Rusted Mossis a solid Metroidvania that manages to incorporate some novel twists in terms of both gameplay and narrative, featuring a strong cast of believable female characters along with a physics-based grappling hook traversal mechanic that makes exploring the game’s overgrown environments an exercise in skill and creativity.
Developed by a trio of gifted femaleindie gamedevs known as Faxdoc, Happysquared, and Sunnydaze,Rusted Mosshas benefited in several ways thanks to the team’s unique perspective. In an interview, theRusted Mossteam spoke with Game Rant about how they dealt with the notorious challenges that female developers often face in the industry, along with how their life experiences are reflected in the game’s narrative.
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The Rusted Moss Team Avoided Female Dev Horror Stories
It’s an unfortunate reality that women face numerous challenges in the gaming industry, with stories of sexual harassment and worse being myriad among development studios. Beyond the workplace, female developers and even female characters are often targets of discrimination by gamers, adding further stress to an already demanding career. As a small, insulated team, thedevelopers behindRusted Mosshave thankfully managed to curate a supportive environment to do what they love. As Happysquared explained when asked how their team has dealt with this,
But outside of that [experience], mostly no. It’s more because we’re very insular. We built a safe space for ourselves and just haven’t interacted much outside of our community that I was just telling you about. We basically just talk to people that we know are chill, cool, and supportive. So we’re lucky that they are supportive and that we haven’t had to deal with the horror stories that other female devs encounter when they need to go outside their own group.
One of the advantages of being part of a small team is thatfemale game developerscan be more selective in who they interact with, rather than being forced to work with toxic individuals in a larger studio. The fact that theRusted Mossteam has had a mostly positive experience with their development will hopefully inspire other female indie developers who have no doubt heard some of the horror stories to come out of the industry.
Rusted Moss Offers A Refreshing Female Perspective
Although the narrative inRusted Mossis not explicitly related to gender, the team enjoyed exploring theroles of the female charactersin their world and how those characters could be used to express and “vent” about some of their personal experiences. Sunnydaze explained that,
Most of the characters in the game are female and some of them have been suspected of being changelings because they’re melancholic. Or they’ve shown irritation. They’re not perfect children all the time. They show more emotions than a girl is “supposed” to show, so I think that that’s part of it.
Part of it is also having lots of female characters in a non-sexualized way talking to each other, even if the narrative of the game is totally not related to gender. Since the default in a lot of games and media is male, just having lots of female characters going through a story just being normal and having adventures is something I enjoy.
Most games and media are male-centric, and oftentimes games that do have largely female casts tend to facecriticism for overly sexualizing female characters.Rusted Mossdepicts female characters in a more grounded manner: they feel like real people who are simply part of an adventure, each with their own set of flaws and character quirks. Reactions to the cast have been expectedly mixed, with some players predictably asking “Where are all the male characters?” while others find the cast relatable and compelling. It’s considered normal for a game to feature mostly male characters, andRusted Mosshas flipped this convention around in a believable way.
Rusted Mossis available on PC.
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