Journey of the Prairie King
| Journey of the Prairie King | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mechanic |
Journey of the Prairie King is the cowboy shooter sitting in the back room of The Stardrop Saloon, and it is a complete arcade game hiding inside a farming one. A farmer moves with one set of keys and fires with another, which makes it a twin-stick shooter in the mould of the old cabinet classics, and a single touch from any enemy or bullet is fatal. Three stages of four areas each lead to a boss, with a vendor appearing between them to sell boots, guns and ammunition for the coins enemies drop. Beating it once brings a Prairie King Arcade System to the farm by post the next morning, and beating it without dying at all earns Fector's Challenge, which is one of the hardest things in the whole game. Hard Mode then invites a farmer to do it all again with the enemies thickened and the extra lives thinned out.
Overview
The controls split the hands. One group of keys walks the gunman around and another fires, and holding two at once moves or shoots on the diagonal, which matters because enemies close in from every edge. On a controller the left stick walks and the right stick shoots, with the d-pad and buttons doing the same job. On a touchscreen two translucent circles handle the same split, one for walking and one for aiming.
Lives are the whole economy of the run. The counter in the corner reads three but actually allows four deaths before the game is over, and every death is instant, whether from an enemy's body or its bullet. Each area runs a timer bar across the top while waves pour in from the perimeter. Once the bar empties the spawns stop, and the area ends when the last enemy already on the field is dead, which is why clearing stragglers quickly is what moves a run along.
Drops are the reward for killing enemies near the middle of the field rather than at the edges. Coins come singly or in fives, an occasional pickup grants an extra life, and the rest are weapons and tricks. Coffee makes the gunman quick, the Heavy Machine Gun triples the rate of fire, the Shotgun throws three bullets in a cone more slowly, and the Wagon Wheel sprays in all eight directions at once. A Smoke Bomb freezes everything on screen and teleports the gunman somewhere random, which buys four seconds to breathe but lets the spawn zones fill up behind it. A Tombstone turns the gunman into a zombie who kills on contact and sends enemies fleeing, though boss bullets still cut straight through. The Screen Nuke wipes the field instantly, but nothing killed that way drops anything, so using one on a crowded screen throws away the coins the run needs. Only one of these can be held at a time, and picking up another fires it off immediately.
The vendor is where a run is won or lost. He appears after every second area and offers three slots, and only one purchase is allowed per visit. Each slot presents its items in a fixed order, so the cheap items have to be bought before the better ones appear later. The first slot sells boot upgrades for movement speed and then extra lives. The second sells gun upgrades for fire rate. The third sells ammunition upgrades, which raise bullet damage and give bullets penetration so a single shot can carry through more than one weak enemy. Most experienced players push ammunition hardest, aiming to have the first upgrade by the forest stage and the second before the mummies arrive, then spending the rest on gun speed.
The enemies escalate neatly. The prairie opens with slow orcs in large numbers and adds spikeballs, which walk to a spot and then deploy into armoured balls that kill on contact either way, and ogres, which plough through spikeballs. The forest brings fast mushrooms and the first flying enemy, an evil butterfly that can come over obstacles from anywhere on the perimeter. The graveyard brings hordes of tough mummies and imps, which fly, hunt the farmer and ignore both the gopher and the zombie effect. A gopher occasionally wanders across the field and is the only friendly thing in the game: enemies chase it and die on it, and it sometimes carries the gunman on a parade float after a boss falls.
Two bosses stand between the stages and the end. The Cowboy appears twice, across a ravine both times, popping out of cover to loose a volley upward before ducking back, and he has twice the health on the second meeting. Fector is the final fight and is a different order of problem: nothing restricts his movement or the farmer's, he fires both straight shots and eight-way bursts, and he summons help as his health drops. Holding the top or middle of the arena and circling steadily, taking shots in the gaps between his volleys, is the approach most players settle on, since the bottom of the field is where runs die.
Progress is saved between areas, which changed the game completely. The autosave records the held item, the upgrades, the lives and the time left on entering a new area, and also fires on each death, so a run can be abandoned and resumed days later. It skips a death during a boss fight, which lets a boss be retried until it falls. Sleeping after each cleared area and restarting the day after a death turns the whole thing into a series of short attempts, and that is how most farmers earn Fector's Challenge.
Hard Mode starts fresh with upgrades and coins carried over but lives reset and held items removed. Every enemy gains at least a hit point and some move faster, spawns thicken, imps turn up on every ordinary area, and extra lives become scarce. Beating it offers another turn at a harder setting again, and the ladder keeps going.
Notes
The arcade keeps its own luck. Its random elements roll independently of the farmer's daily fortune, so a good forecast on the television changes nothing about which power-up drops next.
The names used for the power-ups and the enemies are the players' own invention, worked out by watching what each one does on screen.
A Lost Book in the museum's collection is written about the game, which casts it as a real cabinet hit inside the valley's own fiction. The title itself nods to an older fishing series by the studio behind the farming games that inspired Stardew Valley.
The window matters more than it should. A high zoom level crops the edges of the arcade screen, and the default windowed view can hide the timer bar at the top, so dropping the zoom before a serious attempt is worth doing.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
