Weird West (PC) Preview

I’ve always been a fan of immersive sim games. I love having choices in a game, and I’m always happy to see that developers planned for whatever unorthodox approach I have. I’m also a huge fan of genres and settings crossing over that you don’t see too often. So when Raphaël Colantonio, the founder of Arkane Studios and co-creator of Dishonored, announced at The Game Awards 2019 that his new studio WolfEye Studios was making an immersive sim RPG with supernatural elements set during the wild west, I was completely on board.

Weird West places you in control of five different characters on their individual journeys before they eventually meet. I played through the opening campaign for the game, which focuses on Jane Bell, a.k.a. the Bounty Hunter. There were some bugs encountered here and there that were a little frustrating, and some that were (for lack of a better term) weird. Even so, I had an incredible time playing the game and testing to see what was possible.

Although the people of WolfEye Studios have a lot of experience working in immersive first-person titles, Weird West is played with an isometric view that lets you see your character and their surrounding environment. Thankfully, the switch in viewpoint did not result in any immersion loss thanks to a lot of different mechanics and thought-out ideas. As the attention to detail and immersion is the most impressive part of the game and it’s supported by every other part of the game, I’m going to talk about the later aspects first.

Let’s start with the story. Jane’s journey focuses on her picking up her gun and bounty hunter gear again to enact justice for whoever kidnapped her spouse and killed her son. It’s not too complicated of a story and it has the typical elements of a revenge tale that you typically see in Western-themed films. For those who aren’t as versed in that genre, it’s probably easy to say that her story is a little bit like the first John Wick film.

Western or modern Keanu Reeves movie aside, you’ll certainly feel like a gun-touting force to be reckoned with. When it comes to combat, you can use pistols, shotguns, rifles, a bow, various melee weapons, and throwables. There isn’t a dedicated button to move faster, but there is a button that lets her roll to dodge attacks or enter a slow-mo dive ala Max Payne if aiming a weapon.

Outside of combat, you can pick a point on the initially uncovered map to travel to, discovering various locations and places to visit in-between. While visiting these places you can take out a weapon and enter combat whenever you like, although there are consequences for doing so. Typically, you’ll just be talking to NPCs, which also commonly makes you feel awesome because so many people comment on how great or fearsome it is to see you with your gear again. You’ll also find yourself scaling buildings and maybe stealing some things while no one is looking. You can also steal in front of them, but again, there are consequences.

Speaking of taking things, something you’re going to stumble across in various places is upgrade items. Glowing “nimp relics” can be used to select upgrades for your weapons or general abilities for your class (which in this case was Bounty Hunter). “Golden Ace of Spades” on the other hand are cards used to gain and upgrade perks such as moving a certain percentage faster while crouching or gaining bigger discounts from stores. Both of these items are easy to find with how much they glow and stand out in the environment.

This leads me to the visuals and how great of a job they do at bringing this world to life. My initial thought when playing the game is that it looks a little dull, which is entirely expected with a game in this setting. The first few places I saw were dusty, barren, and old. The first town I visited wasn’t in the best of shape and the colored buildings were very muted. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say a lot of environments in this game look muted and a little worn out. Even the people looked worn out as if the harsh frontier life had aged them to look older than they were.

That might sound like a detracting observation, but Weird West manages to portray the dust-filled grittiness of its setting appealingly thanks to its wonderful French comics-inspired art style. Cracks break up the ground into various tones of brown and tan. The wooden boards used for some building walls are more separated by slight variance in color than the less-than-harsh lines in-between them. In some cases, like the shingles present on some roofs, this is even more apparent as it all blends together even more with a few strong lines to separate them.

In a realistic and graphically-powerful game, this would look off and a little cheap. Instead, it works very well here with the overall art style. Extra details make it even better such as the grimy dirt between the white tiles of a monastery or the paint chipping off the outside walls of the saloon.

Outside of the textures, there is plenty in the environment that adds more to the world. Planks of wood cover abandoned buildings. Small patches of grass and giant rocks remind me that the town has to coexist with nature. The occasional tumbleweed further reinforces the feeling of desolation. All of this is merely about the first town I visited. While the main quest line sent me on some additional environments that did stand out such as quarries, expensive mansion grounds, and farms, I truly got a taste of the environment when I began to travel all over the map.

