Sheriff says there’s a scumbag Stillwater holed up in a cell nearby who knows exactly where his cronies hauled your battered and bruised beau off to. Runs with the same guys who offed your son Huck - “no meat on the bones.” The words echo in your head the whole way to Grackle PD. Sure as shit, Stillwater is there, cowering in the corner as Jane Bell busts down the door, shooting irons at the ready.
Where are they? Scumbag Stillwater doesn’t answer - you break his pinky. “I can’t t-tell you nothin’,” he says. “He’ll k-kill me!”
Ring finger. Scumbag Stillwater’s lip loosens. Trigger finger - that one’s gotta hurt for a raider. They’ve set up camp five hours north. The Weird West awaits.
I’ve only played around two hours of Weird West so far. In that time, I have looted three gold dollar coins from a dead man in front of his mourning wife. “Can’t even wait for the body to cool ya scavenging little shit,” she says. I feel bad, so I bury the corpse - turns out she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. I have taken a lantern from a crashed carriage, slinked through dense foliage, chucked it at an oil spill, and watched my enemies flail in fear and fever as their mortality struck like hot iron. I have punched the numbers “0451” into a sequestered safe to access important logs revealing the next known location of my elusive prey - it comes as no surprise that WolfEye Studios boss Raphael Colantonio comes from a background in immersive sim design.
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Weird West, despite being radically different in aesthetic to the likes of Deus Ex, Dishonored, and Prey, is an immersive sim in the purest sense of the term. Fire propagates; locked doors can be picked, blown up, or creatively navigated around; innocent bystanders will respond to your benevolence or lack thereof; cactuses can be pierced and drank from to restore health; sound can be used to distract enemies who would otherwise intercept and slaughter you before you could say “gunslinger.” I would say Weird West’s miracle is how well connected its systems are, but what’s actually miraculous is how systems this abundant should feel oppressive, and yet somehow - miraculously - never do.
This is because of how cleverly contextualised said systems are in terms of narrative depth. Take tactical mode, for example, which highlights nearby enemies in red and slows time to facilitate orchestrating a measured approach to any given situation. This is obviously highly gamified, but it also speaks to how you were once one of the most feared and revered bounty hunters in the Weird West. You strategise before engaging because you know better than to be impulsive. You can spot the tells of your adversaries because you’ve watched hundreds of their predecessors fall to your pistol. On the contrary, when people see Jane Bell coming, they’d run if not for the fact that victory would immortalise them. Every design decision made in developing Weird West also serves the story it wants to tell.
This calibre extends across every metric of quality, too. Weird West opens with the pared-back grunge of a detuned guitar, but layered synths texture the soundscape so it’s equal parts weird and Western. It’s also stupidly stylish - after spending some time with the game, what I’m most excited about is the art I’ve yet to see. The writing, meanwhile, is restrained but intensely dense. Everything comes together to assert a tone that oozes attitude and authority. It’s spectacular.
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If you took a cross-section of Weird West and trapped it like a bug in amber, all of the above would hold true and all would be well. Weird West, though, doesn’t come to life unless it’s being played - no amount of screenshots or trailers will ever do it justice. Even when it consciously recognises limitations - the world is split into individual levels, for example, which you fast travel between - it somehow manages to wrench them into unique advantages. Missions need to be completed in a certain amount of time and fast travel is defined by how many hours it takes to traverse a certain distance. If you’re frugal, you might be able to set up camp and rest before a job expires. If you’re not, you’d better kiss that bounty goodbye. Nothing about Weird West goes unconsidered - someone, somewhere, has thought of every possibility.
The pace is also brilliantly measured - you won’t want to leave a deserted town because there’s so much to uncover, while 30-second bouts of rip-roaring combat are sufficiently tense for time to slow to a stop. At one point, I saw three enemies standing guard next to a carriage loaded with explosive barrels. By blowing one of these barrels up, I simultaneously killed the first guard and sent the other two into a frenzy. I picked the one on the left off, swapped to my rifle, and by the time my final foe realised what was happening, propelled myself backwards as time slowed and my crackshot shell sent its mark to its maker. This transpired over the course of around four, maybe five seconds, but still acts as a perfect vertical slice of just how layered everything is.
Put as plainly as possible, Weird West is magnificent. I’ve only played a couple of hours, but I think the fact all I can do is wonder about all of the other brilliant ideas it might have up its sleeve serves as an irrefutable testament to the quality of what I’ve seen so far. We’re all already aware that next year is going to be massive for games, although personally, Weird West has skyrocketed to the top of my list faster than Samuel Beechworth could scull a pint.
Weird West launches for PC, PS4, and Xbox One on January 11, 2022.