Bounty Star: The Morose Tale of Graveyard Clem | PS5 Review

November 16, 2025 Zack Parkerson

It’s been a complicated road to release for Bounty Star: The Morose Tale of Graveyard Clem. Originally announced in 2022 for a 2023 release, it’s obviously been delayed multiple times. It also had to survive the great Annapurna Interactive fallout from the publisher’s employees quitting in unison. But much like the titular character, Dinogod persevered and has finally released its wild west mech action game into the wild.

My Darling

Clementine is whom this morose tale is about, and it’s her we’ll be playing as. A brief prologue introduces us to the incident that led to her rather cool nickname of Graveyard Clem. After the horror there, she’s lost herself in drink and depression. Luckily, her friend Jake is an exceptional pal and has managed to hook her up with an old garage that has plenty of room for farming. In addition, he helps to get her all signed up for the bounty hunting guild so she can make some money and move on with her life. We could all use a Jake.

This sets up a rather nice general loop of Bounty Star. Clem wakes up, waters the plants, feeds the animals, tunes up her mech, maybe makes a meal, then heads out to hunt down bad folk. The combat and homemaking systems are interlinked, with a good meal providing an attribute boost for the day or extra crops and chickens being sold off for money. It’s a compelling loop that kept me engaged with the game’s simplistic farming mechanics to the point where I made sure everything in the garage was fully upgraded.

The Tin Star

Inevitably, Clem has to get to work with her big ol’ Raptor mech. These are not the fast-flowing mecha of Japanese anime, but rather lumbering machines of war. There’s weight to the steps of the Raptor, and the melee weapons have a heft to them, even the quicker ones. Naturally, there are also ranged options of many sorts, including a nice big ass double-barelled shotgun that can rip foes apart. These two combat options work well together, including some neat melee tricks you can pull off to instantly reload weapons, and it was a ton of fun utilizing different loadout options. Unlike many games, Bounty Star actually pushed me to change up my tactics per mission due to the surprising enemy variety.

In addition to your enemies, you also need to pay constant attention to your own Raptor. Temperature is a constant concern, and it varies depending on the time of day you head out into the field. Any given weapon or accessory provides either heat or cold to your mech’s core, so it’s always a balancing act you need to stay aware of. I really liked this aspect of the game, because it made me feel deeply connected to my war rig. We needed to stay in sync, or neither of us would make it out alive.

Winchester ‘73

That’s not to say combat is perfect, however. There’s a stagger meter on every enemy, and until it’s drained they won’t react to your hits. They’ll take damage, but they won’t have any reaction at all. Presumably this was to make sure you can’t just pound away on an enemy without fear of retribution. Which is fine, but I really became frustrated with just how quickly that stagger meter regenerates. Once drained, it always comes back and you must deal with the process all over again.

It may sound like a small frustration, but it just made melee combat feel a little dull after a while. It’s so much easier to shoot these foes from afar and pile the damage on instead of dealing with the complications of melee entanglements. I don’t wanna be a backseat game developer, but I think it would have been a lot more satisfying if the meter was harder to take down but it stayed gone once depleted. It would make it feel like you earned the ability to crush your enemies, rather than a recurring annoyance to constantly deal with.

The Gunfighter

Where Bounty Star truly excelled for me was in the central character of Clem. She’s dealing with the trauma that earned her that slick nickname, but she’s not even fond of that name for good reason. Clem is dead set on running from her past rather than confronting it, and we all know that never works. The flow of bounty targets and homebuilding allows Clementine to put the pieces of this farm back together, and in the process put some of her own pieces back together. Through some truly weird side characters, we get to see different sides of Clementine and watch her be forced into growing. It’s a compelling story that knows it’s best to focus on this one woman’s pain, and it leads to a satisfying conclusion.

So your mileage is going to vary on the combat aspects, and I hope you got more out of it than me. But I think anybody can appreciate the storyline in Bounty Star: The Morose Tale of Graveyard Clem. It’s a true western mech action epic, so it stands out even in the sea of creativity that is modern indie game development. Once you pick up this morose tale, it’ll be hard to put it down.

This review is based on a PS5 copy of Bounty Star: The Morose Tale of Graveyard Clem provided by Dinogod for review purposes. It is also available on Xbox (including Game Pass as of this writing) and PC.