Heading east I found myself taking side trips into abandoned mines, sneaking into swamps filled with grotesque Pigmen creatures, breaking into old temples, and camping out in the woods only to wake up to bears. Random events also provided some excitement whether it was a gang trying to rob me or a random heathen witch offering me a suspicious box. The overall color palette may be muted, but the range of tones is great and further elevated by the art style. There’s a lot to see here and it all looks great.

It also sounds pretty good too. The sound effects are nice enough and each gunshot or explosion is satisfying. Pigmen sound disgusting and gang members yelp in pain when set on fire. The soundtrack didn’t stand out too much to me, but it perfectly encapsulated the atmosphere present. What did stand out was the narrator you hear during the main quest. His voice is absolutely perfect for a western. It captured me and made me happy each time he spoke.

Of course, visuals aren’t the only aspect that creates a powerful atmosphere for players, especially in an immersion sim. There’s a whole lot of mechanics and cause-and-effect situations that end up creating some unique moments while you’re playing. Some of these are based on physics or certain element states. Throw an oil barrel from a high ledge and it will roll around spilling oil until it breaks. Ignite that spark with a nearby lantern or wildfire cocktail and you’ve got a nice trail of fire. Any water, whether from a bucket or rain, will extinguish the part of the trail it touches though.

The real fun begins with the more mechanics-based examples. The first is the reputation system. Helping people with favors/side quests will bump that reputation up while committing minor or major crimes in front of them will take it down. Depending on your crimes and reputation, deputies and sheriffs can attempt to arrest you and ask you to go to jail, pay a fine, or resist and have a shootout.

There’s also the “friends for life” and “vendetta” mechanics. The former is typically when you help people in a bind or by making certain story choices. For me, it was usually people who I helped escape from a bad situation and then let me know that they were forever in my debt for saving them. These people will randomly show up during your fights as an ally to help you. As soon as the combat is over and the nearest enemy is dead, they leave and go on their way.

On the other hand, it’s possible to make a personal enemy and gain a vendetta. My first experience with this was when I killed a gang leader, and one of the members of the gang swore vengeance and began to flee. They were too far away for me to accurately shoot them so they managed to escape. The next time I walked into a town, they ambushed me with a friend of theirs. I can also attest that vendettas can start when someone sees you kill a member of their family as I incurred the wrath of quite a few spouses.

These immersive sim games are great at providing a foundation for having your own stories. With some games, the general plot points are likely going to be similar, but it’s the in-between moments that make the experience your own. Weird West is looking to make it all very open as NPCs can die, and everything you do in one character campaign is carried over into the next character’s campaign. I wasn’t able to see the result of that, but I do want to share some of the stories I made during my time playing as Jane. I think that’s the best way to represent the possible experience.

During the main quest, I was informed by the sheriff of the initial town that her deputy would probably like to join me and help me take on this gang. I was hesitant to go back there though, as during my first visit I had committed some crimes and the law was on the lookout. It turns out that it is frowned upon to steal some items from a corpse, bury the corpse, and then dig up the grave you just made to see if the offered items were the same. For the record, the items were different as digging up a grave allows you to take a skull and or bone. Also for the record, it’s rude to do this in front of their grieving widow.

I begrudgingly made my way back to town when and was quickly ambushed by a gang member looking to avenge her leader. I swiftly took her and her posse down, but the deputy I wanted to talk to wasn’t happy to see me, especially with guns blazing. He threatened to arrest me or try my luck with his gun and since I was there for him specifically, I let him take me to jail. After a while, he asked me if I wanted to pay a fine or stay longer in jail. I paid the fine and asked him to join me right after. He was more than happy to.

From here I just brought him along to help me with bounties, especially for one in particular. A few days prior I had come across a spirit bound to a statuette. It pleaded that it was innocent and I needed to find an oneirist (a type of magic user) to undo the binding spell. One of my bounties was an oneirist, and I was curious if I could get her to help me.

