I was also happy to find that experimentally riding to the home of Jane Bell and talking to her led to her becoming a constant companion of Mr Pig-man. When you then jump from Jane into the body of a confused Pig-man, Shelby Cross will appear as an optional bounty in one of the townships. Should you, like me, succeed in freeing your husband but fail in avenging your son, Shelby Cross will remain alive in the world. I was quite impressed by the organic nature of some of the questing, though. You can have a bloody shootout in the middle of town, and the instant the last bad guy thuds to the mud everyone just reverts back to strolling around like nothing happened.

Also, while the people of the world react to your morality and actions, they don’t do so with much consistency. While they will comment on the world and your actions, they will also become invisible to enemies as long as you’re in stealth, to the point that enemies will literally push them out of the way while walking into them and not notice they’re there. You can, through the course of the story, recruit NPCs to fight alongside you. He rarely comes up again either for the span of Jane’s story, as you travel from place to place helping or hindering NPCs in the hope that they’ll exposit something useful.īefore long I began to notice some bizarre contrasts in Weird West’s mechanics. So you just leave little Timmy lying face down in the dirt and go dig up your guns before riding off in pursuit. But Weird West treats its narrative as an inconvenience a lot of the time. When your young son is gunned down by evil bastard Shelby Cross and your husband is taken, you set off on an odyssey to find him. The first character you find yourself inhabiting is Jane Bell, a former bounty hunter turned wife and mother. But four hours later I was still carrying it and had utterly forgotten I even had it. It’s all “You will learn in due time, puny mortal,” stuff and feels awkwardly forced at times.įor example we’re given a box with the number 21 on it and told not to open it, in a moment reminiscent of a subplot in Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. At no point does any character who knows what’s going on give an adequate reason for not telling you. The core mystery is the simple question of why it’s happening, but this main question blunders around dropping loads of little questions behind as it goes. The campaign follows five protagonists possessed by the Passenger, each of whom you spend a few hours with before the story jumps you on to the next. The central premise is that you are an entity known as the Passenger, a spirit that doesn’t even know it’s possessing people until it’s told it is.

It’s a place where simple, mundane real-world horrors like plague and death-by-gunshot aren’t horrifying enough, and need to be propped up by cannibalistic demons, ancient curses and a really awkward camera. Welcome, then, to Weird West, a wander into a wild and wonderful wasteland of witches, werebeasts and weary-eyed warriors.Īt surface level it’s an isometric action rpg set in a hellish reimagining of the American Old West. An era rife with lawlessness, disease and desperation, it’s not hard to imagine it being overrun by zombies, werewolves and mutated Pig-men, too. But it’s also down to the fact that it only takes a gentle nudge to plough directly into Bizarro World. Partly this is down to the romanticism of the era, of course. It pitches somewhere between the Golden Age of Piracy and Viking Britain on my list of favourite places to kill people in. I’ve always been a fan of the Wild West as a setting for entertain media, especially games.

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