Truth may be the driving force of any revenge tale, but whether Westerado’s truth is fabricated, earned, implied, or rejected is left to the player. You can practically do whatever you want, and, rather than damn the consequences, Westerado makes it easier to embrace them.
It all starts with the seeds of vengeance. A pixel-perfect western sun fades away as you chase down an escaped buffalo. When you return to your family’s ranch, your mother is dead, your house is burning to the ground, and your brother’s dying words hint at the identity of the person responsible for destroying everything you held dear. Assembling an accurate description of your family’s assassin is Westerado’s driving function. Obeying it is another matter entirely.
Immediately clear, upon wandering off and entering the nearby town of Clintville, is you have to option to murder anyone. This isn’t necessarily what you’re supposed to do, just something you can do if you’d like to wreck or (depending on how you’re feeling) enhance your Westerado experience. You can either draw, cock, and fire your gun to the left or right or, at any point in any conversation, you can draw your gun and deal with the consequences. Sometimes this results in a hasty exit for the person opposite you. Other times it’s a declared intention to shift the course of a conversation into something more focused or desirable to your specific needs.
Wanton violence is valuable asset in the fabled West, but it’s not the only way to take care of business in Westerado. Most of that responsibility involves talking to residents populating the towns of Clintville and Santa Anna, along with the surrounding wilderness of ranches, mines, outposts, and Indian territory. There’s maybe a couple dozen vignettes covering Westerado’s arid 2D landscapes, but they run the gamut of Spaghetti Western iconography; ramshackle towns, abandoned villages, desolate mines, the wild frontier, and all of the lowlifes and freak shows in-between.
Early on I found myself convincing a drunk at the local saloon to go home to his wife. I was rewarded with a piece of information that clarified my obfuscated villain; he wore a blue bandana around his neck. Later, I would aid a rancher in getting his stagecoach away from a group of outlaws, and he also awarded me with some gossip; and edged hat brim. Most of Westerado’s lingering quests have an appreciation for the long game, such as trying to seduce (or is it getting seduced by?) the Sherriff’s wife and saving up enough money to buy a house together, or the managing the escalating feud between ranchers and a filthy-rich oil baron.
Westerado also has the courtesy to switch the villain around every time you play. There are a finite number of people in its world, but your mark isn’t chosen at random. (I think) He or she is selected and fleshed out, clue by clue, based on the quests you’ve chosen to undertake. I suppose going around and murdering everyone available might eventually lead you to the inevitable end-game sequence, but it’s more fun to figure things out piece by piece. Besides, you also get to bear witness to all the wild scenarios happening on the way there.
In my initial game I stumbled upon a tribe of Indians quite late. They asked me to go blow the locks off of the rancher’s buffalo pens, which seemed incongruous with my rancher friends’ needs, but, whatever, a quest is a quest and all I really needed was information. Next, they asked me to go on some sort of cleansing ritual with them and next thing I know we’re shooting up a fort of American soldiers! I exited the screen hoping they would go away and everything would be fine, but when I came back all the soldiers were dead in bloody piles! Later I begrudgingly agree to accompany them to Clintville, which was similarly massacred of every living being.
My Indian friends’ hostile takeover was weird, but it also drastically affected the outcome of my game. I couldn’t access the Clintville’s bank—a bank that I had resisted the urge to rob several times—because I guess Indian’s don’t believe in stupid banks. That meant I couldn’t withdraw money or purchase property, which meant my long-game affair with the Sherriff’s wife came to a screeching halt. Any quest involving Clintville or the soldiers I murdered at Fort Motor was wiped completely. At that point I had enough evidence to find the right guy, but what a devastating turn of events! The idea of a game locking you out of content is alien in the modern AAA space, but Westerado isn’t afraid to discard content when it’s not in service to the narrative the player is constructing.
Westerado’s fluid narrative works so well because you’re intended to see it through more than once. My first game lasted four hours because, as someone who reviews and writes about games often, I wanted the, “do everything” approach. When I finished I knew I had locked myself out of some quests but, purely going by the achievements, I missed a ton of content. On my next run (as a different character) Westerado was practically a different game based on some of the choices I made. Westerado’s quests are weird, serene, violent, and occasionally estranged from humanity, but they help fundamentally shape a personalized narrative.
The assumption of personalization is important because Westerado’s gameplay isn’t enough to support its full weight (which makes sense, it was adapted from a browser game of the same name, after all). You can upgrade your default revolver to a few different guns, but I was having a relatively easy time walking in and out of an enemy’s line-of-fire and returning my own fire. Health, managed by having up to three hats blown off your head before you’re dead, has an interesting wrinkle in that, with some clever shooting, you can blow hats off bad guys’ heads and wear them yourself. When you die your money, or whatever you didn’t stash in a bank, is halved, but it’s a small price to pay for living to see another day. It’s possible to play Westerado closer to a roguelike, where death really is the end, but that wasn’t an avenue I opted to take.
Personality also goes a long way in selling Westerado’s time and place. The visual presentation, which feels 8-bit but behaves and animates with some modern sensibilities, is god damn gorgeous from almost any angle and succeeds in selling the saturated atmosphere of a classic Western film. It’s hyper exaggerated and almost over-stylized, but it works with Westerado’s adopted pastiche. Dialogue is also a strong suit, keenly self-aware in replacing “I” with “ah” and other beloved Western parlance; it’s all a big goofy time. Even calling Native Americans “Indians,” while not in vogue with modern culture, feels period-appropriate not to the actual Wild West, but to the era of film Westerado seeks to pay homage.
Westerado is a slavishly faithful sendup to a beloved era of cinema with a sizeable chunk of player agency along for the ride. It packs all the moral choice and open decision of a modern adventure game, only without the heavy hand of right or wrong to guide your way. You play to win, sure, but not to satisfy any sort of arbitrary condition. You can shoot first and ask later, or shoot and never ask, or ask and maybe never shoot. It doesn’t matter and simultaneously matters a great deal, which is just about all you can ask for in Westerado’s driving constant; it’s a lawless tale in an open medium. All that’s left is to take the reins and see where it can go.
