West Of Dead

PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

Life is a precious, fragile thing, and stupidly hard to hang on to in West Of Dead. This punishing Roguelike is as brutal as they come, your dead-again gunslinger doomed to repeatedly return to the start to bang his flaming skull against the wall for yet another repeated attempt. No matter how well each run seems to be going, how much gear you’ve acquired or progress you’ve made, it only takes one unlucky ambush to make short work of all your hard work. Even for a Roguelike, West Of Dead is unforgiving. Its redemption lies partly in its sense of style but particularly in its excellent combat, which, despite our frequent failures, has had us pushing for better and longer runs well past sundown.

Undead protagonist William Mason, a poncholoving gunslinger with Ghost Rider’s fiery face, is voiced by Ron ‘Hellboy’ Perlman, whose gravelly drawl superbly narrates Mason’s journey through a purgatory filled with monstrous creatures in pursuit of a mysterious preacher. The dark, cel-shaded comic book style really brings this apocalyptic Old West to life, with some lovely animations and moody weather effects adding rich layers of atmosphere to the game’s labyrinthine ghost town levels. The game’s striking and clever use of light and shadow does more than just convey the nightmarish setting, however – it also defines its exacting room-by-room shootouts.

Entering an area, each one containing shambling monsters and zombie marksmen, presents a challenge for which you can never entirely be prepared. Rooms are randomly generated and all encounters are different, the permadeath peril alongside the need for rapid tactical rethinking wracking the nerves. Areas are in partial darkness, and it’s not so much if enemies are present as where they are. You can’t lock on to unseen enemies, so lanterns can be lit to illuminate shadowy areas and temporarily stun enemies, allowing you a few free shots before you need to dive for safety behind one of a randomly placed set of destructible cover items.

Get close enough to said cover, and Mason will shoulder into a position from which he can safely shoot. It can only sustain a few shots before crumbling, but you can hop over or around it, or roll out of the way of gunshots, with red indicators telling you when an enemy has locked on. You have access to two weapons, and counting your shots and allowing for reload times is part of the moreish rhythm of each encounter. Once you’re intuitively reading the room and using weapons and abilities in your preferred playstyle, success can be rewarding – more than enough to drive you on to the next encounter with a spring in your cowboy boots.

Until you die for the hundredth time, that is. Often, especially the further in you get, you’ll come across rooms with little to no cover, while armed enemies never, ever miss. Each has two shots, and even performing a perfect dodge out of the way of the first could roll you right into the path of the second, as enemies track you with unerring precision. And don’t get us started on the bomb-spitting hellhounds or the larger meleeing hunters, when all that careful learning is thrown out of the saloon doors because they’re simply no respecters of the cover mechanic and you don’t yet have the firepower to take them down quickly enough.

For those with patience bordering on the masochistic, progress is ultimately all the more rewarding because of the precipitousness of the difficulty curve. But West Of Dead punishes new players the most, and the longest. Teleportation pads exist to save time progressing through those early areas, but they aren’t active until you’ve beaten the first boss, making the game’s initial stages unnecessarily cruel and lengthy. Worse, boring, since you’re forced to sit through the same tutorial lines of dialogue over and over again. No matter how cool Perlman’s voiceover is, this gets old very quickly. As Perlman himself is fond of telling us, time and again, “Fortune favours the persistent,” but that’s simply not true. There is nothing here, luck or otherwise, as a reward for your repeated runs, and any victory depends first and foremost on random starting items, placement and frequency of upgrade stations, potions, buffs and so on. Thrown back to the beginning of the game, it can be hugely dispiriting – more so the further you got in your last run – to be starting over with a pair of duff guns.

Except for some very subtle overall buffs gained by spending Sin points (along with iron, one of two resources you gather) with a creepy witch you meet between stages, nothing is carried over from your last run. Weapons, items and abilities that you buy or find are then ‘unlocked’, which in theory should make them more commonly found on repeated runs, but we don’t find this to be the case. The trader has better weapons to sell you for iron, but by the time you meet him early on in a run, you most likely won’t have collected enough iron to actually buy them from him. It seems strange that when you’re most in need of help, the game slams a door in your face.

A game this difficult, with everything to lose from permadeath, should at the very least feel fair; without any balancing of enemies against your character’s progress (something that Upstream Arcade has seemingly done none of), West Of Dead does not. Roguelikes are meant to teach hard lessons, and you do learn how to ace those shoot-outs the vast majority of the time, but there’s nothing you can do when the procedural generation deals you an impossible hand. We might be going back in for our nth run, but a lot of players will find there’s little to be learned from

West Of Dead’s endless, seemingly futile runs – except that, maybe, life is too short.

Progress is ultimately all the more rewarding because of the precipitousness of the game’s difficulty curve