Post Script

Weird West’s life hopping tackles some big RPG questions

You begin Weird West as a retired bounty hunter, forced to leave the quiet farmer’s life behind after a gang kidnaps her husband and kills her son. Although, actually, that’s not quite true. You begin Weird West as a robed figure, their face unseen, slumped in a chair placed at the centre of a room where five portraits hang. Two women stand over you, talking enigmatically, before one of them takes a cattle brand and applies it your neck. And then you begin, as a retired bounty hunter with her life forever changed and a burning mark on her neck.

When her story wraps up, half a dozen hours or so later, you simply move onto the next life. You slip into the leathery skin of a pigman, trying to piece together scraps of who he was before. Then a young man of the Weird West’s indigenous people, hunting the Wiindigo spirit of greed that has overtaken so many of its colonisers. A church-going werewolf and his opposite number in the Oneirist witch clan. It’s an anthology format that suits the game’s horror fantasy well, each chapter introducing some new monster of the week, and overcoming the rather rote setups of each campaign.

It also changes your relationship with the traditional meat of RPGs: character progression. Once someone’s story is over, all the abilities you’ve unlocked and loot you’ve collected are lost. There are, however, exceptions to both rules. In the former case, there’s a second tree of passive upgrades that will carry over seamlessly; only your hotkey-triggered powers are removed, and frankly they’re no great loss – the effects are generally underwhelming enough that we often forget about them in the heat of the moment.

The loot would be a bigger issue, except that you quickly discover that you can take it with you. In fact, there are multiple ways of setting up an inheritance. You can ride out and find your past self, wherever their story left them; offer to posse up and you’ll have access to their inventory, stocked with all those goodies you spent hours acquiring. If you’re feeling more antisocial, the same thing can be achieved through a quick trip to the bank – or even just by digging a hole in the desert.

The latter method works because Weird West’s world is persistent to a fault. People you’ve killed will stay dead, zombie plagues notwithstanding; graves will remain dug, or dug up; shops you’ve robbed will never be fully stocked again. There’s an extra touch of magic to this persistence when you’re returning in another life, even though it requires no extra technical complexity.

With each character’s abilities not doing much to define their playstyle, and most losses easily recouped, it might sound as though Weird West’s lifehopping structure doesn’t introduce any real change.

But it does affect the nature of consequences, which are so vital to the notion of an immersive sim – what Colantonio once described to us as his “design religion”. Aside from more immediate consequences (ie, the faceful of lead you’ll receive for attacking a friendly NPC), the game has two ways of tracking consequences: a ‘reputation’ rating (effectively a flimsy morality system), and the vendettas and friend-for-life allies that will return hours later to repay your actions. But once you’re in a new body, all that is wiped clean.

Mechanically, it’s not a huge difference, but the fresh start feels like an improvisational prompt. Is a bereaved mother more or less likely to kill indiscriminately than a brothel-owning scumbag who wakes up as a pig? Does starting as a character with a bow suggest a different playstyle than beginning as one who wields a shotgun and meat cleaver? Do you want to be good this time, or very naughty indeed?

We’re reminded of Deathloop, the game Arkane made after Colantonio’s departure, with its loops that attempted to free players from some of the traditional strictures of the immersive sim. The two games feel like divergent answers to the same set of questions. Here, the reset frees us from the obligations of unwanted side quests, and lets us sample the different ways Weird West can be played. The game will respond to your actions, but only up to a point, so feel free to experiment and then change approach.

And as in Deathloop, Weird West’s overarching story considers what this might mean as a way of living your life. You slowly come to understand that you’re not really playing the bounty hunter or werewolf, but that robed character, known as ‘the Passenger’. It’s a setup that straddles a line between metaphysical and metatextual. Occasionally you’ll meet one of the observers from that portrait-lined room, and they’ll discuss your decisions and wink at the artifice of it all. It feels like chatting to the game’s developers.

As the Passenger, you’re literally playing roles, trying them one after the other. This can have a distancing effect, providing permission to be a monster in a way that can be difficult when you’re going to be stuck with that character for many hours to come. But occasionally it’ll have the opposite effect, as we refuse to eat a steak for the health points because it’s on the table of a cannibal or take time to bury the victims of a bandit raid because it seems like what our character would do. This can be forgotten among all the stats of RPG progression – that the foundational point of the genre is performing a character, even without an audience to perform it for. Because in Weird West, you’re always been watched from behind the metaphysical two-way mirror of that strange room.

The fresh start feels like an improvisational prompt. Do you want to be good this time, or very naughty indeed?