I try to swing my rock in self-defense to no avail and I am brutally mauled. I am encountered by a wolf, who attacks me. So I’m just bumbling around in the woods like that, a probably-naked guy marching to nowhere while heaving a giant rock forward over and over, carrying on as God’s own fool. This early-access version of Rust offers nothing in the way of explanation or context, which in retrospect I will come to appreciate as a masterstroke.
I wander around in the woods for a couple minutes, completely unsure of what I want to do, or whether there’s any sort of objective I’m expected to complete. I can only hoist it over my head and violently swing it forward. I take stock of the only wealth I have to my name: the torch, which seems useless in broad daylight, and a big rock. The first time, I find myself in the woods somewhere, apparently naked. It’s been six years, so if you’re familiar with this game and something strikes you as inaccurate or impossible, my mistake. I will recollect them here to the best of my ability. I paid $20, and in the subsequent 26 minutes, I played three times. Bugs may happen, gameplay imbalances will abound, and you should know what you’re in for. The developers clearly spelled out on their Steam page that, look, this was not yet a finished product. My experience with this game was a special one, because at the time, Rust was branded as “early access” or something similar. From there, to hear others tell it, you can build structures, craft advanced tools, form alliances, and generally make something of yourself. It’s a first-person, open-world, massively-multiplayer survival game that drops you in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a rock and a torch. Continuing.Ĭonceptually, the game certainly seemed fun enough to try. I wholeheartedly agree with every opinion of it that anyone has ever had, even if those opinions directly conflict with one another. I have no idea whether this game is good or bad.
But most importantly, it noted the 26 minutes I spent in the world of Rust. It’s logged the hundreds upon hundreds of hours I’ve buried into games like Civilization and RimWorld. Steam was there for that, and Steam is there today on my work computer, patiently enduring uninstallations and reinstallations whenever I frantically clear hard drive space to make space for an exporting video project. This sounds like a lie but isn’t: upon pulling out the jumper, I had to wait and listen for the motherboard to make a little squeak before replacing it. The tower was permanently missing its cover, because every time I had to restart the machine, I first had to dig into the motherboard to remove the little plastic CMOS jumper for a moment and stick it back in.
It lived within them all, including the desktop PC so hideous that multiple burglars, in the process of lifting whatever they could grab from my apartment, clearly took one glance and correctly identified it as trash.
Steam is sort of the traveling bard of my gaming career, faithfully wandering from computer to computer since 2004.
It is the funniest video game I have ever played in my life. That would be the first and only time I ever played it. In August of 2014, I downloaded a computer game called Rust and played it for 26 minutes.