That's fair enough. The health system alone is pretty gruesome, and it's easy to get attached to disposable pawns if you treat them like Sims. A few runs of trying to save "everyone" is soul-crushing enough as-is. Horrible possibilities aside, it just takes a mature mindset to process and respond to every threat or disaster that happens to your colony circumstantially.

That said, I think it's a wonderful system of skill expression that also rewards the opposite style of play. Running a prison pretty much requires the same work as a greenhouse or hotel. Stockpiling drinks and decadent meals can be more lucrative than mass-manufacturing coke. Organ harvesting looks crude and unnecessary once... well who am I kidding, organ harvesting is always lucrative unless you don't get raids.

Perhaps RimWorld isn't for kids. But for teens and adults, it's kinda like a smorgasbord of all the best strategy game concepts rolled into one. And all that being said, the game still isn't offensively explicit or depraved. If you have a specific goal in mind (like the Royalty DLC questline), your run can stay pretty focused without resorting to cannibalism or humanleather parkas. I think the war-crimes reputation of RimWorld turns a lot of people away from the more fulfilling and benign gameplay loops. You can play it like the Sims, if you accept that your neighborhood will be raided by offended tribes and locals. And that your Sims can get carcinoma.

I’m a grown man and I quickly fell into a flowchart mindset when I started, where I checked if a raider: A) Had skills I needed and an appropriate personality, and B) was healthy. That decided if he was scrapped for parts, sold wholesale or recruited. There were counted instances where NPCs didn’t end up in the meat grinder, as viable members of society were few and far between, and they had to be lucky enough to be incapacitated instead of dying in a kill box.

It took a conscious effort not to do this kind of morbid activities. I found late into my Rimworld experience that healing and releasing prisoners nets you good relations with other factions. After releasing 5 or so of them with a full belly and no injuries the tribes and cities around you decide “Hey, you’re alright, mister, we won’t raid you anymore”. Except for pirates, space pirates will never like you. So they either become chicken feed, an involuntary organ donor or a couch, maybe all three.

Time and effort and resources put into helping people that came specifically to kill you doesn’t happen spontaneously and I doubt a kid would favor that style of play. I wouldn’t want my son to tell me stories of how he turns people into a log or how his cyber super soldier can level 100s of tribesmen with a minigun by himself.

I’d rather introduce him to other war crime sims like Factorio where humans aren’t the subject of his ire.

It's just the opposite for me. I think ethics is done right in Rimworld. Doing the right thing should never be the efficient option. I have more issue with the constant violence in there though.

Also I dislike Rimworld becaus it's the forever game. I was happy with the early betas which were winnable, but the recent builds just feel like a treadmill with the game always trying to rip down what you've built up.