We traveled to her known location and it seemed obvious that she and her large group of magic users were not friendly. I devised a terrible plan to wait until she and her group got close to a building, throw a flashbang out, and then incapacitate her and kill the others. It was messy and I took a lot of bullets to the back as I carried her away but after a quick heal, I was ready to get into the fight.

The deputy and I took the oneirists head-on but were quickly split up as they dissipated and reappeared around us, wielding magic and guns both. I had to find cover when I could just to reload from their relentless attacks. It didn’t look good and I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to survive…and then it happened. I saw a screen splash and a dialogue bubble telling me that help was here. A man I had previously freed from a cage meant to feed some violent and hungry sirens saw that I was in trouble and he was ready to even the odds.

Such is how a bounty hunter, a deputy, and a friend willing to pay back a debt were fighting together against a group of bad magic users. The tide began to turn and before I knew it, there were only two oneirists left. This shootout had been a rollercoaster of emotions and it felt good to see that it was going to have a happy enough ending.

That was until the deputy was killed with a shotgun blast to the back. This was my first companion and like all non-invincible companions in a video game, I didn’t expect that he would be killed so unceremoniously. Especially since I was running towards him to heal him while shooting at our enemies when he very suddenly got in my line of sight. Not only did he die, but I confirmed that friendly fire was a thing because he’d just died by my hand.

We managed to finish off the rest of the oneirists and my friend left. I was alone, surrounded by corpses and an unconscious bounty target. Vultures began to fly across the screen and circle above, so I carried the deputy’s body to a nice spot in the area and used my shovel to bury him. With nothing left to do, I went back to the unconscious woman and arrested her. She made a bit of a fuss, but she quickly sensed the bounded spirit. She explained that the spirit gave off some strong evil vibes and offered to purify it. Jane showed options of hesitation, but I chose to trust her.

The prisoner and I traveled around the area together as she needed a particular herb before heading to a ritual site, but she regrettably died before we could find the herb. As a prisoner, she was shackled and could only swing her arms together to attack if need be, which isn’t a lot of help and made it harder to protect her. Ironically, as I made my way back to the town to accept her bounty payment, I encountered a lot of the herb along with many zombie-raising wraiths.

When I finally made it back to town and was on my way to see the sheriff, I heard a snide remark by one of the deputies. My reputation with the town overall may have improved, but there were some people still mad enough to yell obscenities at me. It was probably fair, but I did find it annoying that this one deputy, in particular, seemed so rude.

Thus, the spark for a crime of passion had been lit. I quickly walked around a building and jumped and scaled it. I ran from rooftop to rooftop until I was right across from the deputy and a hanging lit lantern. With the ability to silence one shot from my rifle, it was as if the stars had aligned. I aimed and fired at the lantern, causing it to drop and shatter with an oil spill that was quickly ignited. It didn’t take long for the deputy to be set on fire and run around in a panic. The people of the town also panicked while I sat on a rooftop, gleefully watching.

It all seemed fine until he ran close to a horse, which set the horse on fire. The burning horse then began to run down the road and brush against some people in town. This, of course, set them on fire. With annoying luck, the deputy stumbled into a small alley and knocked over some water that extinguished the fire for him. He walked back out confused about what had happened and then was horrified to see more people on fire. Nobody knows how that fire started, but it ended with one dead horse and three dead townsfolk, one of which was the blacksmith. Needless to say, it was unexpected.

After beating the main questline, I reloaded an earlier save and decided to just go nuts and to see what happened. This game is supposed to be immersive and I wanted to see just how much it was. I traveled back to the starting town after hiring some outlaws and started killing everyone (including that pesky deputy). Upon revisiting, the town had become a ghost town.

This tanked my reputation and I soon found my face on the wanted board. Law enforcement in other towns began to recognize me and tried to arrest or kill me. Bounty hunters also began to show up regularly to try their chances for a cash reward, but to them, it was a whole lot easier just to shoot me dead. Being “wanted” was a problem, but it was a really fun problem to play around with. I’m not saying that I would play this game and kill everyone on my first playthrough, but maybe I would on my second.

I have other stories I could share from my brief time with the game, but I do have to talk about what I didn’t like, which includes some bugs. To be fair, this was an early access preview. The development team is well aware that there are bugs present and are currently squashing them. I have hope that they’ll take care of the annoying ones by the game’s launch date, but I do have to mention the ones I came across.

