For a few weeks now, TripGeo's social accounts have been quietly posting about an "untitled pig project". Then an "untitled pig game". Then, briefly and against legal advice that we never actually sought, Pink Pig Redemption. We can now confirm that none of those were the name.

The name is HOG NOON. It came out on Saturday. At noon. Obviously.

A spaghetti western, but with more actual spaghetti

Hog Noon is a top-down twin-stick shootout set in the Great Gristle Basin, a frontier settled during the Truffle Rush of '49 by thousands of pigs who went west to get rich digging up legendary fungi. They didn't find many truffles. They did find a lot of mud, and they have made the most of it.

The Basin's motto is "the only law is gluttony", and its currency is feed corn and actual, physical lard. This is not a dusty frontier. It is a greasy one. Everything is slightly sticky. We apologise in advance to your keyboard.

You shoot with two revolvers, roll through gunfire, hide in barrels, and bounce trick shots off spittoons, which is the single most cowboy sentence we have ever been allowed to write in a blog post. When a hog loses a fight, it doesn't die. It is Tuckered Out: its hat flies off, stars circle its head and it flops over for a little lie-down. Nobody in Swine's Crossing is ever really hurt. Their pride, on the other hand, is in tatters.

Meet the swine of Swine's Crossing

The town is a powder keg of conflicting appetites, held together by the tenuous authority of a Sheriff who is too old for this slop. A few of the locals:

• Sheriff Wyatt Earpig, the weary, incorruptible lawman, who famously cleaned up Dodge City by eating all the evidence. His lumbago is flaring up. It is always flaring up.
• "Tuskface" McGraw, a scarred, feral wild boar who hates civilisation, soap and Sheriff Earpig, roughly in that order.
• Short-Fuse Sal, a hyperactive javelina with dynamite braided into her mane. Her special move, The Big Kaboom, has a 40% chance of missing, and a miss can land on Sal. She considers this part of the charm.
• Jebediah "Iron-Gut" Slade, who will eat anything, including gunpowder, without flinching. Especially gunpowder.
• Judge "Hang 'Em High" Hogg, whose verdict is always "Guilty" and whose sentence is always "The Smokehouse". He has never once been accused of overthinking a case.
• Doc Cures-All, whose Pig-Vigor Elixir is mostly beet juice and truffles and whose attacks are, medically speaking, a lucky dip.
• Cornelius "The Chop" Vanderbilt III, an Eastern city slicker who came west for rustic adventure and is still horrified by the sanitation.
• Deputy "Squeaky" Pete and Ol' Pete "Truffle-Shuffle" Higgins, who are two completely different pigs. Shout "Pete!" and both of them answer. This happens a lot. It never stops being a problem.

The Great Turnip Heist

The story opens with Tuskface's gang robbing the bank, which keeps its vault in a reinforced root cellar stocked with premium feed sacks, molasses barrels and the town's winter supply of candied yams. Gambino takes the high ground. Sal lights the fuse. Squeaky Pete raises the alarm at a pitch only dogs and bank managers can hear. There is an extremely large kaboom.

We won't spoil what's in the vault. We'll just leave this here.

From there it all gets out of hand. Over five parts the story takes in a runaway mine cart, a trial by trough, a snake oil stampede, a revival tent where the congregation speaks in tongues (the tongues are mostly oinks), a railroad bridge over the Swill, a midnight raid on the Judge's smokehouse, and an attack by a hog roughly fifty feet tall. Gambino goes to the Moon in a barrel, in black and white, because the Moon was in black and white back then. Deputy Pete takes a swig of Doc's elixir and can suddenly hear colours. It all comes down to Main Street, at noon, and one last draw.

A tip for that draw, from the Sheriff, who learned it the hard way: wait for DRAW! Do not fire on DRAWERS!. Nobody knows why anyone would shout "drawers" in the middle of a gunfight, but somebody always does. Your first shot will be a dud, the whole town will see it, and the Gazette will print it.

The story has more than one ending, depending on who you trust to draw. There is also a secret ending, and all we will say about it is that you should keep an eye on Cornelius, and that there is a sneeze involved.

The side shows

If you need a break from the main event, the town has entertainment:

• Piano Hog: the saloon piano as a rhythm game. The left hand plays on 1 2 3, the right on 8 9 0. Play it well and forty pigs pile onto the dance floor. Play it badly and forty pigs pile onto the dance floor anyway, but to complain.
• The Duel Gauntlet: twelve high-noon draws in a row, each rival quicker than the last.
• Hold the Line: an endless last stand on Main Street, with a tide of varmints that gets bigger, meaner and later in the afternoon.
• The Shooting Gallery Express: an endless ride on the rails, shooting everything that isn't nailed down and quite a lot that is.

A small film studio has also appeared

At some point during development the game grew a film studio, Gristle Basin Pictures, which nobody asked for and which nobody has been able to stop. The Movies panel on the title screen now holds a prequel (A Fistful of Truffles), a teaser, two trailers, a music video and a pile of shorts. One of them is filmed entirely on a pig's phone at 11:58 on a Saturday. Another one is about a turnip. We don't want to talk about the turnip.

Every one of them was made from the game itself, with its own art and its own sound. No stock footage, no music library and no actors were harmed. Some pigs were mildly inconvenienced.

How to play

Hog Noon plays in your browser at hognoon.tripgeo.com. There is nothing to download and nothing to install. It works with a mouse and keyboard, a game controller, or touch on a phone or tablet held sideways. If you would like it to open full screen like an app, there's an App page that shows you how to put it on your home screen.

Your progress is kept in your own browser, so you can wander off, have a lie-down in some cool mud, and come back to the Basin whenever you like. It will still be noon. It is always noon somewhere.