My early Steam Next Fest highlight is like an idle Stardew Valley, but I promise it's not as distracting as it sounds

When I played Stardew Valley for the first time on Nintendo Switch, I lost a good chunk of an overseas trip farming crops, exploring the town, and romancing Abigail befriending the neighbors. So when Rusty's Retirement, an idle farming sim, reared its head as part of Steam Next fest, I was a little worried.

Rusty's Retirement is designed to sit at the bottom of your screen and largely play itself while the user does something else. Specifically, it recommends playing while you "work, watch videos, or play other games." Nestling in the bottom 25% of my screen, it can be scaled up if you'd rather check out its pixel animations in a bit more detail, but I can confirm that Rusty and co trundle away quite happily no matter what I'm doing elsewhere. I could be browsing YouTube, or, like right now, writing an article. I was even pleased to discover that I could boot up a second Steam game and Rusty's Retirement wouldn't so much as flinch.

My experience of how easy it can be to get lost in Stardew Valley means that I know how Rusty's Retirement sounds. It's all very well for something to be an 'idle' game, but that can quickly go out the window once you get too invested and cross into 'active' game territory. Thankfully, at least with the Steam Next Fest demo I've played so far, it's clear that steps have been taken here to try and avoid that. By default, Rusty's Retirement sits underneath other windows, and I've often forgotten that it's running quietly in the background. 

Whether by accident or design, Stardew Valley's day-night cycle incentivizes fitting as much activity into a single day as possible. By contrast, Rusty's Retirement is deliberately sedate. The elderly Rusty and his robotic pals move gently around the screen, crops grow slowly and often re-seed automatically, and those aforementioned robots are designed to automate big chunks of the game. The slow pace almost reminds me of the kind of mobile game that would let you pay to speed things up, but obviously those features aren't present here - in fact, the full version will feature a 'Focus Mode' that slows down the speed at which crops grow.

Perhaps once every 30 minutes or so, I'll turn my attention back to the demo to find an empty field, but it only takes a few seconds to sow a new collection of seeds and let Rusty get back to work. I've been genuinely surprised by how easy it is to set Rusty's Retirement going and get on with something else. I've booted up other games while it ticks along in the background, wandered off to do things away from my PC, and even written this article inside an hour while I've had it up on my other monitor. If this was Stardew Valley we were talking about, I'd be firmly stuck on my first paragraph, all while deep in the mines.

The demo for Rusty's Retirement is available now as part of Steam Next Fest. It's missing a few features - a handful of characters are locked, and there'll be more space for planting in the full release - but it's an otherwise excellent demo, full of the charm that defines this genre, all while smashing its idle brief. Off the strength of what I've played so far, it seems likely to be an instant pickup when it releases later this year.

Lose even more of your time with our list of the best farming games.