The Indie Informer

Bounty Star is the kind of game that understands the effect of strong language. I don’t mean cursing – although there’s plenty of that – I mean that Bounty Star‘s vocabulary and syntax are the type of things that get me immediately interested. While the game is listed everywhere as “Bounty Star,” the full title is “Bounty Star: The Morose Tale of Graveyard Clem.” The game is set in a desert called the Red Expanse, there’s just something cool about the way Bounty Star presents itself with its language: a very strong moment of dialogue happens in the prologue where one of Clem’s comrades asks, “What if he comes back?” Clem responds, “Then he will have forfeited the generous mercy I gave him.” Right off the bat, we know that Clem and by extension the rest of the game, doesn’t just look cool as she sits inside her hulking mech suit, she is cool.

Bounty Star is a mecha western, an interesting marriage between two of gaming’s most iconic genres. The game has an attitude to it that emanates from its protagonist, Clem. Clem is a former squad leader for a group of mech warriors who were all wiped out along with everyone who lived in a frontier town by an enemy faction. She spends her days living quietly on a farm until she’s gifted a new mech suit to fix up and complete bounties in the desert for cash.

While the game’s narrative leans on classic tropes and character architypes, most of them are subversions of some kind that add depth to what could be cookie-cutter beats. For example, Clem seems like the kind of character who would be an emotionally cold loner after the death of her squad. Instead, she’s incredibly in tune with her emotions. She journals after every combat encounter to unpack how she’s feeling as she begins piloting a mech again after so much time away. There’s a real interiority to Clem that drove me to finish as many missions as I could, not just for the layered mech combat, but to also get another quick look into her head.

As far as the combat goes, Bounty Star takes a relatively standard approach to the mecha genre. You start with a basic frame for your mech suit that you can upgrade and finetune to your liking as you earn more cash and crafting supplies to buy different weapons and rig elements. This is the part of mech games that I usually enjoy, I always think it’s fun to make a machine that’s specifically tailored to my liking and then compare it to what everyone else playing the game is doing. Bounty Star takes a little while to really let you branch out away from the base build, but once those options open up, there’s plenty of customization.

What doesn’t land as well with me are the sections between missions where you’re back at your homestead, where Bounty Star becomes something of a farming sim. There are plants to raise and harvest, mail to constantly pick up, and smaller mech components to craft. I’m not against the idea of slowing things down in between the fast-paced firefights Bounty Star throws you into for its combat sections, but I think the game slows down a little too much. I didn’t get much satisfaction out of the activities on the homestead, but maybe part of that is the point.

There’s this major whiplash between Clem’s life as a frantic bounty hunter who dodges explosions and cuts her way through countless killer mechs and returning home to a quiet life on a farm. I think the game means for the homestead to feel more reflective as Clem comes down from her adventures, but it’s missing an extra level of intentionality for that to truly come across. It almost gets there with Clem’s post-mission journaling, but that reflective vibe is largely dropped when she returns home. At the very least, the much slower homestead sections allow me to appreciate the absolutely killer score.

My time with Bounty Star had me itching to hunt for my next bounty as soon as I could. Its farm-sim elements feel a little misguided, however, Clem’s character and the fun of getting in fights with my bounties was enough for me to race through those sections without much pushback. Bounty Star knows how to be cool, so much so that it makes you forget the moments when you’re stumbling around picking cactuses and searching your farm for new batteries.