Bounty Star Wants to Be the Mecha Western David Milch Never Wrote

By Garrett Martin | November 6, 2025 | 2:00pm

Video Games Features bounty star

Bounty Star Wants to Be the Mecha Western David Milch Never Wrote

You can feel the weight of the mechs in Bounty Star. They’re sluggish, clunky, awkward both to move in and to fight with. They’re giant piles of junk worn by cowboys and gunslingers like Graveyard Clem, a lawful sort who blames herself for the destruction of the town she was supposed to protect and the deaths of most of her loved ones. Clem’s as broken as the hulking piece of scrap she climbs into whenever she needs to round up some outlaws.

One thing about Clem that isn’t broken, though, despite living alone in a backwater nook of a bombed-out desert in a barely functional society assembled ramshackle ages after the collapse of everything we know and hold dear today, is her language. She has a command of English that puts most video game characters to shame, regardless of their situation. Her complex sentences are full of evocative imagery and idiomatic constructs whose meaning is almost always clear even though they rarely resemble something anybody living today would ever think to say. She’s a damned poet, and although at its worst her dialogue—often delivered as her narrating her own journal entries—is ponderous and overwritten, it feels natural for the world the game presents.

Clem’s language is Bounty Star’s most striking facet. She speaks like a David Milch character. Almost everybody in this game does. Bounty Star might as well take place in Deadwood.

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Milch, whose acclaimed screenwriting career seems to have ended due to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, was a poet and Yale English teacher who got into TV as a writer on the legendary 1980s network drama Hill Street Blues. He developed a long relationship with HBO in the ‘00s, where he was known as one of the channel’s “three Davids” alongside The Sopranos creator David Chase and The Wire creator David Simon. Milch didn’t have the same success at HBO as those two writers, although his first (and longest-running) program for the channel was critically beloved and remains one of the signature shows of the “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO” era: Deadwood, his gritty, realistic take on the classic Western. Deadwood became known for the poetry of its language, with dialogue that combined unflagging vulgarity with a beautiful, almost otherworldly lyricism that sounded like nothing else on TV then or since. If you love the sound of the English language, and the mystery and depth it can hold, Deadwood might be the greatest TV show ever made. And although he didn’t write every word of every episode, its style comes straight from Milch.

I don’t know if Bounty Star’s creators would credit Milch or Deadwood as an influence, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t. There are some obvious shorthands to writing characters in a Western, patterns familiar from midcentury classics and poverty row backbenchers alike, largely absent from Milch’s idiosyncratic and transcendent Deadwood; some of Bounty Star’s characters tread that turf, even Clem herself at points. But her internal monologue and the stories she tells of herself strive for the poetry of Milch and the way his words can ring out with a wisdom that sounds both timeless and inchoate, whether they’re written as twisty riddles or sledgehammer declarations. It’s not hard to imagine Graveyard Clem wandering into Al Swearengen’s saloon and holding her own in a lingual tête-à-tête with homespun wordsmith Whitney Ellsworth, or even Swearengen himself.

Bounty Star doesn’t always pull it off, of course. I don’t know if anybody other than Milch can. And even he didn’t always pull it off. Much of Clem’s writing is obtuse, leaden, performative—the work of somebody reaching for something well out of their grasp. Occasionally, though, it works—a small string of stinging words, an unexpectedly rich image—and this sci-fi mecha western approaches something special. It never quite catches up to that horizon, but the fact that Bounty Star can even see it and attempt to reach it is worth noting. It’s not the Deadwood video game Milch never got to write*, but it’ll give you a small taste of what that could’ve been like.

*: I can’t find any indication that Milch had the slightest interest in video games, either playing them or writing them, but in 2011 he was announced as the writer of a never-produced adaptation of Quantic Dream’s abysmal Heavy Rain, of all games.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.