Do you remember the worst day of your life? It’s okay; you don’t have to answer. I do. I was doing something I loved, I made a mistake, and a story someone else told about it for their own purposes cost me almost everything I had. People I thought were my friends walked out of my life, doors slammed shut in my face, and everything I’d worked for evaporated. My family resorted to communication by postcard because I refused to answer the phone, and I spent the next two years contemplating suicide before finally finding some semblence of peace. Nearly a decade later, those moments, that mistake – such a little thing, really – impacts every aspect of my life. I spend a lot of time grappling with that, wondering if I’ll ever be the person I was before that moment again. I don’t know the answer.
The worst day of Clementine McKinney’s life reminded me a lot of my own, though it came inside the cockpit of a Raptor mech rather than behind a keyboard. She made a decision, one rooted in trying to do the right thing and defend people she loved, and it cost her everything she had. Clementine McKinney died that day, and Graveyard Clem was born from the ashes. Bounty Star is about who you are after the worst day of your life, about what you do when the only option is to climb back into the machine that put you there in the first place. I didn’t have a choice; neither does Clem. We don’t know how to do anything else.
Clem is a bounty hunter. Building and piloting a Raptor is all she knows, and it’s the main thing you’ll do across the roughly 15-20 hours it took me to finish Bounty Star’s story (though there is ample replayability if you want it). After her world collapses, her friend Jake Triminy, the local marshall of a post-plague future that caused the collapse of human civilization and the return of the dinosaurs, sets her up with an old workshop that has enough space to double as a farm. Nobody much trusts her after what happened, so the bounties she is offered are for small fry: local bandits and the like. You spend her money to buy food and cook it in her kitchen for stat increases before going out on a mission. The first time she gets into her Raptor after the decision she made inside one destroyed her life, she spends a long time staring at the ol’ girl, her heart beating fast. Then she closes her eyes, exhales, and gets to work. Clem sees the irony, but it might also be her only way out. Both she and I sit in that cockpit, but we are not in the same place.
Clem wears her battles on her body. There’s a nasty burn on the side of her neck, a deep scar on the right side of her face, and another on the opposite cheek. She’s not young anymore; if you leave her alone long enough, she’ll stretch and complain about the way her body is failing her, even though her physique tells the story of a woman who builds Raptors and welds steel. Her clothes are covered in engine grease and stained with sweat. Her accent bears the twang of the American South. She drinks, smokes, plays guitar, and swears like it’s going out of style – and yet, when she gets stuck on a problem, she’ll pull out a stuffed dinosaur named Jeremy and talk to him until she realizes the solution. After a completed bounty, Clem sits on her Raptor and writes down her thoughts in a small journal, a warrior poet hoping that she’ll find herself in the words she arranges on the page. She is a person, messy and flawed and glorious, and I loved her in the way you love a kindred soul, someone whose failings you understand and strengths you admire.
Once you've got your assignment, it's time to outfit your Raptor and get to work. Raptors are relatively tiny mechs – think an Armored Core’s AC, but smaller, less well armed, and faster. They have melee and ranged weapons that range from chainswords and giant hammers to assault rifles and grenade launchers. You can customize them to fit your playstyle even further by popping in things like a booster for quick dodges, a burst repairer for on-the-spot healing, or a thermal computer to restore your Raptor to its base temperature faster.
There's a lot to consider: each weapon has one of three types (Blade, Bludgeoning, Boom) that operate in a rock, paper, scissors style against different types of armor. Weapons and systems also build or reduce heat. Too much or too little, and your Raptor will shut down until it comes back under control, leaving you vulnerable. But there are benefits. High heat speeds up your melee weapon swings, while a cooler Raptor fires its guns more quickly.
Some bounties are only available in the morning, afternoon, or evening. It’s cooler at night, so weapons that generate heat are more viable than they would be in the afternoon, when you'll want systems to keep your Raptor running cool. The right build takes your targets, time of day, and heat into account, and there is a joy in stepping into Clem's mind, getting under the hood, and building a smooth-running rig.
