Moderation matters: piling every possible option onto a single thing often dulls the overall experience. You wouldn’t want every topping stacked on a burger, because the meat’s flavor disappears beneath an avalanche of competing tastes. Dinogod, the studio behind Bounty Star, clearly prefers the opposite approach.
The studio’s latest release blends narrative, farming, and base-building around the unusual conceit of piloting a robot to track bounties. That wholeheartedness pays off: what could have been a curious mash-up instead becomes an unexpectedly affecting mecha title.
Rather than sneaking in one distinctive twist, Dinogod appears to have assembled everything it found appealing into a single package. Bounty Star: The Morose Tale of Graveyard Clem — available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC, and included on Xbox Game Pass — follows Clementine McKinney as she searches for belonging in a retro‑futuristic, Western‑tinged world.
The game leans on familiar design patterns from each of its constituent genres. Clem’s farm is a sunbaked, sparse place scored by plaintive folk songs, and daily life is divided into segments (morning, afternoon, evening). Some activities — cooking, reading, harvesting — are leisurely and don’t advance time; others, like taking bounty missions, move the clock forward.
Image: Dinogod/Annapurna Interactive via PolygonHer hangar functions as both home and command center — the player’s base of operations. From there you launch missions using the raptor mecha suspended nearby, tinker at the central workbench to craft batteries and tools, and eat at a modest kitchen table where Clem reflects between tasks. Meals aren’t just atmosphere: they grant buffs that matter before a mission.
On bounty runs you pilot the raptor while managing temperature and cooldowns. The system is deceptively simple, but the mecha’s physical presence is palpable — weight and momentum shape your choices even if the controls aren’t hyper‑complex. Each sortie lets you kit the raptor with elementary but effective loadouts: an assortment of weapons plus support components designed to keep heat and systems in check.
Image: Dinogod/Annapurna Interactive via PolygonCombat is as unadorned as the surrounding desert: deliberate, weighty, and unforgiving. Quick, flashy maneuvers are rare — the raptor moves with a sense of mass, and repairs are limited per mission, so errors carry real consequence. The objective is simple: finish the bounty and collect your reward. Victories may be messy, but they still count.
Between missions the game slows into quieter vignettes where Clem banters with neighbors or talks to herself. She’s clever, hardworking, and hungry for recognition, and it’s her personal story that becomes the game’s emotional anchor. The subtitle — The Morose Tale of Graveyard Clem — isn’t window dressing; the farming, base‑building, and mecha systems all serve her arc.
The raptor is less a symbol of brute force than a mirror for Clem’s inner state. The machine is assembled from distinct, mismatched parts that nonetheless function together, reflecting Clem’s own fractured identity and gradual self‑reconciliation. Once Clementine, now simply Clem, she juggles roles — bounty hunter, farmer, cook, friend, former protector — a peculiar puzzle that slowly comes together.
Image: Dinogod/Annapurna Interactive via PolygonI’m fond of mecha when they do more than flex: when they reveal something about characters and setting. Bounty Star’s disparate pieces might appear mismatched at first, but they ultimately harmonize — like instruments in an ensemble — to deliver a resonant, character‑driven tale.
Source: Polygon
