My description of Rusty's Retirement has an unfortunate tendency to strike fear into the hearts of the people who I think would love this game most. "It's like an idle Stardew Valley!", I tell them. "It sits at the bottom of your screen and plays itself." What I didn't realize when I was espousing the virtues of this charming life sim, however, is just how quickly I'd try to hyper-optimize my cozy farm into an arable dystopia swarmed by mecha-farmers - or just how quickly the game would turn against me.
Rusty starts from humble beginnings. Your growing options are limited to cheap wheat, radishes, or carrots. A shed, a pond, and a patch of dirt is all this unlikely hero has to his name. Except, that is, for the bioconverter behind that shed - selling crops generates cash, but a collection of three different veggies can be turned into biofuel, which in turn is used to power and upgrade the little robots you can build that help harvest and water crops, speeding up Rusty's particularly sedentary agricultural pace.
