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A blend of good old western life and unsettling humor, July 25, 2023This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.
I played this game the day after Pioneer Day. This holiday is only really celebrated in Utah, where I don't live right now, but I celebrated it by telling stories about my pioneer ancestors to my kid. They journeyed west over the plains in the 1840's and 50's, and lived western lives, like being a coal miner in Nevada or running a farm in Utah.
Growing up in Utah, a state with a religious majority, we were required to learn Utah history every three years but religion was not allowed to be mentioned. So besides the occasional Native American history, we spent almost all of those years learning about Mountain Men like Jim Bridger.
So this game brought back a lot of thoughts. It's pretty short. You play as a kind of mountain man who lives through multiple stages of life, each with a varying amount of its own branches. Each life drives you further, inexorably west.
If this was just a straight-up western, I'd probably give 3 or 4 stars. But little bits of deadpan humor are slid in that really enhance it. Sometimes I had to read it twice before I realized how funny it was. And some of it is almost not humor but just an unsettling inconsistency, a literary uncanny valley.
Anyway, the game itself is quite small and I have a whole cloud of baggage attached to it so if someone reads this and plays it and thinks 'That was it?' yes, that was it, I just liked it.