Image via EA & screenshot by Bonus-Action
Despite being a game designed to be left alone and barely played for the majority of the time it’s open, Rusty’s Retirement has garnered more than 1,000 reviews and an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam in the less than 48 hours it’s been available.
Rusty’s Retirement is the productivity fix of your dreams
Developed by Mister Morris Games, who also created the amazing indie platform Haiku, The Robot, Rusty’s Retirement is a new type of idle game I doubt you’ve played before. Instead of running in the background in a sneaky hidden tab, it sits at the bottom or on the side of your screen and runs right where you can see and interact with it.
That’s the beauty of this game and why I think it’s had such a positive reception, with 1,351 positive reviews at the time of writing. To achieve this in the same weekend that Manor Lords was released is astoundingly impressive.
I’ve been playing all weekend to figure out exactly what makes it so good. For me, it’s the sense of progression it adds to your day without taking up an inordinate amount of time.
You begin with a simple farm where Rusty, a poor old robot who just wants to sit on a bench all day and rest, plants, waters, and harvests by himself. Everything is automated in Rusty’s Retirement apart from the seed-planting, at least until you’ve played and upgraded the farm for 20+ hours.
The progression is addictive yet staggered. You want to sit there managing the farm and planting seeds or rearranging buildings, but you can’t. Instead, you’ve got to wait for crops to be gathered to generate parts, then have them converted into Biofuel to run your little helper robots.
After one day (roughly 8 hours) I had 7 farms set up, a few NPCs helping me out, and two production systems where robots would pretty much do everything. As I write this, 16 hours in, I have even more production systems, double the farm space, a berry and pollen gathering garden, and I’m about to start setting up animal farming.
I’ve achieved this during two full days with Rusty’s Retirement, and I think I’ve maybe spent 20 minutes in total actually interacting with the game. You’d think the constant animations at the bottom of the screen would be a distraction, but I didn’t even notice it because I knew I’d done all I could.
When I finished a task, I checked in with the farm, planted what needed planting, purchased a building, or figured out what I was aiming for next. Then I got on with the next job I had to do. I mean, some of the time I was also looking at cute Pokemon baby clothes, but Rusty’s Retirement is perfect for both work and leisure time at your computer, so it’s fine.
My wife has ADHD and this game would be perfect for her. She finds it very hard to concentrate on a computer and has to leave her phone in another room if she’s working. With this game, she gets that time to focus on something between tasks that those with ADHD know are so important if you’re going to be able to engage your brain with your job.
Rusty’s Retirement is under a tenner and worth the money. There are multiple maps to unlock and, like I said, it gives you that feeling of doing something productive even if you’re entering data into a spreadsheet or mindlessly trawling Google for research purposes.
Thanks for reading! I intend on doing a full review of this game once I’ve spent enough time with it. If you’d like to read that and help support Bonus-Action going ad-free, consider following or becoming a member of our Patreon so you never miss a post. In the meantime, check out what Chris has to say about Fallout 76 and who should play it.
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