In the field, a Raptor is nimble but purposeful, a force of fury and steel. It can dodge and run to avoid fire, but when you swing that chainsword, you commit to its weight and momentum. An assault rifle will kill a man in a single shot, but it will be less effective against a Driller mech built heavy for mining and repurposed by outlaws for combat. A double-barreled shotgun will chew through an unmanned Sieger, but you'll need to be more precise against another mech. The heavier enemies – Drillers, Raptors like yours – have stability that must be reduced before your melee weapons stagger them, but once it's gone, a hammer, chainsword, or flame gauntlet will rock them to the frame, steel grinding against steel until something breaks. But be wary of counter-attacks, which can stop your offense cold and send your Raptor reeling. To compensate, you have melee and dash tricks of your own. Cancel a swing of your hammer into an evasive maneuver while leaping backward and firing your shotgun, or dash forward into a swing of a built-for-a-mech baseball bat. To fight another Raptor is to tango, two gunslingers circling until one finds an opening.
It’s satisfying, though repetition does set in when you see the same Raptor, the same Sieger, the same group of enemies again and again, especially during the Low Priority repeatable bounties you’ll do between High Priority story missions. The environments Clem navigates, clearly a loving tribute to the American Southwest, are stunning at least. Though you’ll see some of the maps several times, many of them never lose their beauty, especially at night. Variety is found in optional objectives that offer additional cash and challenge you to take no damage, use a specific build, complete a bounty quickly, destroy objects scattered around the environment, find a hidden item, and so on. And it is always worth scavenging an area to find secret chests for additional rewards like world lore, resources, or even blueprints for new weapons or recipes for Clem to whip up in the kitchen.
Between bounties, you’ll use the money Clem earns to build up her new home and improve her Raptor. Things start small. But soon enough, you’re crafting new weapons, unlocking additional slots or loadouts, producing your own fuel, making your own ammunition, growing crops, and raising chickens. As she rebuilds herself, a place she didn’t want to be becomes a home. These chores are minor – feed the chickens, water the plants, sow new seeds, make sure the fuel producing systems have enough water, cook a meal before you head out – but I found joy in the repetition of a life lived outside of the cockpit, of seeing the real, tangible progress Clem and I were making on our journeys of healing.
A I invested more time and money into the farm, I was able to do these jobs faster, more efficiently. Carrying water to each plant will get the job done. But it’s much more fun to build a firearm-activated irrigation system, to watch empty space get filled in by the work you’ve done, slowly, piece by piece. Isn’t that a life? And my Raptor was becoming fiercer, too, the bounties bigger. At the start, one feeds the other. The Raptor. The farm. Over time, they intertwine, and it’s harder to see where one ends and the other begins.
In one of her journal entries, Clem reflects on her relationship with Raptors, wondering if she should loathe them on principle as machines of war or lean into the power and joy she feels while piloting one. It’s a question not just for her, but us as the player, too. She opts for the latter, partly because she has no choice, and partly because she feels she is making the world a better place by removing bad men from it. You can thankfully take bounties alive or scare off dinosaurs with fireworks instead of killing them (and sometimes you are paid more for it), but you’re going to rack up a lot of bodies either way. The home she builds is the opposite of that. At first, she resents it, wanting out as quickly as she can find a way. But she comes to see its potential. Soon, I was making just as much money from farming as I was from bounty hunting. What was a chore became a way of life.
And as she builds a new life, other characters come to inhabit it. She befriends a reformed bandit who offers her a way to relive past battles, useful for completing optional objectives in bygone story missions; a former thief atoning for his crimes by wearing a ridiculous steak outfit and selling meat as Mr. Meat; a miner trapped inside his suit who has dedicated himself to building an ethical mine for other miners; a weapons dealer who becomes a confidant; a giant insect driven from its colony who becomes a friend (and, when fed and watered, a weapon to be mounted on a Raptor).
Each is a mirror that offers Clem a chance to reflect on her life, her choices, to show us who she is, and who she still might be. Shall she be a woman at war with herself, reliving the battles that brought her here? There are many kinds of prisons. Some you carry with you wherever you go. Clem’s Raptor could be a cell. But it could be armor, too, the key to something else. Something better. The past is prologue, but it doesn't have to define us. We choose who we are every day.
Bounty Star is a simple game. You would never mistake it for something with a ton of money behind it, though the writing and voice acting are excellent. And there were times it frustrated me, such as when it locked story progression behind building an engine I couldn’t afford. (Luckily, I had a pretty sizable farm at that point, and chicken eggs and corn command a premium.) It crashed on me a few times. It can be repetitive. I’m not sure I care about much of that, but it was part of my experience. But I did care about Clem, about her story, the people she loved and who loved her in return. This town takes in all kinds. I wanted her to rebuild her life, and that saw me through.
