In this alternate universe, the West was won by trying a bunch of ideas so crazy they just might work… and if they don’t, hitting the quick-load button to revert to an earlier save and trying something even crazier until you pull it off. Thanks to that freedom to experiment with its world as you explore, Weird West is one of those games that feels like a stealth and combat playground even as it tells five mostly serious, well-written stories with interesting decisions throughout and a thoughtful conclusion. And with so much ground to cover and replayability to investigate, it’s well worth putting up with some quirks and underwhelming loot.
What ties Weird West’s plot together is a group of shadowy figures using a magical brand to force your character’s consciousness into the bodies of various unsuspecting people. It’s a clever play on the way so many games have us take control of a character who already exists in that world but still need to bring us up to speed on their identity: here, our character is going through the same confusion we are. On top of that, the fact that our character is also an amnesiac and has no idea how or why they’re playing this game of musical bodies is another mind-bending layer of mystery that definitely adds some appropriately intriguing weirdness to Weird West.
Although the tone is generally played straight and dark, with murder, mutilation, and blood everywhere while eerie music builds the mood, the writers at Wolfeye have worked in some good humorous dialogue here and there that keeps things from getting too dour. That’s one of many ways in which Weird West reminds me of my fondness for the classic Fallout 2, including the isometric perspective and the overworld map where you’re pulled out of your travel for bandit attacks, traveling merchants, and a witch who just likes to mess with you. The low-detail art style works better from farther above than it does when you zoom in closer to ground level, but it’s certainly not without its abstract charms when it comes to depicting the exaggerated features of creatures like werewolves, wraiths, and insect-infested zombies that move like The Last of Us’s Clickers.
Each of the five characters you’ll inhabit has their own vignette story that can be as short as a handful of hours or, if you take your time like me, an average of eight a piece. We begin with Jane the Bounty Hunter tracking down her abducted husband, followed by a forcibly mutated pigman searching for the truth about who he used to be, a Protector of the Lost Fire Tribe battling a greed demon, a werewolf who is prophesized to lead his people in a battle for survival, and finally a cult member. They all take place on the same large, dense overworld map of a region known simply as “the West.” And while there’s not a ton of overlap between where their main quests lead them, they’re all free to explore and revisit anywhere and anyone they like. Don’t worry about the count of how many days you’ve spent – there’s no time pressure to any of the stories.
The playable characters are largely defined by their sets of four class abilities, ranging from the bounty hunter’s landmines to the pigman’s poison trail and the werewolf’s temporary invisibility. There’s also a universal set of useful weapon skills like electric pistol bullets, silenced rifle shots, and stun arrows, but those must be leveled up for each character individually. However, a set of perks you unlock that remain persistent, and between that and a couple of shared loot stashes that means you’re considerably more powerful in the fifth act than in the first thanks enhancements like more health, doubled explosive damage, and faster stealth movement. That provides a sense of progression even as you reboot from one character to the next.
While it’s kind of a bummer that you can’t switch back to directly controlling a previous character if you miss their abilities, that’s an understandable limitation when you consider how the story works as a sequence of events. You can, however, go back to their homes and recruit them as one of your two AI-controlled companions (and you’d be crazy not to, since they’re powerful and you get their inventories back) but the AI doesn’t use their abilities with the precision they need to be really useful in combination with your own. There’s also an added tension from the fact that these irreplaceable companions can permanently die (unless you reload a quicksave), so they’re more of a loss than the disposable mercenaries you can hire in that role when things go bad.
Another forgivable letdown is that none of the main characters are voiced – we only ever hear from the Sam Elliot-impersonating narrator, and the voices that play behind the text of everyone else’s speech sounds like spooky whispers or if Bane from The Dark Knight Rises was a Sim. But their personalities come across in the writing when you interact with them, and we’re given plenty of opportunities to define them for ourselves with choices about who to help and who to harm.
When the action begins, gunfights with more than a couple of adversaries get hectic quickly because everybody moves pretty fast and the lead flies faster. Weird West is effectively a twin-stick shooter, and rapidly aiming and firing while managing your lengthy reload times for your revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and bow and arrow is a tall order. However, there’s a slow-motion button that takes the twitch reactions out of fights (except for the reaction required to push that button); with this activated, the real challenge becomes managing the amount of time it takes to swing your gun from one target to the next – it’s not instant – and of course, timing your special abilities for maximum effectiveness.
[Note: to activate this tactical mode on console, push and hold the right bumper button.]
Also, slow-mo will automatically activate when you initiate a cinematic dive move, which eats some of your precious Action Point bar that’s consumed by your abilities, but is extremely worth it because of how much damage you can put out. You get extra bullets in your gun and can fire rapidly, so anything short of a boss-level character will usually melt under a satisfying hail of bullets before you hit the ground.
Pros will know to do this before a fight breaks out, but I relied on slow-mo to give me the time I needed to really take advantage of the environment. Weird West is as much an immersive sim as it is an action game (which makes sense, considering Wolfeye was founded by Raphael Colantonio, who previously founded Arkane Studios, known for Dishonored and Prey) so you can expect plenty of opportunities for physics-based antics. Throw a lit oil lamp into a field and watch the firestorm that ensues; water (including rain) puts out the fire, while wind makes it spread faster. Touching arrows to a flame makes them into fire arrows, while dipping them in poison does exactly what you’d expect. Electricity plus water is another good one to remember. There’s a lot of room to experiment here, and I love when a plan – or a completely accidental win – comes together.
Of course, there’s no XP gained from killing in Weird West, so that means it’s really an expedient means of acquiring loot as you go from point A to point B or defending yourself when you get caught where you shouldn’t be. That’s a wise design choice because it means that if you prefer to sneak through the whole thing, avoiding combat and pilfering the artifacts and golden playing cards that unlock new abilities you won’t be missing out on much by way of progression. Also, it smartly takes the Last of Us approach to companions while you’re in stealth, meaning they’re simply invisible to enemies and you don’t have to worry about them blowing your cover if the AI does something goofy.
Stealth is an exercise for the patient, so much of my first playthrough was done in a guns-blazing fashion, but every so often I’d see an opportunity to thin the herd; with a little timing (and perhaps some quick-loading) you can crough-walk from bandit to bandit, knocking them out and then picking up their unconscious bodies to toss them into a bush or behind a minecart while you deal with their friends. If they’re dead you have the option to bury them if you have a shovel, so playing non-lethal stealth is slightly more of a self-imposed challenge. (Wolfeye says it’s possible to get through the campaign without killing a human, but I was nowhere near pulling that off myself.)