Xbox Game Pass Adds A Fun New Game Today, West Of Dead

West of Dead, a western twin-stick shooter, is out today on Game Pass for Xbox One and PC. The game follows a stranger as they attempt to free Purgatory from mysterious forces so the dead may pass on. With a stylish isometric view, the run based game combines twin-stick controls with cover-based shooting mechanics.

The game is an amalgamation of every idea developer Upstream Arcade wanted to pursue. In a post on Xbox Wire Adam Langridge, co-founder and developer of Upstream Arcade said that the game was a pursuit of fitting as many ideas in as he and co-founder Imkan Kayati could.

Langridge said he wanted to make a new kind of cover shooter, but also loved twin-stick shooters and permadeath games and procedural generation. Kayati said he loved westerns and horror games. Both said they wanted to make a game with a comic book art style and explore themes of fear and light.

"A smart person would maybe have decided to focus on a few of those things and abandon the rest. We're not that smart," Langridge said. "We decided that this hodgepodge of ideas felt like something different and interesting and something we really really wanted to do."

The end result of that lengthy list of ideas was West of Dead, a game that combines all of those ideas together under the guise of fighting through purgatory as a cowboy with a flaming skull, narrated by Ron Perlman (Hellboy, Sons of Anarchy).

The main gameplay revolves around cover-based twin-stick shooting, channeling old fashioned western shootouts. You move from cover to cover, planning out tactics and reloads around enemies closing in on you from all directions.

"To bridge these two flavors of action, you are kitted out with a lot of tools to use, whether diving to avoid bullets, sliding into cover, or vaulting from one side of cover to another, there is always a route to safety," Langridge said.

The art style of West of Dead combines comic book art style with a gothic tone to create a creepy graphic novel aesthetic. West of Dead is available now on Xbox One Game Pass and Game Pass for PC and is coming to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in August.