West of Dead Review — Russell Troxel

It’s been about a month now since the protests for racial and social justice began and, though it seems to have fallen out of the American news cycle, the protests and injustices continue. I know that continuing to pay attention to these events can be tiring, both physically and emotionally, but I urge you to not look away because some very important changes are starting to be made. This isn’t to say that every waking minute of your day must be devoted to social reform, because that would probably leave you an exhausted, jaded shell of your former self. Make sure to take some time to decompress and take your mind off the modern stresses. As you know, I’ve been using those times to continue the relatively frivolous pursuit of game reviews to help me unwind, and hopefully to help some of you. So this week, I took a look at the supernatural Western odyssey West of Dead.

West of Dead is the story of a dead man trapped in a version of Purgatory styled as a hyperbolic American Wild West with an artistic style heavily inspired by the works of comic book creator Mike Mignola. When the game begins, the main character has no memory, presumably caused by the trauma of dying and having his head replaced with a shattered, ever-burning skull, but soon after learns his name is William Mason. Now dead, Mason would normally travel either East or West, West of Dead’s way of referencing Heaven and Hell without tying it to any particular belief system in spite of setting the game in Purgatory, but is unable to thanks to the mysterious Preacher. Apparently hand-picked by Death, Mason must fight through the minions of The Preacher and the various horrors of Purgatory to confront the corrupt clergyman, which would be difficult but Mason has one advantage: whenever Mason is slain, he wakes up on the floor of the saloon that greeted him on his entry to Purgatory. Through these resurrections, Mason will become more powerful and gain new skills to help him in his quest to vanquish the malicious minister.

In the same way that last year’s Warsaw pulled so many ideas from Darkest Dungeon, West of Dead has so many of the same ideas as 2018 release Dead Cells I’m surprised there hasn’t been any legal action, from the MetroidVania gameplay loop to the show-offy gallery of unlocked items at the beginning of each run. Each time Mason awakens on the floor of the bar, he will set off on an adventure through the same levels but with randomized layouts wielding randomized weapons. As Mason fights his way through the many regions of Purgatory, he will be gathering iron and sin, typically dropped by defeated enemies. Iron is used to purchase new weapons and tools from a traveling vendor while sin is traded to a mystic woman to cause new weapons and tools to be available in subsequent adventures. Mason can also unlock new gear by defeating especially powerful enemies and receiving the memory of the weapon, because it seems a person’s capabilities in Purgatory are limited to what they can remember about the land of the living. In addition to these two currencies, Mason will find shrines that allow him to bolster one of his three attributes: firearm proficiency, physical fitness, and a stat the developers don’t want to call magic but really should just be called magic because it includes abilities such as teleportation and conjuring dynamite out of thin air. These upgrades are one of the two ways I think West of Dead expands on the excellent ideas of Dead Cells because, unlike in Dead Cells where players could ignore one or more of their three attributes with the right equipment, West of Dead motivates players to improve all of their skills equally for maximum reward. The second way West of Dead expands on the Dead Cells model is the memories of life that can be found by players. These memories tell the stories of Mason and other characters before they died and do a great job of explaining motivations in short but captivating 20- to 30-second clips and are the best use of the game’s narrator.

This might qualify as burying the lede, but the narrator of West of Dead is none other than the human personification of whisky, Ron Perlman. Perlman, as the voice of Mason, narrates the game in a way reminiscent of gaming’s greatest narrator, Logan Cunningham in Bastion, but has a harder job because, unlike Bastion which had a traditional start-to-finish story, West of Dead, by virtue of it’s roguelite structure, revisits the same scenes and actions over and over, which will eventually make anyone get tired of hearing the same lines repeatedly, regardless of the fact that Perlman absolutely nails the delivery. I don’t know what happened to Perlman in his 70 years on Earth, but his ability to convey a sense of bone-deep weariness mixed with the threat of unstoppable violence is undoubtedly the strongest of the three pillars cementing the game’s excellent theme, with the others being the game’s music and art style. As I mentioned earlier, the game’s art style is very clearly inspired by the comics of Mike Mignola like Hellboy and B.P.R.D. The bold colors and deep shadows serve to make this game full of visual contrasts, which plays into the games mechanics, as Mason can’t shoot anyone he can’t see and so must make sure to light the lanterns scattered about the levels. Lastly, though I’m fairly ignorant of any non-bluegrass country music, I think the game’s soundtrack is excellent, full of both subtle guitar-string plucking for moments of exploration as well as big boisterous ensembles playing catchy, exhilarating numbers during the game’s many gunfights.

So far, I’ve had mostly positive things to say about West of Dead but I have some bad news: this game just isn’t finished. It is extremely weird to me to load up a game and be greeted by a message on the title screen celebrating the game leaving the beta period and yet be confronted by so many issues related to needing more time. The most frustrating of these issues is that this game needs a lot more explainers and tooltips about the game’s more subtle mechanics. I was incredibly frustrated to discover that West of Dead has a very different definition of what freezing an enemy means, but what made it worse was that, in order to learn about this discrepancy, I had to spend about 60 hard-earned sin in order to unlock a freeze gun that I quickly learned I hated. The same issue exists for things like critical hits and whatever “plague” is. As a person who has played a lot of video games in my life, I can make general guesses as to their meanings but when I’m spending resources across five or even ten lives, I need more information about what I’m spending those resources on. West of Dead also has quite a few bugs that, while not severely damaging play, make it seem unpolished and incomplete. I’ve seen instances where the game’s subtitles don’t match the narration, had Mason move through cover as though it weren’t there, and have dialogue occur that doesn’t match what actually happened in the game. Worst of these unpolished bits are two bugs I’m apparently stuck with: any time I pick up a rifle weapon for the first time in a run, I get the tutorial for how rifles work in spite of the fact that I’ve seen it about 50 times before, and, upon resurrecting in the saloon, Mason will comment that the barkeep has something to say to me, but it’s just a generic “good luck out there” message. Like I said, these things don’t impact play severely but they absolutely affect the perception of it.

As I write this review, I genuinely want to stop and play more West of Dead instead because I want to see the next new fight, hear more of Perlman’s excellent lines, and unlock something new, but that’s only because I’ve already paid money for this game. For those of you out there who are wondering if you should pick it up, I must caution you as this game needed maybe a month or two more of development time to fix these bugs and do a better job of explaining mechanics. If you’re dead set on getting West of Dead, I recommend finding it for a sale price, doubly so if you’re looking at the game’s first bit of DLC that launched alongside the main game.