It’s the end of times. Humankind is all but dissipated. With the lack of resources and ability to repopulate, someone has to play God. That person is you. Ragnorium is a brand new planet recolonization simulator, where the player commands clones to do thou bidding and attempt to repopulate the human race. Developed by Vitali Kirpu and published by Devolver Digital, Ragnorium has just come out of early access and you can pick this up on Steam storefront.

The end times are near, humankind’s last chance is through a bunch of clones who have no idea what they are doing. Lead your naked bunch of plebs to a state of self-management and prepare them for the onslaught of the holy crusade. Much like many colony sims before it, you can research technologies to better prepare your clones for the upcoming trials and tribulations.

Research starts off as primitive, but the more influence you gain during your tenure as a God unlocks better things to research. As you gain influence and the elders see your colony as thriving, you can launch more shuttles to further improve life on the planet, or if you so wish, you can launch a nuclear warhead to decimate the enemies.

Starting a new colony is relatively simple; pick a planet and what you wish to drop with your clones, and get those cavemen to work. Along the way, you will be appointed particular quests to complete for experience, influence, skill cubes, or special items. However, I found some of the main quests were shut behind massive enemy entities who would wipe the colony in mere seconds. While my plebs were dancing around fires praying for rain trying to scramble stone and flint, the group of guards seemed like God’s.

I found the enemies to be extremely interesting, ranging from harmless critters to hunt for meat, to aggressive critters, mutated old colonists who beg to be killed, rebel groups, and holy warriors. Each faction has different elements, and weapons can have elemental attributes reached through research. There are 3 main game styles/difficulties; Extreme Mode which will give you random events that you can spend influence on or gain influence from but affect the world and colonists around you.

Zenlike mode removes these random events and Zen mode, which also has a tutorial. These events can be a simple outbreak of enemies added to the world or some buffs for your colony. The buffs, however, cost influence points, so you have to think of the implications and influence these may affect. During my time playing, there was no fast-forwarding of the game, but in the latest patch notes, the developers have added one, making the long nights and sleep times much more bearable.

The game ran well, on an RTX 3070 TI, 5800x, and 32GB of RAM. With maxed-out settings I averaged 80FPS. The world and models, although well designed, visually left much to be desired. Most objects just seemed to look funny and the palettes were awfully muddy.

The background audio seemed to only comprise a few tracks and I definitely noticed the repetitive elements of the audio within a couple of hours of playing. The enemies and characters have their own quips when scrolling past them, with mutated colonists begging to be killed.

All and all, after playing a few different colony sims I was hoping for a sneaky little indie to knock my personal favorite RimWorld off of its top spot. Although fun to play, it had its downsides with repetitiveness and muddy-looking models. Even though the general design was great, they seemed out of place in a seemingly polished environment. I would recommend it to any colony sim buff as it is a unique experience and being set in a 3D world, this game could have some major potential with further updates.

Written by: Bigfoot