It’s a unique gambit, as the beginning of each chapter basically sees you having to fight your way back to getting the best weapons and abilities, including hooking up with the previous chapter’s hero and realizing there may be some existential meta horror in play, as one single being seems to possess them each time. Notably, while perks are shared between characters, abilities are not (as each character has their own unique skills), requiring you to start from square one each time. There’s also a ton of stuff to hunt for in Weird West, be it unique weapons, various documents that provide neat little bits of lore, or Golden Aces and Nimp Relics that can be spent on passive perks and combat abilities, respectively. The game does a good job in getting you invested with the major players that you can recruit, making you ready to load a previous save the second anything goes wrong. Travel to them, recruit them, gather whatever equipment you left them with at the end of each chapter if you’d like, and then go raise hell with them…but with the knowledge that if they die, they die permanently. You can hire random mercenaries and outlaws, maybe people you come across just in it for kicks, but then you have major story characters that you can recruit as well, which extends to all of the previous characters that you’ve played as. One of the biggest twists, though, is the ability to recruit up to two individuals to create a posse that can travel along and assist you. The graveyards in each town fill up as NPCs can potentially die, creating rather shocking sights at times. Do certain favors for folks, and they can jump into battle to help save you at random times. Clear an abandoned town of monsters, and new citizens may move in to replace them. Bump him off then or as part of a bounty? Then his gang disbands, and they no longer ambush you. Fail to bump off a slaver? He’s shown dealing meat to the villain of the next chapter. Aside from the the attractive visuals and spot-on classic Western soundtrack, what makes it attractive is not just the little bits of-world-building, but how you build the world yourself as you play, as you can easily change it throughout your journeys in various ways beyond any moral choices given. Really, though, it’s world in Weird West that easily takes the center stage. The best bits, though, are the recurring characters like a mysterious witch that gifts you with mystery boxes not to be opened and gunslingers obsessed with immortality, contributing more to the greater picture. Weird West makes great use of a wide variety of different supernatural elements that surprisingly tie in perfectly with the Western setting, be it wiindigos, werewolves, wraiths, witches and several other parts that may or may not also start with the letter “w.” You truly never know what you might come across next (especially with random encounters that can occur as you travel between locations), especially as the world expands a bit more with each new chapter. Joking aside, every character’s story has their highlights, like almost literal ghost towns that can appear out of nowhere or fighting pits run by an owner obsessed with pain. You have a bounty hunter coming out of retirement in order to rescue their husband from a group of cannibals and avenge their dead child, an amnesiac pigman created by a witch who wants to seek out the answers concerning who they previously were in life that has to destroy a swearing Soul Tree and is assisted by the only other pigman capable of speech who’s been cursed to only speak in rhyme, and then three other characters who were unlucky enough to follow the pigman’s story, because that was insanity that could not be topped. Weird West is the story of five individuals living in a twisted version of the Wild West, bound together by a mysterious branding they’ve each received at the hands of a mysterious group of figures, as shown in between chapters as you switch to each character and their tale. So now with the game’s release, we finally get to experience this sun-kissed land of bizarre delights, and let’s just say the little gold rush the game has created has led to a few moments of fool’s gold as well, even if there’s still genuine gold in them hills. The initial outing by a new studio made of former Arkane employees published by Devolver Digital, an action-RPG styled as a throwback to the likes of the original Fallout, a unique Wild West setting that’s been warped by several supernatural horrors…it felt like there wasn’t much that could go wrong. Going into this year, it feels like Weird West was one of the year’s most anticipated indie games.
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