its all about building shelter, farms for sustainable food, temperature control, power generation, protection from raiders, etc. Every so often a random event would occur such as bandit raiders which you need to combat to survive, or traders roam by, or even space debris may fall for materials to harvest. Sometimes the bandits will even kidnap one of your party members which can be crippling if that happened to be your doctor or carpenter.

It's a fun experiment to see how long the characters survive against all odds. Sometimes they have mental breakdowns and turn on each other, other times the raiders outnumber you and you perish, or even a harsh winter comes and your characters freeze to death. The game can be both fun and brutal!

If Maxis was still around, perhaps this niche would be fulfilled by the Sim games. Paradox grand strategy titles can also be story generators, particularly Crusader Kings II.

Rimworld is great, and easy to sink dozens of hours into. I tried it after getting into FTL, which has some similar aspects of randomness. Cranking the difficulty in rimworld also produces a very different gameplay experience.