Weird West
A mad tornado of magic, violence, and consequences.
When a game gives you the power to do almost anything in its strange world, and you find yourself eating corpses every 10 minutes, you really start to take a long hard look at yourself. In the mad tornado that is Weird West, you find yourself making unexpected choices at every turn, never sure what they’ll mean until later.
Weird West’s story is split into five distinct chapters, and in each, you’ll play as a different character. There’s Jane Bell, the retired gunslinger, The Pigman, Across Lakes of the native tribe, the powerful protector, and the witch. Their stories are connected and intertwined, a murky soup of occult practices, witches, flesh-eaters, and regret, told through dialogue, documents, and the environments you travel through. While they all have their own individual plotlines and different journeys to go on, they can pleasingly overlap. Once you’ve finished Bell’s story, for instance, you can go back as another character and recruit her to your posse. It’s nice, seeing an old friend, at least until you get her killed.
The actual gameplay is a mix of gunplay, strategic use of the environment – like lamps that can be shot to cause a blaze, barrels of oil, toxic chemicals – careful inventory management, and special powers afforded to your characters by collectible playing cards and relics. The isometric perspective does take some getting used to when you’re wielding your rifles and bows and shotguns, but the guideline helps accuracy (those lamps are pretty tiny) and I adapted faster than I expected. You’ve also got the option to go for stealth, sneaking up behind enemies, knocking them out, and hiding them in the bushes, but in my case, things got so chaotic so often this approach was only ever the amuse-bouche before a feast of bullets. I did manage to complete a main story mission where I had to sneak through a brothel, throw someone off a balcony and raid an office all without being spotted, but I’ll die before I tell you how many saves and reloads it took.
Weird West has the ambition of a much larger game, and has made smart choices to be able to meet it.
Rachel Weber