Review: Rusty’s Retirement is a well-oiled idle farming sim

Rusty’s Retirement is a cute little game that is meant to sit at the bottom of your screen, filling up only about 25-33% of the desktop depending upon the size of your monitor. We thought that this was a really cute way to play Idle games.

After Rusty’s Retirement was released, we’re now starting to see a lot of developers creating games in this similar lower-thirds style, such as 9FingerGames’ My Little Life.

I love this idea because you can have your game open and still have access to the screen. 

Rusty’s Retirement

The gameplay for Rusty’s Retirement is very simple, which is great since there’s nothing in the way of a tutorial. You’re kind of just thrown into the shallow end and you fiddle until things just work. 

You play mainly as Rusty, a robot that has – gasp – retired. We don’t know what he retired from, but we know where he’s retiring to; a lovely little stretch of land to farm upon. Like most capitalist societies, we need coins and something called biofuel to fund our farms. But, good news! You start with a patch ready for seeds and the first crop is free to plant. 

If you’ve ever played idle games, you’ll know that things start slow, then zoom ahead, only to halt to a slog in late-stage gameplay. Rusty’s Retirement sort of does this; there comes a time when you’re waiting for all the crops to unlock to start your next farm. But, since everything is so well automated, you don’t really have to feel the grind. You just get to a point where you don’t have to do a thing and you rake in all the rewards.

Congratulations, you are now the 1%. Just watch out for guillotines. (Guillotines sold separately.)

That’s putting the cart before the horse, though. So, let’s rewind. Once you’ve planted your zero-cost crop, you’ll eventually have enough money to buy other robot helpers, additional crop patches, decorations, and even animals. 

Honestly, it’s at this early stage that you figure out your strategy. This game thrives on three types of farms. The first is crop farming which is what will net you most of the profit but requires a lot of time and resources upfront to get it automated. 

Everything runs off crops, even bots.

The second is through bublets and bushes. (Bublets are basically bees.) This type of farm is good for long-term, idle play, but is a moneysink initially. Even though this farm type is cheaper upfront, I recommend skipping it until after your farm is automated.

And the last type is animal farming. Again, some robot houses open up that help with this before others, but this is the very last thing you want to invest in. At least with the bublets, you would get biofuel, albeit at a slow rate. With animals, it’s just about collecting animal waste to fertilize the crops. 

With those out of the way, let’s talk about the robot houses and why you should skip most of them to get the most expensive ones first. 

Your robots are Rusty, Haiku, Forbic, Pinion, Echo, Slate, Splunk, and Sonnet. 

Rusty is your main guy and Haiku is a second Rusty. They both do exactly the same thing, so prioritize getting Haiku first. 

These guys have their own individual tasks that you can move around to organize how you want them to move. For instance, you can have Rusty focus on farming and Haiku on watering.

This is where the game tries to tempt you into building houses that aren’t a priority because they’re simply cheaper. Skip them and go straight to Echo.

Echo is the robot that will upgrade the individual bots that you can place around the farm. Bots are not to be confused with Robots. Robots are sentient, they do what they want and half of them can’t be told what to do. 

Bots, however, come in all flavors of farming, watering, biofuel making, fertilizer collecting, animal feeding, etc. Every single bot can be upgraded to be faster or hold more and you need Echo to do that. Once you have him, you’re good to start upgrading and your farm will really start moving.

Only 1’s and 0’s, no 2’s in sight.

From here, you’ll have all your bots upgraded and working on getting you coins and fuel. This is where you want to put some focus on hoarding resources to save for the most expensive robot. Splunk is pricy and you’ll have to save up, but when you get him, he will auto-seed the land for you.

This means that when a patch is empty, he will come through and seed it – usually with crops that you still need. To open up more crop types, you need to have harvested a determined amount of prior crops. 

With Rusty, Haiku, Echo, Splunk, and your upgraded bots, you’re set. You never have to do more. However, that’s no fun.

At this point, it’s the dealer’s choice. You can go for Pinion, who will give you stats on the farm. I only found him useful when I couldn’t remember what I’d planted. He’ll tell you a breakdown of a lot of things, but most importantly, he lets you know what is in your patches.

Forbic is the bot that opens up the Bublets. This is where you’ll be able to buy fruit bushes, regular bushes, and decorative nature items. Sonnet is purely a shop for decorations.

And, finally, Slate is the bot that opens up animals. He will find fossils randomly in the crops and once you find a certain amount of fossils, you can trade that in with currency to buy pigs and cows.

That’s really it. You set up your farm in whatever way you like, by expanding and adding as makes sense for your gameplay. Now, you sit back and relax. 

Do you think they name the animals with words or binary?

Personally, I had Rusty’s Retirement open on my computer for literal days and it was really fun to come back the next day to see what resources I had and what more I could do with my farm.

Overall, this was a fun experience and I felt the pixel style was perfect for just hanging out at the bottom of the screen. 

I mentioned above that the game will cover a different percentage of your screen and that’s based on the specs of your monitor. On my main monitor, it takes up about 33%, but my second one is a TV. So, over there with a taller screen, it scales to about 25% of the surface. 

For me, I found it distracting on the main screen. I disliked having to resize everything and it always felt like I was missing something. But, it was perfect on my TV.

Additionally, if you don’t like it at the bottom, there are options that allow you to have the game vertical along the side of your screen and even a setting that stops it from overlaying. If you don’t want the screen in front of everything, it doesn’t have to be.

Overall, Rusty’s Retirement was a really cute game. I enjoyed it, but don’t be like me and forget there were other options for farms when you start a new game.

You have to unlock everything in one farm type to open up the others. Since there’s no tutorial or mention of other farms, it’s easy to forget. Or that’s just my ADHD.

I can’t really comment on the other farms just yet, I’m still working on the crops in the first farm. But, I’m assuming the process is much the same.

I definitely recommend Rusty’s Retirement. And, since there are other farms to unlock and play, you really get your value out of the $6.99 price tag.

If you want to check out Rusty’s Retirement, you can get it on Steam. If you want something with a bit more participation, you can check out our review of Botany Manor.