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Western Road
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About the game
You wake up in a small shack with a note by the bed: someone has left you money, there is a present waiting for you, and it is at the end of the path. The path cannot be that long, can it? So you open the door and start walking.
Western Road is a quiet travelling and trading game. The road is drawn as a single view that scrolls toward you, with cacti and rocks along the sides, and you advance by pressing the A button once per step. Every so often the road brings something up. A trader stops you and offers an exchange, and you can take the deal or turn it down. A fork in the road makes you pick left or right. There is a bandit to deal with, a house with a neighbour who has a favour to ask (one of them wants a package delivered to the shop, another wants you to visit a shack), and a shop where you can spend the gold you collect.
Your stats are steps, distance and gold, and the options menu shows your current quest and your goal. The items you buy or receive do more than decorate the screen: overalls, a bag, and a crystal worth a point of knowledge for every step you take.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy Color: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in binjgb, a Game Boy emulator written in C and compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play now, press A (the X key) on the title screen and keep stepping. F2 saves the emulator state in this browser and F4 brings it back; the game also keeps its own save.
Controls
| Key | Game Boy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| X | A | take a step, confirm, advance the text |
| Z | B | close menus, leave the shop |
| Arrow keys | Control Pad | move the menu cursor |
| Enter | Start | open the options menu (objectives, stats, items) |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Take your time with the trades. A trader shows what you give and what you receive before you decide, and you can decline without losing anything.
Check the objectives. The options menu lists the quest you are on and the goal behind it, such as a number of steps or gold to reach.
Leaving the shop. B asks whether you are ready to leave the shop, so you can browse without being rushed.
Credits and licence
Western Road is by Jeffrey Gensler, made for the GB Compo 2025 game jam. The whole repository (code, pixel art drawn in Aseprite and the songs written in hUGETracker) is released by the author under the MIT licence; the music player is hUGEDriver, in the public domain. The author does not publish a ready-made ROM in the repository, so the one served here was compiled, unchanged, from its source code with GBDK-2020. The full licence text is linked from this page.