Review By: Duke_Ryle
Posted: 11/16/2024

The game is takes place in Purgatory and features main character William Mason, a recently deceased lawman with a case of amnesia in the afterlife.  A group of outlaws are starting to cause trouble in Purgatory, preventing souls from movin' on East (heaven) and it's your job to send ?em packing West (hell).  Along the way you?ll start to unlock memories, both yours and another characters, giving you a little more background into the world.  The gameplay is a standard roguelite, each time you die you have to start over from the beginning, with some upgrades carrying over, and a new procedurally generated map.  The main character is voiced by Ron Perlman, one of the great voice actors of our time, and also the only voice actor for this game.

On the surface West of Dead is a game I should really enjoy.  I'm a big fan of the Western genre and I  love Ron Perlman in pretty every role or movie he's been in.  But ?should? and reality came into conflict rather quickly for me.  The first main issue I encountered with this game were technical.  I played on PS5 and I encountered numerous bugs.  The two most frequently occurring bugs were either a total game crash or, more annoyingly, a bug in the autosave function which resulted in two consecutive error messages popping up every two seconds until you agreed to stop the auto-save function.  When the auto-save function bugged out the game would freeze on completing a level and it would be impossible to progress.  Not ideal for a rouge lite, and it would normally result in a RIP run.  My goal was to complete this game legitimately, without resorting to save scumming, but the shear number of RIP runs due to bugs killed this motivation in me rather quickly.  I encountered AT LEAST one major bug each day I played this in the 10 or so day span it took me to platinum and I honestly don't know if you can platinum this game without resorting to save scumming.  The gameplay is average at best.  It's a (buggy) rouge lite twin stick shooter in a cel shaded art style.  Interesting initially, but nothing special.  

About the only thing that worked (and worked really well) was when Ron Perlman's voice acting took center stage.  Each time you recover a memory you'll hear Perlman's dulcet tones, described a fragmented, dream-like memory over a spinning mandala.  I looked forward to collecting the memories for this reason, but there just isn't enough of them.  You'll complete all the memories about halfway through grinding out collectables (the most annoying trophies).

It's an OK game for about 10 hours, but unfortunately if you want to trophy hunt this game it will take you at least 20 hours, and that's if you are efficient in manipulating the RNG to get the collectable trophies quicker.  The trophy list requires you to help 50 lost souls and have 50 outlaw kills.  These will likely be the last trophies you need and will take about 10 hours by themselves.  All other trophies can be done in about 10 hours total.  Each complete run will result in about 3 naturally per run IF you can complete a run.  The easiest way to grind out these trophies is to keep restarting a run after the first level, since the enemies are easiest here and the level can be completed quicker.  Each run has the chance to spawn either a lost soul and/or an outlaw on the first level.  The trick is to know how to best manipulate the RNG in your favor.  Each level in each run is issued a number visible on screen and the number will correspond with whether or not a collectable will appear on a given level.  The last 3 digits will tell you whether the collectable you want will appear on the first level.  The most efficient way to grind is to continuously choose to start a new run until the last 3 digits are ?346?.  This will guarantee you both a lost soul and an outlaw on the first level, allowing you to farm in the shortest time possible.  Other good numbers are ?140? or ?340? which dictates an outlaw will spawn or ?344? which I believe dictates a lost soul will spawn.  Without knowing these codes it may take 30-50 hours to platinum this game and it's just not worth it at that point. 

Continuously re-rolling your runs to manipulate RNG and replaying the first level is really boring, but it's preferable to trying to play this buggy mess all the way through numerous times.  The game is fine, but my advice is to play it on an alt account to experience it.  Otherwise you'll be stuck in trophy Purgatory.