The experience I needed to keep me playing this time.
As much as I’d like to keep up the charade that I’m not a very competitive player in most games, the degree to which I’ve been lying to myself has become painfully evident as I get back into Rust. It’s been a while, but now I remember why I quit—this game brings the devil out of me. A petty, vindictive, camping-outside-your-door-at-night devil.
In my defense, I’m perfectly pleasant when you’re nice to me. But kill me outside the recycler after I’ve just traded hoards of junk for valuables? Menace. Maybe not the most threatening menace, as I’m not a very good shot, but at the very least I’m lobbing grenades in your door before you take me down. Cross me in any game where there was an option for peace and I will initiate revenge mode while also reverting to my elementary school defense of well, he started it.
My return to Rust, a social survival game for psychopaths that I’ve lost weeks of my life to over the past seven years, has been mostly chill, with only one or two instances of me going full Liam Neeson in Taken over a handful of metal fragments and a spoiled chicken breast. I tried to talk the first guy down: I knew he was my neighbor and didn’t want to start any beef, but he shot me as I left the Bandit Camp with recycled goodies.
Sometimes people in Rust won’t kill you if you appeal to some base instinct of shame. I tried shouting «I’m naked, I’m naked!» as many nude, unarmed Rust players do. No luck this time. Being the survival hellscape that it is, he didn’t care and dipped with my stacks of precious metals. I spent the next couple hours launching multiple failed revenge plots, with one half-success when I blew up his friend (and myself) in a feat so ridiculous I could hear them both cackling as the screen went dark.
I made the split-second decision to bolt through the front gate when I saw my neighbor had a friend opening and closing the door.
