Funny. This is only my fourth article about video games, but it’s the second one that needs to be opened with the words “I didn’t think I’d write about this game, but…” – and the “but” today is the fact that our website is full of articles about westerns. So much so that it can be made a motto. RockThisTown: all about rock and roll… and westerns. Why is that? Because it’s necessary. Personally, I am attracted to mechanics: in addition to cars, I am very fond of weapons, and especially revolvers, pump-action shotguns, lever-action rifles… In short, everything that is not automatic, because automation is for losers. Fan the hammer! Well, westerns, for obvious reasons, are packed to the brim with my favorite types of firearms. That’s why I love them. Besides, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley starred in Westerns, which means they bequeathed us such a video to watch. And video-play at the same time. So today I want to draw the attention of all fans of westerns to a game called West Of The Dead.
Graphics: black ink black
Let’s start with what immediately catches your eye: stylization. Even looking at a couple of screenshots, it becomes clear that the game is rigidly stylized – and I can’t find anything better than the word “tough”. Deep black color almost always occupies most of the screen space. There is a lot of it, and the rest of the colors are very happy to contrast with it. Personally, my eyes got used to it after 10-15 minutes, and the picture stopped being particularly cutting. But it’s not hard to imagine a person who doesn’t like this style.
The game obviously wasn’t for everyone, but we only took a look at the screenshots. But is it really that bad? After all, this is exactly the approach that those who make a game as an art object, and not as a product, should have: I don’t care that not everyone will like it. The main thing is to convey the vision! What I personally welcome: yes, even if not for everyone, but it is original, unique and creative – and all this is always commendable in itself.
In addition to flowers, we can talk about the environment, and I really liked it. Low-poly weapons are low-poly, and the textures are minimalistic, but due to all sorts of little things, such as the sawn-off bones and feathers hanging from the butt, it looks very thematic and entourage. The cards are executed very curiously and, in my opinion, very successfully. Can you imagine a chamber western? Without vast expanses of vast deserts, without wild forests and rivers? It’s like I can’t either. But the creators of West Of The Dead were able to imagine and were able to convey. The whole western style has been preserved – we just constantly travel in saloons, mines, narrow gorges, churches… No, of course there are maps like the City, the Battlefield, and even the Farm – but even in the latter, we are not allowed to walk through the corn fields. They are fenced off with a neat fence, and the player’s movement remains strictly corridor-based, and the shooting arenas are strictly limited in size. But this… works.
The pitch-black darkness that hides the fields from us – there is a lot of black in the game – is quite convincing and atmospheric. As well as the absurd layout of the City. Or a huge endless Church. All this helps to build an incomprehensible, different and different world from ours, which appears before us on the screen.
On the Internet, one of the reviews mentioned that the style of the game is very similar to the style of Mike Mignola. Comrade Mignola is the author of the Hellboy comics, but I haven’t read a single issue, so I can’t say how much the style of the game is similar or different from the comics. But Hellboy is not only here from the comics side: Hellboy personally voices the main character. The original one. That is, Ron Perlman. And he speaks well. At least, to me personally, Comrade Perlman’s gloomy purring seemed to add a lot to the overall mood of the game. It also helps that the monologues are written as if it were Max Payne, if he were a Western: every phrase is like that… noir, viscous, just mmm! Good. The only downside, perhaps, is that Ron Perlman is the only voice actor, and only the main character talks. Which, on the one hand, is again very atmospheric, but on the other… Well, as if it were necessary to voice at least the main villain. Moreover, in the process of passing, we – as they literally say in the game – collect the memories of not only the protagonist, but also the antagonist. So I want to conclude that Ron Perlman alone is still not enough.
"The wind was as cold as a knife blade. He brought me the smell of copper..."
Mechanics: absolution with a notepad
In terms of its device, West Of The Dead most resembles a small arcade game. However, arcades are not in fashion right now. What’s in fashion? That’s right, rogue! But I can’t stand them. All these rogue-like, rogue-lite and rogue-everything else are not for me at all. In general, arcades were not for me for a long time either, because they absorbed quite a lot of real money. It was only with the advent of emulators that I was able to truly appreciate and love arcade games. Fortunately, there is also salvation from rogue: the game still needs to be saved somewhere, and no one can stop you from manually making backups of saves on the computer. If you can’t stand all this rogue as much as I can, then here’s the path to the save folder: C:UsersUser_nameAppDataLocalLowUpstream ArcadeWest of Dead
By the way, saves are pure text, and are very easy to edit in notepad (although I still recommend Notepad++). Therefore, if you want to, say, get rid of randomness and register your favorite weapon, look for a line called _LoadoutNames. My favorite revolver, for example, is designated in the code as IW_RVFIFT. Just below the equipment line, the words _LoadoutLevels mark the level of our weapons – put any one. The maximum is the tenth. The tenth level is also the maximum for the hero’s skills (in both cases, by the way, you can set values above ten – it just won’t do anything), which are called _Strength, _Skill and _Will in the save (only if you decide to turn everything to ten – do not take the improvements on the altars, otherwise the game will go away in softlock). There, not far from the protagonist’s skills, is the number of sins collected, although they are designated as souls in the code. Anyway, if you want to reduce the grinding time, edit the value of the _Soul parameter.
