WEIRD WEST
A cowboy RPG from a team that has earned its spurs
Developer WolfEye Studios Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC Origin Various Release Autumn
Raphaël Colantonio knows a thing or two about the peculiar magic of immersive sims. As the founder of Arkane, he’s responsible for some of the best examples of the form ever made. After leaving to found WolfEye Studios, his priorities really haven’t changed much: “Our mission is to go deeper into immersive sims. That’s our passion – it always has been and probably always will be.”
Before our demo of Weird West, WolfEye’s debut, Colantonio gives a brief presentation on what he refers to as a “design religion”. He talks about the importance of making a world that is “bigger than the game”, of leaving room for player expression, and of systems that interlock to create outcomes even the designers couldn’t have predicted. The heart of immersive sim design, as he sees it, is akin to that golden rule of improv. “Say yes to the player.”
But you know what they say about the relative volume of actions and words. And we’re happy to report that, if you’re looking for an explanation of why these games have attracted such a dedicated cult following over the years, even Colantonio can’t compete with Weird West itself.
The demo begins with a fairly rote setup. Jane Bell is a former bounty hunter who traded in her guns for a quiet family life. At least, until a bandit gang shows up, kidnaps her husband and murders her son. Thanks to a few suggestions from the audience, though, this familiar story quickly takes on a life of its own.
At the controls, game designer Gaël Giraudeau explores the Bell family farm, where the corpse of your child still sits in the dirt. There’s a request from one of the assembled journalists: can he give the poor son a proper burial? Giraudeau grabs a shovel and gets to work. No sooner has he finished, the fresh dirt on little Huck’s grave topped off with a little cowboy hat, than another question follows: what if you dig him up?
It turns out, perhaps thankfully for good taste, that the child’s body has already ossified. We’re presented with an inventory screen containing one skull and one femur. A description of the latter calls it “a tough old length of bone” and lets us know we can use it to attack someone or sell it a general store for five dollars. Another suggestion from the audience: take his skull with you.
Giraudeau holds firm to that ‘say yes’ mantra, and pockets it for later use. “I will keep my son’s skull all along the way,” he promises. Knowing how these things go, we can’t help but imagine the temptation, hours later, of something shiny in a shop window when you’re short on money. (After all, the femur might only fetch a fiver, but the skull? That sells for a few dollars more.)
This is just one of the ways that this opening sequence could have gone off the rails, we’re told later. Giraudeau shares a story of preparing for this demo, involving a tornado. This is one of the game’s procedural elements, capable of introducing a little extra chaos as it tears through the map at random. We encounter one in our session, but all it does is pick up the body of our pet wolf – also killed by the bandits – and toss it a few yards.
However, tornadoes gain the elemental properties of anything they touch. And in Giraudeau’s prep session, it happened to pick up a burning oil lamp, setting light to everything in the vicinity – including the sheriff NPC who sets the player off on their quest. That probably won’t be allowed in the final game, Colantonio says. Weird West is still going through what he refers to as a “reverse” design process, where the possibility space is locked down a little. “We allow for everything to happen, and then little by little we say, ‘No, that cannot be’, so we add exclusions.” In this case, it may be that the tornado is forbidden from entering certain critical areas of the map or forced to wait while the player is in dialogue. “Right now, we’re still in the state where a lot of crazy funny things can happen.” Evidently, the man is not wrong.
With skull safely tucked away, Bell continues on her mission, tracking down the bandits’ base and eliminating their leader. Getting there involves navigating the overworld map, which is inspired by the original Fallout games. There are set points of interest to visit, but it seems you can click anywhere to travel to it, meaning that – if you know the exact location of your final destination, as Giraudeau does – you can head straight there.
When Bell arrives at the hideout, we’re shown two ways things can play out: a fullfrontal assault, and then the sneakier approach. The former is a good opportunity to get to grips with Weird West’s shooting. Because the game isn’t quite top-down, and has various layers of verticality, the aiming system was tricky to get right, we’re told. The solution WolfEye landed on blends twin-stick shooting with what appears to be a pinch of lock-on, enabling you to target characters and objects with enough to precision to, for example, throw a bottle and then explode it with a bullet before it hits the ground. “People ask what’s the point of that,” Colantonio says. “And the thing is, in a very emergent game, where there are a lot of systems, that is how you actually create interesting possibilities.” Sure enough, we find ourselves wondering what happens if you pull the same trick with one of those oil lamps.
Stealth, meanwhile, is a fairly basic hideand-seek affair, with detection relying on occlusion rather than light and dark, and meters above enemies’ heads that fill to let you know you’re about to be spotted. Bodies can be picked up and hidden in bushes, attacks on unaware enemies deal extra damage, and there seems to be an optional non-lethal takedown move. It’s everything you’d expect from sneaking around in one of these games, in other words.
Bell completes the mission, one step closer to finding her husband. Once she reaches this goal, her story will end – but Weird West won’t. There are five miniature campaigns (‘journeys’) to play through, each putting you in the spurred boots of a different character. This goes some way to explaining the tropey beginnings of Bell’s tale. WolfEye intentionally borrowed from all those videogames and Westerns to ease players into its world, before cranking up the weird elements. The second campaign has you playing a pigman.
This has the potential to be Weird West’s most exciting addition to the immersive sim. Your new character will inherit the world as the previous one left it, from possessions they buried in the desert to towns they massacred. Your previous character, meanwhile, retires into an NPC role. You can leave them to live out their days, recruit them into your posse, or perform a kind of deferred suicide. That last one is a presumption on our part, admittedly, but it will surely be an option. After all, the possibility has crossed our mind, and we know what Weird West says to player suggestions, no matter how strange they are. Chances are we’ll be able to add another skull to our collection: the one we inhabited in a previous life.
“We allow for everything to happen, and then little by little we say, ‘No, that cannot be’”