Always (literally) farming with my boys.
Rusty’s Retirement is the perfect bite-size game with a different kind of resource to manage: our screen.
I love games that have really serious grinding curves, where it’s like, OK, I have to grind a lot to get what I want. But I also really like games that kind of play themselves while I’m not playing playing them — the AFK kind of like mechanics. This is kind of the perfect combination of that crazy grinding curve of a farming sim or MMO and an idle game. And it works so well.
So essentially, we’re a little robot. We have to tend a farm, but the farm is located as an overlay on our screen while we’re doing our work or watching a video or playing a game. It’s always going. Tending to our farm involves planting crops or building animal stables, but it’s all within that really intense grinding curve where we have to to manage putting this amount of plots here and plant this amount of this kind of vegetable. Click, and move out of the way. And then we just watch our dude do it all.
As we collect our harvests, we earn gold and biofuel, two kinds of currencies that we need to expand our farm or buy new buildings. And when we expand our farm it starts taking up more and more of our screen and we have to zoom in and out to see it all. It just KEEPS GROWING.
It’s a very simple kind of farming simulator factorial kind of game that eventually it gets to a point where we complete that farm and we unlock another one with a different layout. There’s one that has a river through it, so we have to think about, okay, this river is disrupting where these plots of land are and I need to figure out what size plots am I going to use in what areas. Where are the robots going to go? Where are the boxes going to go? We have to think more deeply about it, in a way. And then we unlock another farm that’s like a desert, and we have to be more mindful about water. Then we unlock another one that’s even bigger, and it also expands up. So we have more up here and more down here.
But the coolest, and more important resource is our screen and kind of managing that and being smart with what’s available to us and what we want to see behind it when the game is open. And yeah, it’s open all the time. ALL THE TIME. Just let the little robot go. Watch the veggies come in, and let him keep moving.
He’s retired now, so it’s all okay.
This review was based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest LIVE on May 14, 2024. Images and video courtesy Mister Morris Games.
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