WEST OF DEAD

The quick and the undead

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Each new descent into West Of Dead’s underworld begins in the same place: a dusty Old West saloon, upright piano in the corner, a half-finished game of Texas Hold ’Em laid out on a card table. You’ll return here again and again, having mistimed a dodge or lingered out of cover a second too long. You’ll nod to the waistcoated barkeep, pushing grime around the same glass into eternity, then head out through those swinging saloon doors and into a freshly-baked labyrinth of rooms, all of them dressed for a shootout.

As well as a fistful of enemies, there are two elements that pretty much all of these rooms have in common: a smattering of conveniently waist-height tombs to take cover behind, and a couple of lanterns that can be kindled to throw light into the room’s dark corners. From these elements, you can discern pretty much everything you need to know about West Of Dead, right back to its origins as a pair of prototypes, one made by each of developer Upstream Arcade’s co-founders.

“What we always do at the start of a project is we prototype – we prototype quite ruthlessly,” head of code and design