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Anomoly is the most recent DLC added to rimworld and stands apart as a particularly linear DLC with a narrow focus around a horror / scp style plathrough of the game. The main features of anomoly are the anomolies themselves, how we interact with them and void rituals. the DLC costs € 23.49
Anomolies and the Monolith
At the beginning of a playthrough with anomoly enabled there will be a broken monolith that your colonists can interact with, ignoring it will just let you play the game as normal with the odd anomoly encounter but activating it will enable the void research tree and cause more anomolies to appear, anomolies are horror tropes made manifiest by the void and vary from zombies to suspicously helpful golden cubes to unnatural weather, I will not be delving into each one as there is 20+ and part of the fun is expreriencing them for yourslef blind. by downing various anomolies you can capture them and research them to progress the monolith through its stages, unlocking more potent anomolies to appear and be researched to unlock more powerful rituals and researched technology, this research tab is seperate to the normal research tab and works differetnly with the monolith and captured anomolies serving as the research bench instead, bioferrite may also be harvested form anmolies and used to make potent new gear such as the hellcat rifle which is an assault ifle with an unerbarrel flame thrower. Different anomolies have different levels of security they need, while a basic zombie may only need a door and to be tied down something like a revenant may need a security gate and thick walls.
Overall I love these features, abig thing for me with DLC is adding variety to the game and this comes in buckets, my main complaint would be the difficulty of each anomoly is quite random, a horde of shamblers may wipe any colony due to their extreme tankiness while blood rain basically does nothing. They can also get tiring on repeat playtrhoughs which is the main critique of this DLC as it feels quite linear and many of these events are just "tanky monsters spawn outside, either fight them or hide inside"
Psychic Rituals
because what is sci fi horror without tempting unknown dieties from another dimension, Psychic Rituals serve as a way to gain boons using an invoker, the invoker of a ritual must be psychically sensitive in any way and chanters must also be psychically sensitive, these rituals will have a cost in either bioferrite or shards gained from killing anomolies and will give various effects that ae modifie by the quaity of the ritual, these effects include calling herds of animals to the map, reviving dead pawns, improving their skills or summoning more anomolies. Note that hostile cuktists may appear on your colony and attmpt to do their own rituals to harm you, it is best to just kill them as they tend to be poorly armed and armoured.
These rituals add a lot to a psychic focused playthrough and can be fun to roleplay as a void fanatical cult (note this dlc adds memes to the ideology DLC to facilitate this playstyle) and can be quite potent when cast at the right time and hostile ritualists can provide a fun threat that is not like the ususal ones.
conclusion
I am quite fond of anomoly as an individual, but I can see the flaws with it, it is quite linear in nature and doesnt offer much for general playtrhoughs other than some in game events that can be quite unbalanced against the player, its not fun to have your most important doctor get vanished to the labryinth during a raid, but the content itslef is high quality as we excpect from rimworld and overall I would give it a 7/10, with an asterisk that if you dont like the horror theming you can definitely skip this one and save your money.