From the archives: This feature was originally published in PC Gamer #305 (UK, June 2017). It appears below as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation.
No gaming genre can generate stories quite like the colony sim. Almost entirely unique to PC gaming, colony sims task players with building and sustaining a habitat for a group of AI characters, which could be anything from dwarfs to demons.
Although the player controls how the colony is shaped, constructing rooms or buildings and filling them with useful objects, they do not control the inhabitants directly. Instead, the colonists interact with their surroundings and other NPCs via AI systems that simulate their needs and desires.
Through these desires and the player’s ability (or inability) to meet them, colony sims produce incredible, incidental plotlines; tales of dwarves who delve too greedily and too deep, unleashing hordes of monsters into their fortress, of bitter rivalries between demonic creatures that tear apart the plans of an evil dungeon master, of prisoners who explode into riot because the warden forgot to b...
English (US)