I must have explored dozens of underground mines over the course of the game, and even more caves and ancient ruins, each using the same “mysterious” architecture. It turns out that the Weird West isn’t all that weird. I was hoping for something more in the vein of Lovecraft and Weird Fiction - Dishonored’s talking rats, sentient hearts, and magic whales, for instance. Random encounters never feel anything more than frivolous, and even the best side missions never get weird enough. The map is huge, with hundreds of locations that will pop up as you travel across the wilderness, but a lot of these places end up feeling samey - content to blast through, rather than tales to savor. It ends up feeling a bit limp.Īnd if the main story is disjointed but ambitious, then the side quests are a genuine letdown. While the overlapping structure of five different characters living within one world is ambitious, Weird West struggles to coalesce. This is typical of computer RPGs, where there’s such varying complexity in the earlier stages, all that can be mustered by the end is a cold, calculative summary of your actions. The overarching plot eventually sees your five avatars pulled together into a big showdown that takes your previous lives into consideration. Previous characters also persist in the world after you’ve finished playing them, hanging about ready to be recruited into your posse. Similarly, if you go on a huge robbery or killing spree, that place will be empty except for an overflowing graveyard. If you liberate a monster-infested ghost town as the bounty hunter, it’ll be a bustling place with shopkeepers and a saloon when you return as the hogman. Bridging each of these distinct chapters are several recurring characters - a strange young girl who speaks in riddles, a wandering witch who plays games with you, and a bounty hunter obsessed with immortality and bad jokes.Įach life lived spills over into the next chapter. There are five characters, who you play in sequence, each with their own story to unravel and specific problems to solve: a bounty hunter whose husband has been kidnapped by a powerful fleshing-eating entity a hogman hungry for revenge after their horrific transformation a young Anishinaabe hunter defending his home from the spirit of greed a werewolf and finally, a witch.
The story of Weird West works as an anthology. Weird West also comes in a slightly more condensed package - the world feels far smaller and less cohesive than many big RPGs, instead being split up into smaller locations that you travel between on a map. Think of Larian Studios’ recent Divinity games, where you can pick up almost every object in the world, set elements ablaze (in real time), and sneak around and pickpocket people. While Weird West comes with plenty of systems and simulations, at its heart this is a familiar computer RPG rather than some spectacular new translation of the immersive sim. There’s “frontier justice” and duels at high noon - but there’s also witches, werewolves and vampires. Like Dishonored, Weird West is a real genre-bender, mixing the open wilderness and gunslinging Western with horror and fantasy. In other words, systemic chaos is to be expected. This is the first game from the newly founded WolfEye Studios, whose co-founder, Raphaël Colantonio, worked as a creative director on Dishonored, Prey, and more at Arkane Studios. Like Disco Elysium’s fatal tie incident, except with physics and chemistry and propagating fire. I hear a few loud squawks and see a fatal burst of feathers as I stand in the middle of the chaos, being slowly licked to death by the flames of my own stupidity.Īh, this is one of those games, I think.
The bottle of whiskey on the table ignites and the wooden chairs shatter, while fire crawls up the curtains and through the window, catching the chicken coop just outside. It shatters, spreading fire across the little wood cabin. I pick it up, hoping to shed some light on the situation, but I miss-click, and suddenly my avatar hurls the lamp against the wall. Resting next to me on the bedside table is an old oil lamp. I wake from my bed in the middle of the night, startled by noises outside.
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