The road west, simulated honestly
WESTWARD! is a historical survival sim set on the emigrant wagon road west in 1848 — the year the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, signed nine days after gold was found at Sutter's Mill and months before word of it reached the eastern states. Your company leaves Missouri knowing none of it. The goal is to arrive in Oregon with every one of them alive. Ideally intact.
It keeps the shape of the trail games you remember — outfitting a wagon, fording rivers, burying people you liked — and puts a genuine simulation underneath it.
Nobody in your company is a health bar. Each traveler rolls their own attributes, a background trade, a personal interest, a temper that governs how they behave when things go wrong, and a growth aptitude that determines who they become by Oregon. Two runs with the same profession play differently, because you are not travelling with the same people.
The Storyteller decides how cruel the road is
Events are not a random table. A Storyteller sits above the simulation with sliders for frequency, severity, mercy, streakiness, pacing and brutality, and it shapes your journey's whole dramatic arc. Greenhorn's Guide will let you learn. The Undertaker will not. Pick the one you can survive, or the one you deserve.
Hunger, weather, and the slow accumulation of consequence
- Food is not a number. What you eat and how varied it is feed a continuous fitness level that shifts every traveler's effective attributes. Meals are composed from what is actually in the wagon — flour and salt pork, the game somebody shot, the berries somebody picked — and a week on short rations is visible on every sheet.
- Weather has teeth. Real monthly climate tables, regional temperature bands, heat waves that ignite wildfires, blizzards, fog that lies in the low country until mid-morning, and a moon on a true 29.53-day cycle that determines how far you can see after dark.
- Minds break. Exhaustion feeds duress, duress feeds mental breaks, and a breaking traveler behaves according to their temper. Grief scales with the bonds people actually formed. Blame has a face: when somebody gets the company lost, the company remembers who.
- Everything leaves a mark. Illnesses scar attributes permanently. Skills level through use. Reputation for honesty, charity and notoriety follows you down the road and changes what strangers offer you.
The hunt is a decision, not a shooting gallery
Go afield and the day stops travelling. Choose who goes — more backs carry more meat home, but a crowd moves loud and the game thins. Read the ground when you arrive: fresh browse lines and rabbit runs mean something, and so do droppings gone white and bones bleaching in the grass. Some country is genuinely barren, and knowing when to pay an hour's walk for better ground is the whole skill.
Rounds take flight time, so you lead your target. The first shot spooks the entire field. You can only carry so much, and every hour afield is an hour the wagon does not travel. Come back with a great bull, or come back with nothing — and then decide how to keep what you brought: over a fire-frame tonight, in the sun over a standing halt, or on lines strung along the outside of the wagon as it rolls.
A wagon that obeys physics
Cargo, supplies and riders all weigh something, and your oxen can only pull so much. They also take up room: a wagon rated for a load of flour holds exactly that much flour under cover, and a stove, a plow, two tents and a spare wheel are forty cells of the bed before a single sack goes in. What does not fit rides lashed outside, in the weather. Overload the team and you travel slower while it wears down — a spiral that ends with a stranded family on an empty plain, waiting to see whether the next caravan sells you a team or robs you.
Wheels wear. Tyres shrink off their felloes in dry heat and throw on rough ground; you soak them at the river overnight or wedge them with timber and buy a few more days. Gear is a material crossed with a form, so a leather coat and a wool one protect against genuinely different things, and both degrade until somebody mends them.
A world worth looking at
Hand-built pixel country that changes as you cross it: prairie giving way to forest, the Rockies rising around mile one thousand, alkali flats, swamp at the historical sloughs, and settlements sized from a lone tradepost to a city. Clouds honestly herald tomorrow's weather. Lightning terminates on the actual skyline. Your dog rides ahead of the column and smells the rattlesnake before you do.
Play it your way
- Easy / Medium / Hard. Medium is the real 1848 and the tuning baseline; the other two are scalings of it, never a different game.
- Hardcore ironman as a separate toggle: one autosave, permadeath, no take-backs.
- Six Storytellers, from Greenhorn's Guide to The Undertaker.
- Nine trades — Banker, Merchant, Doctor, Carpenter, Blacksmith, Hunter, Farmer, Soldier, Teacher — setting your purse and your one real edge. Every member of the company brings a background of their own besides.
- A household or a crew. Set out as five strangers, or as a family with children who grow up on the road.
By the numbers
The thirteen books ride at their true weight and do nothing until somebody literate reads one aloud of an evening. One of the guidebooks lies. A second honest guide is how you catch it.
Early Access, plainly
Fully playable start to finish. You outfit a company, make every decision on the road — pace, rations, who walks and who rides, who steps up when an event fires, every encounter choice — hunt for meat in a full playable hunting scene, save, quit and resume exactly where you left off, and arrive in Oregon City or fail to. The simulation is feature-complete for one full journey.
What is still thin: audio, the remaining encounter scenes, and the trail network beyond the first journey. The plan for 1.0 is the onward routes that unlock based on what you survived, the remaining playable scenes, and the settlement at the journey's end. The estimate is about twelve months, and it will be revised publicly rather than quietly if it changes.
Content note
This game depicts the death of characters from illness, injury, starvation and exposure, and portrays psychological breakdown under sustained hardship. It includes hunting animals with period firearms. No blood is depicted. It is fully offline and singleplayer, collects no data, and contains no real-money purchases of any kind beyond the game itself.
Where to get it
- itch.io — the browser build lands here first, playable in a modern desktop browser. Follow hardtackgames.itch.io for the release.
- Steam — a store page is in the works; wishlisting opens when it's live. Desktop builds are planned for the Steam release.
The trail does not care who you brought. It will find out anyway.