Local bandits are represented with animal skulls instead of human ones. It's a simple and understandable allegory; I really like it sometimes. From time to time, the main character utters the phrase in plain text: "I suddenly felt like a hunter... and my prey is somewhere nearby right now."
The important question is: how much do you need to resort to all these tricks? Well… First of all, West Of The Dead is a great opportunity to practice. Especially if you are new to such things. It’s not that common to find a game in which a save is pure text. So I recommend trying to make some changes, at least for the sake of overall development. But if you try to answer this question a little more subjectively…
Well, first of all, in my opinion, there is a certain imbalance. Some levels are extremely simple, but when I got to the Churchyard… ugh. I’m not a hardcore player. I spent two hours in the Churchyard, and this was gradually increasing my health, adjusting the level of weapons…and replaying specifically the Churchyard. If I had to start over from the beginning after every death, and even without the opportunity to make myself a little stronger, I would kill at least a day to walk through the Churchyard. If it had passed at all. And besides, honestly grinding sins to open all the items seems like it’s taking too long.
And then if it’s still honest to wait until it all randomly falls out… Whereas the game is quite small. The number of cards can be counted on your fingers (there are exactly ten of them), and the plot doesn’t last that long. From my point of view, West Of The Dead is able to attract for 4-5 evenings – or, if converted, for one and a half days. For the weekend, basically. And spend the whole day on one level, waiting until you get a certain layout, running through the same corridors from time to time… Some people like to memorize the mechanics and replay the same moment in a circle until everything goes as smoothly as the fattest butter. But personally, I find such a pastime boring, no matter how interesting the gameplay is.
Gameplay: Random Hell torment generator
Gameplay. That’s the most important thing in the game, isn’t it? So, as befits a good arcade game, the gameplay is executed according to the formula “easy to master, (very) hard to become a master.” Let’s start with the control: it is carried out with eight buttons, everything is extremely simple and very clear. Somewhere on the Internet I saw a mention that we have a console port here, and that keyboard and mouse control is very inconvenient. I can’t confirm or deny this statement: from the very beginning, I sat down to play with the gamepad. Because, well, damn it… If you still don’t have a gamepad, then you probably don’t play games often enough to actually finish reading this article up to this point. So just play with the gamepad and may you be happy.
It feels like playing with a gamepad… It’s uneven. Well, that is… It’s very cool to break into another arena, cover two nearby enemies with a shotgun, then finish off the more tenacious of them with a revolver, throw a tomahawk at the third enemy, empty everything left in the revolver into the fourth and throw a stick of dynamite at the last opponent. It just sounds cool, even in words, with minimal imagination, and when you manage to pull it off in the game, it feels great. Another thing is that in the end, at levels like the aforementioned Churchyard, when enemies turn into a sponge for bullets, and their attacks are capable of killing our hero with two or three hits, nothing like this can be depicted. You have to tactfully sit in shelters, roll carefully, and wait for a recharge… The pace of the game drops a lot, and it feels extremely strange. It’s as if the gameplay was designed for something faster and more adrenaline-fueled, rather than a long shootout from hiding.
There are also irregularities in the balance of objects. For example, I can hardly imagine a game without a tomahawk, which does just catastrophic damage. There is also a very useful thing called a shield, which, although for a short time, completely blocks the damage caused to the player. The shield can even breathe life into later levels of the game, allowing the hero to leave his hiding place and return to a fast and adrenaline-fueled battle for at least a couple of seconds – this item is so powerful. This raises the question: what if, by the will of the random number generator, the shield does not fall out? Was the race wasted? Well, if not for nothing, then it will definitely be much more difficult and slower, because you will have to play much more carefully, that’s it… And, by the way, there is only room for two items in the hero’s inventory. In my case, it’s a tomahawk and a shield. Well, okay, the tomahawk can probably be exchanged for a harpoon with explosives. And we can single out two or three more subjects. But the rest of the scattering-what the hell is it for? Just to hammer the random number generator, probably.
