A few impotent stabs with your spear later (a weapon with the worst hit-detection in the game) and you're back to square one: naked and alone. Or you die in the dumbest of ways: taking a shortcut over a mountain, and a wolf walks up a near-vertical cliff face to surprise you at the exact moment that you don't have any of your good weapons equipped in the hotbar. You didn't hide quickly enough and the helicopter mows you down in the open, or you were too busy stalking a deer to notice someone has been stalking you for the past few minutes and literally all you hear is a shot before the world turns red and you drop to the ground. It's something that forces me to consider what Rust looks like from above, as a bunch of half-naked, violent, and greedy people try and create peace and security for themselves in a setting of profound anarchy.īut eventually, you die. It's existence is contrived, like everything else in Rust's deserted, semi-industrial wilderness, but still unsettling. There might be nothing very special in those supply drops… but there might be advanced gear that would be difficult or impossible to craft yourself.Īlternately, an attack helicopter sometimes appears to hunt down and kill any players that it manages to see, and its appearance is as chilling as it is unexplained. It's like someone gave Stanley Milgram a private island, a private army, and an endless supply of willing prisoners and said, "See what you can make happen here."Įvery few hours in-game, a cargo plane flies overhead and makes a supply drop that draws players from all around the map into a highly charged, dangerous confrontation over the mere possibility of treasure. Every player you meet is potentially a mortal threat or a potential ally, which is common enough for a survival multiplayer game, except that Rust also functions a bit like a social experiment. Rust is the closest I've ever come in a videogame to feeling like I was living in The Most Dangerous Game or The Ruum or any of those pursuit-and-survival classics that students read every year in middle school. Survival in Rust can become a fairly comfortable survivalist's fantasy if you stay alive long enough… but death comes swiftly and with little warning. The tech tree runs from Stone Age materials all the way to automatic weapons and heavy body armor. Then, after a few minutes of trial-and-error exploration of Rust's wilderness, you can start building crude tools out of loose materials, then using those tools to harvest more material to build better tools, etc. You wake up in a strange landscape, cold and naked with nothing but a torch and a rock to your name. If you're not familiar with Rust, or if you only know it as the Survival Game with Lots of Penises, it's actually a weirder and more interesting game than it first appears to be. Rust, the multiplayer survival game from Facepunch Studios, seems comfortable with both analogies. Inevitably, the process eventually repeats, and the to-do list gets longer and less fulfilling, which sounds a little bit like hell and a little bit like a parable about the human condition. This week, he visits the ultra-popular survival game.Īs I died screaming between a wolf's jaws, collapsing in the snow that dusts the top of the mountains while listening to it gnaw through virtual flesh, I had a realization: survival games are fun as long as they are about the threat of death.ĭeath itself is underwhelming: a gateway to an ever-increasing set of chores and tasks that you must repeat in order to recover your lost progress. Every Monday, Rob Zacny gathers the raw materials of Early Access and attempts to survive against a world of crazed, screaming unfinished games.
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