Australia makes the news for just two reasons. Either it's announcing a new union of game developers, or it's banned a video game for no particular reason. Today, we will be discussing the latest game to be banned in Australia, and that game is RimWorld.
For those of you who haven’t played, RimWorld is a top-down construction, survival, and management sim where you play as a group of colonists stranded on an alien planet on the edge of known space. You must survive the elements, defend against raiders, relearn technology, and eventually escape on a spaceship. Colonists and the planet are all randomly generated, making each playthrough unique.
There’s a lot going on in RimWorld, where you have to manage everything from food and water to the colonist’s fickle moods. Some of those colonists can also have psychopathic tendencies, leading to things like an in-game serial killer.
Although the game can get serious very quickly, none of the inhumane acts that your poor stranded colonists might be forced to perform is particularly well animated. Characters are just oblong and limbless blobs and dead bodies are merely a different color. Most of RimWorld’s action is described in text boxes. And yet, despite this, the Australian Classification Board has “refused classification” to a coming RimWorld console port.
As noted by PC Gamer, the reason for the refusal (which basically amounts to a sales ban) was due to the depiction of “sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that they should not be classified.”
Anyone who’s actually played RimWorld would probably find this laughable in a country where Mortal Kombat 11 is readily available. PC Gamer notes that a similar issue happened with Disco Elysium, although the Classification Board eventually overturned their earlier ruling. Also, Australians have long been able to purchase RimWorld on PC, and that's unlikely to change even if the console port is effectively banned.
Oh, and by the way, this whole kerfuffle likely means there’s an unannounced RimWorld port on the way. According to the Classification Board, the port is being handled by Double Eleven Limited, a studio known for taking PC games and putting them on consoles. Expect an official announcement to come very soon.