Which works very poorly, by the way. From a huge pile of things, only a few are always selected. And if the game decided to give you a lamp, a smoke grenade, and a pair of swords at the first level of the race, then you have every chance of not finding anything else by the last level. You’re just going to run around with a stupid smoke grenade… If there is no save revision, then it is better to restart the race immediately. The generation of levels is not completely random at all. Yes, the rooms are arranged in different order, and they themselves vary in size and decoration, but the set of rooms as a whole – as well as the number and type of enemies in them – if they change, then not even much. I definitely managed to memorize, for example, a set of opponents in the arenas with three waves of a Farm and, of course, a Churchyard. But I tried my best to reduce the number of re-runs to a minimum. In general, I mean, I didn’t exaggerate much above, talking about the same corridors and replaying the same moment.
Glitches: Not death, but a feature
So, the bagoglooks. We have them. Sometimes the game stops saving, and if you had to go somewhere after turning off the game, then upon returning you can find yourself at the beginning of the already completed level. Or even the previous level, if West Of The Dead has gone too far. In the already mentioned damned Churchyard, the camera refused to move away more than once when I joined the battle, and I had to fight almost blindly. Strangely enough, I’ve never died because of this feature, but it’s still annoying. And – you won’t believe it, but still at the same level – there is an enemy setting traps, which are disabled only three seconds after they have disappeared visually. Although I’m sure that this is not even a bug, but just a flaw of the developers who did not finish the timer somewhere, but invisible traps killed me more often than anything else. In addition to all this, once (and not in the Churchyard) a newly destroyed shelter appeared and sent me straight under the map. But… hehe, I made a backup save, so I didn’t have to replay the race from the very beginning. Here’s an example of how useful it is to use the tricks described above.
But all this is still not the most disgusting stuff that I managed to catch. In one of the races, for some reason, I got stuck on a transition that appears by itself after receiving the fourth rune – and it happened almost at the end of the game, in a Church. And the Church is a map before the final battle. And for some reason, I decided that a backup was not needed in this case – without thinking twice, I just went to the menu. After that, the game literally crumbled. When I first booted up, I was scared off under the map. I went to the menu a second time – and, like, I was able to go further, but from that moment on, everything didn’t work that way. Sound effects were played, when nothing was happening, the camera moved away and approached as it wanted… And when I left the Church, the witch flatly refused to accept the sins. Which, in general, was also solved by going to the menu – when I rebooted, they just opened the door for me, and I went on.
However, after I defeated the boss, nothing happened. Shrugging my shoulders, I decided that this was a continuation of the bug parade and, regretting that I hadn’t made a backup in the Church when I had the chance, I started a new race. This time, everything was done as carefully as possible: in particular, saves were backed up at the start of each level. But although no major bugs occurred, defeating the boss once again did not bring either the final screensaver or anything else. I rolled back and repeated the process. Three times. Somewhere at that moment, the back of my head decided to scratch itself very seriously.
As it turned out, when defeating the final boss does not bring the desired results, this is not a bug, but naturally a feature. It’s just that in a battle with glavgad, before directly destroying him, it is necessary to destroy three columns standing in the arena (in the very last battle with him, if anything, after meeting three righteous souls; do not pay attention to the columns until this moment).
And so, either I’m a fool, or the need to destroy the columns is not very obvious. At best, we can say that the game gives the player a couple of very transparent hints that the columns mean something at all – but that they must be destroyed, and necessarily before the death of the boss… Personally, I didn’t understand this at all, and I think I had every chance of not understanding why the game didn’t want to end. Fortunately, the Internet wasn’t useless this time, and it explained to me what was going on. And thanks again to the backups: if I had to start the race from the beginning for every attempt to kill the boss… then this paragraph would have turned out to be much more negative.
By the way, the final screensaver (as well as the screensaver after the first boss battle in the last arena) for some reason has no voice acting. The main character’s final monologue and the credits roll in complete silence. Since I did find an entry in the game files where Comrade Perlman reads out the ending, we can safely conclude that we are facing another bug. I actually found a lot of Ron Perlman recordings in the game files that I hadn’t heard in the game. For example, apparently, if you start a new race after defeating the final boss, the main character should say a few words about this… which is also not happening. In general, as a bonus for those who have read this article up to this point, I made the final video with voiceover. There are no spoilers in it, if anything – after all, the plot in this game is similar to the plot of a road movie: without any specific beginning and end. And the final cutscene could well have been an introductory one.
One hundred percent pass: The Gods are unfathomable
And while I was crawling through the game’s files, trying to figure out a bug or feature, I suddenly discovered that the game contains not only the memories of the protagonist and antagonist, as mentioned above, but also a third set. Fully voiced and rendered, belonging – judging by the names of the files – to the deities of the world of West Of The Dead. But they didn’t want these memories to fall out of the word at all. And even the Internet didn’t help me. So after trying everything I could in the game itself, I dug into the code again, but it was difficult to find any explanations there either. It was only thanks to a piece of software called dnSpy that I managed to open the CheckAndSpawnWatcherMemory function. Judging by it, the last set of memory should drop out after… Oh, the Gods! After the player collects all the items!
