Showdown at Willow Creek Demo

As you may have seen in all those Clint Eastwood documentaries, the Wild West was pretty much a warzone between gangs of outlaws. The cops did their jobs sometimes, but as it turns out, you needed to be pretty hardcore in order to enforce the law in those parts. Granted, the western  genre greatly exaggerated many events, but that doesn’t make such stories any less exciting.

Showdown at Willow Creek is an adventure game with text-based mechanics in which you are thrown in the middle of a Wild West town and left to fend for yourself. There’s no goal other than what you decide to do as the events unfold, since you are pretty much free to do as you please at all times. Hence, you can be the hero or the villain, as well as go back and do it all over again to see the other side of the story.

The town of Willow Creek is pretty much run by bandits and criminals, but you are not there to judge, at least not if you don’t want to. It’s possible to become an outlaw yourself and join the gangs that bring down the whole town, or become a sheriff and solve everyone’s problems with a badge and a gun. Granted, the plot is more convoluted than that, especially since many characters are part of it.

Besides choosing a name for your character at the beginning, certain choices also affect a variety of other stats, including your ability to smooth talk or use a gun. Hence, depending on your abilities, sometimes it may be easier to talk your way out of a tough situation, especially if you are not good enough with a pistol to take out three people before they do the same to you.

Romance is also a distinct possibility along the way, since there are plenty of ladies and men who are more than eager to be with you. It still takes a bit of effort to charm them, and some may not agree with your actions sometimes, but it’s nice to know that there are no barriers in this regard. In fact, you can try your luck with multiple love interests at once, although this is obviously pretty difficult to achieve without being caught.

Even if Showdown at Willow Creek features almost every cliche you can think of when it comes to westerns, that’s the beauty of the genre, since it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The flexible story should keep you engaged for at least a handful of playthroughs.