Honest Work is a co-op game about moving cattle from one end of the frontier to the other. That's the whole job. Nobody said it was a good job.

You and your posse have a contract: deliver the herd, get paid, take on a bigger drive. The cattle are dumb, heavy, and easily spooked. The land between here and the delivery pen has rivers, cliffs, predators, rustlers, and weather with a personal grudge.

Your friends have lassos.

DRIVE THE HERD

The cattle are the job, and they don't make it easy. Keep the herd together, push them around danger, chase down stragglers, and get as many as you can to the pen.

Gunshots, predators, terrain, and cowboys charging directly through the middle of the herd can turn an orderly drive into a stampede in seconds.

Whose fault it was is usually pretty obvious.

YOU'LL NEED YOUR POSSE

There's a lot of ground to cover. Someone rides point, someone chases strays, someone keeps wolves off the herd, and someone was supposed to be doing all of that, but is currently being dragged behind another cowboy's horse.

When everything goes wrong at once, proximity voice chat lets you hear exactly how far away help is, and how hard it's laughing.

A COWBOY'S TOOLS

Everything on your saddle does real work.

A revolver for wolves, rustlers, and other frontier disagreements. A lasso for catching cattle, pulling friends out of trouble, and putting those same friends directly back into it - rope a cowboy off their horse and they go wherever your horse goes.

A compass so somebody knows where the pen is. A torch for the night drives. Whiskey for morale.

There's a banjo. It does not help with the cattle.

THE FRONTIER DISAGREES

Wolf packs come off the ridge. Rustlers ride in looking to take what you've got. Buffalo stampedes don't care who's standing in the way. Rivers split the posse, storms turn a bad drive into a worse one, and the longer trails bring tornados, cliff paths, and worse.

And then there's the Winter Pass. Up in the mountains, staying warm is part of the job. Blizzards tear across the trail, warmth drains in the open, and the fires along the route are the difference between moving on and freezing solid where you stand.

BACK IN TOWN

Finish the drive, get paid, and regroup. Buy ammo, patch up, hire a herding dog to work the flank you keep forgetting, try the shooting gallery, and pick out a new hat and the mustache to go under it.

Then saddle up and find out what goes wrong next.

ALSO

• Online co-op for 1–6 cowboys. Solo works, but there's nobody to blame.

• Getting shot, trampled, or launched sends your hat flying. Anyone can pick it up. It's their hat now.

• The dead spectate. The dead cannot give directions. This is a feature.

Drive the cattle. Rope your friends. Get paid.

And remember - you chose these people.

It ain't much, but it's honest work.