I don’t even know what to say here. First of all, all the questions about why there is not a word about this on the Internet have disappeared by themselves. I’m absolutely sure that no one has been able to collect all the items. Do you remember the monotonous corridors and repetitive one-on-one fights? So, I can’t even imagine how many times all this has to be played through to unlock all the junk available in the game. The thing is that the so-called blueprints are extremely reluctant to fall – and this is even if there is an item that, in theory, should give a plus to the chance of these very drawings falling out. However, I also talked about a questionably working random number generator.
So I opened all the items through saving. However, the memories of the deities still did not fall. Either another bug, or some kind of flag should be placed in the preservation during the legitimate collection of all drawings… I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. In general, I could also register memories through saving by simply adding the IM_CrowAndSunMemory item to the _ItemNames line (which comes just after the aforementioned _LoadoutNames), but I was really curious to see how these things should be saved according to the developers. And I just deleted the piece of code that checks if the player has collected all the items from the CheckAndSpawnWatcherMemory function.
Unfortunately, nothing particularly interesting happened. To be honest, I was hoping for repeated battles with large creatures, which in this game are called “wendigos” – because it could be quite simple to implement, at the same time slightly diluting a very meager set of bosses… But no, the developers were too lazy. The memories of the Watchers simply drop out of random enemies – or even from boxes of iron. On each map, except for the Battlefield, exactly one memory is knocked out. No more, no less. In principle, memories of the third type do not appear on the Battlefield. In all this gloom, there is only one plus: no random number generator, one hundred percent chance of falling out.
So now all the masochists present – or hardcore fans of rogue stuff – know how to get these memories in an honest way. For everyone else, I recorded a video to free them from this suffering. The video, by the way, is very cool – it is definitely inspired by the stoned mythology of the indigenous people of North America.
And their mythology is really stoned. What is the story of how a Porcupine stole a Coyote’s penis and used it as a walking stick? I’m not. Joking. It’s there too.
Other: rogue and all-all-all
By the way, I translated the first video in this article myself, but I was too lazy to translate the second one and just turned on the Russian language in the game settings. At the same time, I appreciated how the game was translated as a whole, while I was running and collecting memories. And in this very whole, I liked the translation – obviously not machine-made, sometimes creative…but at the same time, there are literally criminal errors, holes and just strange places in some places. For example, the phrase “help you”, translated as “help yourself”, while clearly meaning “I will help you”. For some reason, “Outlaw” was translated as “Rogue”, although the word “Bandit” is much more appropriate in all respects. Or the “Gunslinger” revolver, translated as “Ganslinger”, as well as the “Crypt” level, translated as… “Crypt”! What the hell kind of Crypt?! What are you doing, eating too much henbane?..
But, yes, apart from such stuff, the translation is generally normal. What’s left there? Kind of, just the soundtrack. Overall, he’s quite pleasant. The lazy guitar ripples are quite well-listened to, and they very organically complement both Comrade Perlman’s voice and the sounds of a firefight. I doubt that anyone would want to listen to these tracks separately from the game, but as part of the gameplay they sound just right and in their place.
Verdict: A mediocre afterlife
Considering all of the above, it’s quite difficult for me to summarize. Personally, West Of The Dead seemed like a tough average guy to me, but that’s mostly because I’m just used to these games. I’m used to doing something with my own hands, climbing through files, manually making backups of saves, changing something in the code, even sometimes fixing bugs for developers, and so on. Moreover, I think this is an extremely correct approach and encourage all other players to do exactly the same.
Yes, West Of The Dead offers a choice of four difficulty levels, but you can get maximum, balanced enjoyment from the game only by manipulating the parameters and inventory of the main character manually, through editing the save. And if you don’t do this, for example, if you suddenly play on a console on which it is basically impossible to minimize the game window, log in and quickly make a copy of saving the game, well…
As I said before, if you start the race from the beginning after each death, as the developers want, then the first few levels will quickly get tired, and the boredom with which the player will run through the Crypt for the tenth time (the very first level, and it’s not a Crypt at all!) will settle as the main memory. Unless, of course, by that time he simply abandoned West Of The Dead as a mediocre game. Add to this a random number generator that doesn’t mind turning its back on the player, and yet there are quite common bugs that can inadvertently send us starting the race from the very beginning – and it’s not hard to imagine that we get something that is more annoying than enjoyable. So the verdict is this: an arcade game with a C, and maybe even with a minus, which, however, can be stretched as much as a four, but only if you don’t mind working a little with your own hands.