The first set was the weird ones, the kind you’d see in a Fallout game. Items floating in the air. NPCs (especially horses) would occasionally glitch through walls. On a couple of occasions, I found an NPC standing in a strange place, such as a roof that they wouldn’t have been able to normally access. It’s necessary to hold throwables to aim them before releasing to throw them, but sometimes they just came out as soon as I pressed the button. I was stuck looking in a specific direction when I tried aiming one time, but a quick reload fixed the issue.

I encountered the strangest bug during the final optional battle in the main quest. It was a very challenging fight and I was reloading my save rather repeatedly, even though I had two companions with me. The strange bug occurred during one of the times I reloaded, as I quickly noticed that my party (including myself) had been doubled. There was now an identical group of three standing next to us and the clone version of me even had generic NPC dialogue. Each available quest on the left side also doubled, creating a very distracting wall of text that covered a good sixth of the screen.

As much as I wanted to beat the boss fairly and would have been willing to reload my save again to fix the problem, I had been dying to them for about 30 minutes. I figured it would be okay if I used this strange glitch to my advantage to easily kill him. Even with glitches, it seems my plans were not meant to work out, because the boss and his underling had also doubled. The double issue was fixed when I reloaded my save two minutes later. The worst bugs were those I encountered frequently that impacted my gameplay. Whenever loading up a save the camera would be stuck facing one direction. I could aim in whichever direction I wanted, but I could not circle the camera around. The only fix to this was to aim with a gun and move a little bit.

This camera issue was annoying, but far worse was the movement glitch I commonly encountered. If I entered the weapon wheel while moving in a diagonal direction, I would be stuck moving in only one particular cardinal direction when I left the weapon wheel and the other would not respond. For example, if I was running down-right when entering the weapon wheel, I would leave it and only be moving right. As long as I kept running I could go in any direction except for down. This led to a couple of deaths out of pure confusion in the middle of chaotic fights.

The good news is that both the camera and movement bugs I just mentioned seemed to be isolated to keyboard and mouse controls. I played through the game initially this way to try it out, but the bugs led me to connect my gamepad which was an overall improvement. Aiming is more fun with a mouse so I do hope they fix these specific issues, but overall the game just felt better with a controller.

Outside of the aforementioned bugs, there was very little that I didn’t like. I did feel that the vignette was too strong for my tastes at night or while insides caves and I had to turn the brightness up. Mapping reloading and interacting to the same button, and on the A button for Xbox controllers of all to choose from, felt very weird to me. It was also frustrating when attempting to reload near the edge of an area, as the game would instead ask me if I was trying to leave. There was key mapping for keyboard and mouse controls, but only one option to choose from for gamepads.

Although I mentioned before that a glitch had doubled and covered part of my screen with text, that certainly seems possible just by playing the game. I didn’t find a way to take the list of quests and objectives off my screen or to make them smaller, but I certainly would have appreciated it.

Other than that, I suppose I never felt the need to buy a horse. You can steal some but they’ll leave when you go to your next destination. Buying one means that they’ll stay with you, but I realized that going camping would spawn a temporary one for me to take anyway and it’s pretty easy to spawn a camping spot. I’m not sure if this was intentional because it’s an easy workaround, but it’s one I made use of. All other issues I had were bug-related.

There’s so much that can happen in Weird West, and I know a lot of it isn’t something I even saw during my time playing. Companions have different personalities and might leave your party if they don’t agree with your actions. The loading screens mention random tornados can occur. They also mention zombie plague outbreaks which can bring back NPCs you’ve met.

I’m very curious about the general story of the game and how each character is connected, both with what was implied to me and what I discovered on my own in the world. However, it’s the stories I made while playing and the high potential to make more that really excites me. Some annoying bugs still need to be taken care of, but I was enjoying myself for nearly the entire 15 hours that I played. I can’t wait to make more stupid plans and smile whether they work out or not when the full game releases on January 11th, 2022.

An Early Access PC review copy of Weird West was provided by WolfEye Studios for this preview.