Weird West review: a messy, magical mix of gothic horror and RPGs

When I am awakened by outside noises, my bedside table is the first thing that wakes me. An old oil lamp rests next to my bed on my side table. It’s an old oil lamp that I am trying to explain. I grab it, but my avatar misses-clicks and the lamp is thrown against the wall. The lamp breaks, igniting fire in the tiny wood cabin. A bottle of whiskey is placed on top and ignites. The wooden chairs crackle and fire climbs through the curtains to catch the chicken coop. As I am being slowly consumed by my stupidity, I can hear some loud squawks.

Ah! This is one of my favorite things. Those Games, that’s what I see. You might like Disco Elysium’s fatal tie incident, except with physics and chemistry and propagating fire.

This is the first game from the newly founded WolfEye Studios, whose co-founder, Raphaël Colantonio, worked as a creative director on Prey is not to be trustedArkane Studios has more. Systemic chaos can be said to be normal. Similar Dishonored, Weird West This is an original genre-bender that combines the wild wilderness with gunslinging Western and horror and fantasy. There’s “frontier justice” and duels at high noon — but there’s also witches, werewolves and vampires.

Image: WolfEye Studios/Devolver Digital

However Weird West This package includes many simulations and systems, but it is more of a computer RPG than a new immersive sim. Think of Larian Studios’ recent Divinity Games where you have to pick up every item in the world and set them ablaze. You also can sneak around pickingpocketing people. Weird West also comes in a slightly more condensed package — the world feels far smaller and less cohesive than many big RPGs, instead being split up into smaller locations that you travel between on a map.

This is the story of Weird WestIt can be used as an anthology. You play five characters in order. Each character has their own story and problems. Bridging each of these distinct chapters are several recurring characters — a strange young girl who speaks in riddles, a wandering witch who plays games with you, and a bounty hunter obsessed with immortality and bad jokes.

Every chapter of a life is influenced by the previous one. If you liberate a monster-infested ghost town as the bounty hunter, it’ll be a bustling place with shopkeepers and a saloon when you return as the hogman. If you commit a large robbery and/or killing spree in the same way, it will become empty save for a overflowing graveyard. Previous characters also persist in the world after you’ve finished playing them, hanging about ready to be recruited into your posse.

Image: WolfEye Studios/Devolver Digital

In the end, your avatars will be gathered together in a huge showdown. This takes into account your lives. This is typical of computer RPGs, where there’s such varying complexity in the earlier stages, all that can be mustered by the end is a cold, calculative summary of your actions. The overlapping structures of five distinct characters within one world may seem ambitious. Weird West It is difficult to come together. The end result is a little limp.

Side quests can be frustrating if you find the main story disjointed and ambitious. The map is huge, with hundreds of locations that will pop up as you travel across the wilderness, but a lot of these places end up feeling samey — content to blast through, rather than tales to savor. Even the most difficult side missions are not able to overcome random encounters. It’s weird enough. I was hoping for something more in the vein of Lovecraft and Weird Fiction — Dishonored’s talking rats, sentient hearts, and magic whales, for instance. Turns out, the Weird West isn’t all that weird.

I must have explored dozens of underground mines over the course of the game, and even more caves and ancient ruins, each using the same “mysterious” architecture. While there’s some neat level design with secret rooms and side entrances, too many of these levels feel like they’ve all been constructed from an extremely limited tileset. The visuals — a dark comic-book style that feels a bit like a washed-out Mike Mignola — also doesn’t quite pop in-game the same way it does in the character portraits and animated cutscenes.

Image: WolfEye Studios/Devolver Digital

It is disappointing that there are so few places to be noticed. Of the ones that feel more bespoke, there’s a big brothel brimming with red velvet curtains and furniture, reminiscent of The Golden Cat from Dishonored. While you don’t have the same architectural intricacy of a big first-person immersive sim, in Weird West’s larger levels you’re able to climb up roofs and over balconies, and use ropes to abseil down through glass ceilings. My favorite moment in the game was when I had to infiltrate manors and raid banks in order to power up my crew. There were dozens upon dozens of gold bars, as well as a six-shooter that made it appear like I was cheating. This kind of “sequence skipping” is what I enjoy most about the immersive sim genre. Weird West isn’t too bothered about balancing difficulty. It’s rough around the edges and doesn’t mind its players experimenting, and even accessing late-game equipment too soon (courtesy of a few quick-saves, of course).

While there’s fun to be had in infiltration, stealth doesn’t really ever stretch beyond its basic functionality. You can initiate takedowns on unsuspecting enemies, and you’ll need to hide bodies from patrolling guards, but apart from that the stealth toolset is barebones, and it can be tiring work clearing a camp. It’s a long way from the brilliant espionage of something like Mimimi Games’ Desperados 3. This is, however, not unlike tactical stealth games.Weird West It has its back to fight. While Desperados will have you reaching for the quick load after you’ve been caught in the open, Weird West is — much like Dishonored before it — at its very best when you let loose.

While you can give yourself various percentage-based boons and buffs (and there’s a skill set for each weapon type in the game), it’s the character specific abilities that are most impactful, and most interesting — the beefy hogman can become bulletproof, poison the air, and generally charge around the place causing chaos. You can experiment with a completely different style of play, which fits in well with his personality. On the other hand, there’s a definite downside to locking abilities to specific characters. It would’ve been nice to have access to teleportation with the first or second character, instead of just the last. I’d also have appreciated the ability to mix something like the hunter’s tornado spell with my fiery, exploding hogman. This is a serious oversight in a game that encourages experimentation.

Image: WolfEye Studios/Devolver Digital

Weird WestThere are a few other great combat techniques in the game’s arsenal. When you perform a dive roll when you are aiming, it temporarily transforms into Max Payne — it slows the action down and lets you be a bit more tactical with your next move. Perhaps the best addition to combat is the kick. Ripped straight from Arkane’s old Dark Messiah of Might and MagicThis move will be loved by everyone, because it takes advantage of the many interlocking systems as well as the fact that almost anything in the game can easily be moved or weaponized with great force.

There are many environmental hazards, including oil puddles and explosive barrels that litter the levels. It’s here, when the mayhem ensues, that Weird WestMost immersive simulations feel most real. It’s like your brain is bursting with new ideas about how to move things. So it isKick this or that object. Mix water and electricity. Fire with poison. There’ll be plenty of times when things don’t work out, or it all backfires and you end up burning yourself to death in a tiny wood cabin, but when it does all come together? It’s like magic.

With Weird WestThis is because these magical moments rarely occur. Sheer ambition means eventually something special is bound to be spat out by the game’s extensive simulations — a mishap with an oil lamp, for example — although it’ll be a rough and unwieldy thing, all the more crude when compared with the extensive elegance of a Dishonored. Instead of doing what many, myself included, had hoped — converting the spirit of Arkane and the immersive sim into an inventive top-down form — Weird West has stumbled into a more mundane existence as a pared-down computer RPG that’s nowhere near weird enough.

Weird West Game Pass will allow you to download the game on your Xbox One or PlayStation 4 on March 31, and on Windows PC on March 31st on Windows PC. Devolver Digital gave a prerelease download code to the game. The PC version of the game was used for review. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Here are some links to help you find. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.