Sometimes, you just want to cause chaos. This game lets you – and right now, it’s on sale.
If you miss the top-down chaos of classic GTA and wish someone would drop that formula into a ridiculous medieval setting, Rustler is exactly what you’re looking for.
It’s GTA, But With Horses (And Fewer Moral Consequences)
You play as "The Guy" – a bald, broke troublemaker with zero ambition and a lot of bad ideas. The world around you is a playground of feudal absurdity, where parking violations apply to horses and bards function as human boom boxes.
The gameplay is pure old-school mayhem. You can fight with swords, spears, or automatic crossbows, drift horse carts through villages, or just start throwing holy hand grenades when diplomacy fails. The missions swing between light satire and complete nonsense – from breaking into prisons to joining cults that believe the Earth is round. If the main story doesn’t interest you, you’re free to ignore it and just start fights with guards or fling manure at nobles.
The game's embrace of its own madness is also surprisingly polished. Your personal bard follows you everywhere and reacts to on-screen action, turning your fights into great musical performances. You can dress up as a knight, a guard, or even Death, and the game rarely questions your choices. It’s not a deep RPG, but it knows exactly what it wants to be – a crude, fast-paced sandbox full of bad decisions and worse consequences.
What sets Rustler apart from other indie open-world games is how confident it is in its tone. It doesn’t try to be realistic or emotionally complex. It wants you to laugh, wreak havoc, and maybe question how seriously we usually take historical settings in games. In that sense, it owes as much to Bully as it does to GTA: you're not just a criminal, you’re a petty, scrappy misfit punching far above your social class.
At its current price – $4.99 in Steam Sale – Rustler is an easy recommendation. It won’t change your life, but it will absolutely let you punch a bard, set fire to a weed field, and then gallop off on a stolen horse like nothing happened. Sometimes that’s exactly the kind of escapism we need, right?