“Requires pickaxe” usually means just that in video games – you need this specific tool to complete the action. In Weird West, it’s merely a suggestion. If you think something should logically work – say, mining ore with dynamite – it most likely will. Kick a bucket of water over a blazing fire and you’ll extinguish it. Find yourself aflame? Perform a roll or take a dip in a river.
One of the most magical things about video games is how they respond to your actions. I don’t just mean how you point a gun and pull the trigger, dealing death from a distance (though that’s good too). I mean the little things, like how AI reacts to non-violent actions or how the story changes to note your decisions.
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These are the kinds of games Raphael Colantonio and his team at WolfEye have created since the founding of Arkane Studios: immersive sims. It’s a design ethos that continues with the new studio’s debut game. The main difference between this and, say, Dishonored, is the budget.
Weird West is as much an immersive sim as Deus Ex and Thief, but it takes place from a bird’s-eye view. While part of me wishes I could have seen the triple-A dollars version, played from a first-person perspective, this purity of vision – and the budget constraints – allows the game to go deeper on choice and consequence. Kill anyone, including key characters, and the story goes on. It’s built to be played and replayed, to be messed with and pushed to its limits. Sure, you might see a lot of the same assets repeated across its small playspaces, but there’s more to games than realistically animated horse gonads.
The game opens with a gang kidnapping your husband and murdering your child. Your first quest is to bury your son and dig up your irons, squirreled away back when Jane Bell decided to leave a life of bounty hunting behind. It grounds you in this typical cowboy movie setup, but it’s not long before you realize why the game isn’t just called “West”.
Your husband has been captured by a gang called the Stillwaters, who plan to sell him as meat to the sirens, a race of shapeshifting creatures who slither along the ground when they’re not pretending to be human. Anyone in this world could be a siren in disguise, and there are even some people – like a prisoner who calls himself “Snack” – who want to be eaten by them. So far, so normal.
Once Jane Bell’s story is over, you take the role of a pigman who may or may not have been more of a pig when he was a man. You’re tasked with helping a tree commit suicide.
After that, you’re an indigenous protector who’s fighting against the curse of the Wiindigo, a physical manifestation of colonialism. It heightens the greed of men, to the point where they’re so full of lust that they eat their own lips. I’ll let you discover the last two characters for yourself, but each has a self-contained story that’s weaved into the overarching tale about a group of immortals trying to do… something spoilery.
When your story with one character is over, it’s onto the next, and the world remains however you left it – characters you killed are dead, enemies who got away might turn up on wanted posters, towns you didn’t save are overrun with creatures. You can even recruit your old characters into your party to adventure with you, and each brings something unique to a fight. While every character can use every weapon type – shotguns, rifles, pistols, bows – they’re also imbued with magical powers that make them feel distinct, whether you’re summoning tornadoes with the protector or barreling through enemies as the pigman.
Each character shows you the world from an entirely new perspective. As a pigman, for example, some people are hostile to you on account of you being a, you know, man who eats corpses and has a pig’s head. It reminds me a little of how Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines’ starting class altered your experience, and the bite-sized nature of each story really suits this structure. It encourages you to roleplay as each character – however it is you see them. When I’m tasked with speaking to a jeweler as a pigman, I creep into town at night, check no one is around, and kick the store’s front door off its hinges. No need to rope down a chimney when you’re the scariest thing in town.
Yes, you have a dedicated kick button. As we all know, video game kicks are brilliant. Deathloop, Bulletstorm, Dark Messiah: Of Might and Magic – all of these games are elevated by the humble boot. They’re all brilliant and they all have a kick button. Coincidence? No. Weird West also has a dedicated kick. Kick down doors. Kick over barrels of oil, causing them to spill before setting them alight. Kick through windows. Kick men to their deaths. Kick men after they’re dead. Jane Bell even has a supernatural power that amps up her kick and allows her to boot baddies across the map. In one fight, I kick someone so hard that they smash through a saloon window. I might have saved that town from the Stillwaters, but the saloon owner hates my guts now. Sorry, my guy, it just feels so good.
The action is slick. It plays like a twin-stick shooter, but the aim assist is perfectly tuned – it doesn’t lock onto foes, but it’s smart enough to take differences in elevation into account. It’s so precise that you can throw a bottle into the air and shoot it mid-flight. That precision is important because death comes fairly quickly if you don’t use cover and movement to throw enemies off. You don’t quite need Hotline Miami-level reflexes, but it’s not far off. At least here there’s a tool you can use to control the pace. As well as a range of weapon skills and spectral powers, you can also perform a bullet-time dive in any direction, slowing time to a crawl as you dodge bullets and fire back as if you’re in a John Woo flick. Bodies ragdoll, blood spatters and pools, and stetsons soar.
This being an immersive sim, there’s also a range of environmental hazards, from those aforementioned oil barrels to chemical barrels and TNT crates. Survey the battlefield before kicking off a fight, prepare it well, and combat can be over in seconds. Ignite a spark in a cloud of toxic fumes and it explodes in a chain reaction. Shoot a lantern and it’ll start a fire, which could catch on an oil slick. Shoot an ammo pickup and it’ll crackle and pop, firing off shells and killing anyone around it in a deadly fireworks display. Fire off a magical tornado and it might catch on a fireplace, turn into an elemental whirlwind, and suck you up into it before burning you to death. It’s quite easy to mess up and wreck yourself if you’re not on the ball. In the thick of it, battles can sometimes be difficult to read – particularly when you have two allies in your team – but it’s hardly a deal-breaker. You just have to pay attention and be aware of your surroundings.
In a way, that feels purposeful. By forcing you to pay attention during combat, it opens your eyes up to the world around you and enriches your time with the game. That coffin outside the saloon with the body branded a cheater? Notice the pack of playing cards in his pocket. The major who wants you to force people to hand over their land? Why not snoop around his property first and see if he’s got any skeletons in his basement. Weird West always has more going on than its waypoint markers suggest and it makes you feel smart when you figure something out about a character by heading off the main path. It makes the story feel personal to you.
Another thing that adds to this is the Vendetta System, which is like a watered-down Nemesis System from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Kill someone’s relative, hand them in alive as a bounty, or let them escape in combat, and they’ll start a vendetta against you, springing up with some cronies somewhere down the road. Likewise, make friends with people and they might appear to help when you’re down on your luck.
It’s basically everything you’d expect from a studio made up of ex-Arkane developers – deep, rich, and smart. It’s a game that constantly says “yes”, and then acknowledges all the decisions you made at the climax. It respects the player and their choices, from start to finish, while telling a wholly original story that manages to avoid cowboy cliche.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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