Imagine you’re John Marston of Red Dead Redemption. You get challenged to a duel and you’re face-to-face with your opponent, except your opponent isn’t a person. Nor is your opponent an animal. You opponent is a phrase. As you shoot one phrase and continue with your story, you have to shoot another phrase and your story keeps on going. It sounds similar to a game of improv, where one person says a line, then another person says a line, likely with no relation to the previous line and a story gets told. Put Red Dead Redemption in a blender with the improv element, and you get Words Must Die.
Words Must Die is a narrative game set in the west as a part of The Pippin Bar ‘GAME IDEA’ Game Jam based on a tweet from The Pippin Bar’s twitter account.
The game was created by Paper Nerds. As you continue throughout the game, you literally leave the words you shot on the ground, rather than a person or animal. Just as any game of improv, Words Must Die can have some creative and hilarious results. Heather Alexandra of Kotaku played through the game and describes the outcome of her playthrough.
My playthrough ended in tragedy. As Nasty Jack and I bled to death, I raised my gun in one last act of defiance and shot my foot.
So if you like Western shooters and storytelling you can play Words Must Die, or as Alexandra describes it Read Dead Redemption.
You can download the game for Windows or Mac at the Paper Nerds website.