WolfEye really wants to show me the fire propagation in Weird West, its upcoming action RPG. The problem is, it won't stop raining. Flames don’t like getting wet, it turns out.
Weird West doesn’t care what you want - it’s more interested in giving you moments that you didn’t know you wanted. From some of the minds behind Dishonored and Prey, this is a game where you’re a part of the world, not the sole agent of change within it. Of course, you can change things - you can wipe out entire towns, kill key NPCs, and the game moves on regardless - but the world will ruin your plans just as quickly as you can mess with it.
During a different playtest, one of WolfEye’s developers wanted to show off - you guessed it - the fire propagation (they’re really proud of it). He shot an oil lamp and it fell to the floor, catching on some dry grass and sending flames skyward. At that exact moment, a tornado appeared and started whipping up the landscape. The tornado spun over the blaze, sucking it up into its vortex. The tornado, which was now a flame-tornado - one hour back on the doomsday clock from a sharknado, I guess - proceeded to swirl around the environment, setting houses aflame and burning NPCs. When it finally calmed, every single NPC in the town was dead.
When the developer finishes telling me this anecdote, I ask how they feel about moments like this happening to an unsuspecting player. “Tough shit,” director Raphael Colantonio laughs. It’s all about different perspectives.
The most interesting thing about Weird West is how the world remembers everything that happens. You play as four unique characters whose stories intertwine, and the world remembers everything you did with the previous character. Let’s say you decide to gun down an entire town. When you go back to that same town as the next character, creatures or outlaws might have turned it into their lair, making it more difficult for you to pass through. While this might seem like a punishment, it’s the game recalibrating itself to suit your playstyle. “Oh, you like combat? Here’s some more.”
When I say the world remembers everything, I mean it. You can bury powerful weapons in one run and dig them up to use with the next character. You can even recruit old characters to fight alongside you, though they can die permanently if they fall in battle.
I’m shown the opening moments of the game. It starts out like most Westerns - your partner and your kid have been murdered, and you’re tasked with digging up your guns before heading out into the dust bowl for revenge. But first, the developer throws some lamps about, gets annoyed at the rain, shoots a wolf, buries the wolf, buries their son, digs up their son’s skull, and takes it with them as a memento. All of this happens because of the journalists watching the playthrough. “Can you do this?” was a recurring theme of the hands-off presentation, and so was the answer: “Yes.”
In a previous, in-development version of this opening section, you didn’t play as the mother. You played as the kid. When showing that build of the game off, one of the attendees asked what happens if you shoot your dad, so the developer did that. The dad died, and the mother escaped. Later, the developer was attacked on the road by the mother, who had formed a posse to get revenge against Patricide Kid. The devs had no idea this would happen - Weird West is filled with systems that are designed to surprise everyone, including the people who made it.
While Weird West might start off like a typical Western, it gets more strange as the game progresses. The second character you play as is a pig-man. There are shapeshifting creatures who slither about before disguising themselves as humans. There are strange powers and occult practices. Red Dead Redemption this ain’t.
All of that is captured with a striking, comic panel art style. The action takes place from above, but you have free control over the camera. It plays like a twin-stick shooter, but there’s verticality to consider, and you’re free to clamber over rooftops and parkour your way across them. The action looks immediate and satisfying - it’s so slick that you can throw a glass bottle and shoot it out of the air. It even has a Max Payne-style bullet-time dive, allowing you to slow down time and riddle an enemy with bullets while dodging.
Of course, being a game by Arkane Studios veterans, stealth is also an option here. You can throw distractions, slice necks, hide bodies, and skulk through bushes before getting the drop on your enemies. One section I’m shown sees our hero assaulting a compound. The first time, the developer goes in guns-blazing. The second time, they skulk around the perimeter looking for an opening. I see about four obvious entry points, but the dev chooses to pick up a barrel, plonk it down next to the wall, and infiltrate by climbing on top and jumping over. All the elements you’d expect from a traditional immersive sim are here - believable physics, NPCs with schedules, unconventional solutions, interlocking systems, and a world that constantly surprises. It’s just a different perspective. Oh, and it’s fucking weird.