It’s been about 17 years since the theatrical premiere of the gay cowboy drama Brokeback Mountain, and to commemorate the occasion, gay video game developer Robert Yang created Lonesome Valley a game about two young, horny guys alone in the Wyoming wilderness — yee-haw!
Jose is a bookish, middle-class, Latino college student from California who’s visiting Wyoming to complete a summer field project for his agricultural management degree. Bud is a white working-class rural Wyoming native who has been selected to help Jose wrangle sheep on the countryside.
Together, they locate strays, use carrots to lure them back to the pen, and conversationally flirt with one another while working. In this way, the 30-minute game is a bit like a herding simulator mixed with a dating sim. Players have five seconds to respond to Bud’s comments. Some responses will increase Bud’s attraction, while others will turn him off.
But when the sheep are herded, the sun sets, and there’s only one tent for sleeping… what happens next is up to the player. And anyone who has played Yang’s other gaymes knows that fooling around is definitely on the table.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
But here’s where the game gets interesting. A lot of dating simulators will only let you get sexy with non-playable characters (NPC) if you choose the “correct” responses, something that reinforces the problematic real-life idea that people owe you sex if you’re nice to them. In Lonesome Valley, sex will totally happen unless Jose implies disinterest.
“The NPC knows what you’re here for and he wants it too, even if you kinda hate each other. Sometimes people have sex with someone they don’t like,” Yang wrote. “[In this game,] you can confess you’ve never done a gay sex before, or play it cool and more experienced. Either way, you negotiate what sex stuff to do.”
Back in 2019, when Yang made the original prototype for the game, he had two other gay cowboy things on his mind: Orville Peck’s song “Dead of Night” (a song about lonesome street hustlers) and God’s Own Country, an indie gay film about angsty gay ranchhands.
“Is there a place for gay cowboy romance beyond dreary cursed closets, dying on the street, or naïve bourgeois bliss?” Yang wondered. “I don’t think I quite found it, but [the Lonesome Valley is] how I tried.”
Yang also specifically rendered the game in old-school pixel art because it implies a “speculative history where these games existed, an acquired nostalgia crucial for the retrospection of a gay western.” In non-graduate-speak, that means he wanted to imagine a past where games like these gave modern-day people a way to look back on how gay cowboys have been depicted.
Lonesome Valley is free to play online or purchasable for any price. If you dig the game, you might want to check out Yang’s other quirky and hot indie games, including The Tearoom, a game about cruising a public bathroom; Logjam, where a muscular lumberjack chops wood while stripping; and Hard Lads, a game where drunk British men smoke, kiss, and beat each other down with folding chairs.
Oh also, if gay cowboys are your thing: Did you know that the real-life Wild West was waaaaay queerer than most folks realize? Yee-haw, indeed.
bachy
Interesting. It’s almost like a training session in wilderness seduction techniques!
scotty
” he asked me ! he asked me!”
respectful apologies to graham chapman may he R.I.P.
Doug
I can certainly appreciate the efforts, but it’s yet another video game with a gay theme that is so crudely programmed. It reminds me of an old Atari game, if anyone remembers those.