Rustown Drops Combat for Stealth and Puzzles in a Post-Pandemic Slum
Plotrick, a mobile studio moving to PC, built an action game with no combat, a deliberate design choice to keep the protagonist sympathetic in a world of discrimination.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
At BIC2026, Plotrick showed Rustown, a top-down action adventure where a girl searches for her missing father in a slum built by survivors of a virus that erodes intelligence. The player has no attack moves and must sneak, gather items, and solve puzzles. The studio removed combat because beating up marginalized people made the protagonist look like a villain.
Plotrick's Rustown is set after a pandemic caused by the FEVID virus, which leaves survivors with varying cognitive decline. Those affected are called derogatory names and pushed into the decaying slum of Lastown. The player controls a girl with the same condition who enters the slum to find her father, who disappeared.
The game is a top-down action adventure, but the player has no attack options. Progress comes from finding alternate routes and collecting items, like trading a key for cider at a vending machine while dodging patrolling guards. Getting caught means taking damage and fleeing.
Early development allowed fighting zombie-like enemies, but the team cut combat. Designers said beating up people in unfortunate circumstances would cast the protagonist as a villain. The shift to exploration and puzzle-solving was a major challenge, according to co-representative and CTO Hwang Jun-young.
Localization is tricky because characters with cognitive decline speak in simple, halting language, and in-game letters are written at a basic level. The main story runs 6 to 7 hours, about 9 with side stories. Completion is about a year away.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.