![]() ![]() ![]() Weird West succeeds in combining its namesake genre ( the term originated in DC Comics’ Weird Western Tales in 1972, but the genre has existed at least since the 1930s) with twin-stick shooter and immersive sim elements into an imminently playable experience. While largely dormant in big budget spaces as videogames have moved to full 3D graphics and RPGs have focused more on individual characters, the revival of the Diablo and Baldur’s Gate franchises and the emergence of top-down viewpoints in popular mid-major indie games like Pillars of Eternity and, more recently, Disco Elysium and Hades serve as examples that there’s still something vital there. ![]() Weird West takes these components and fits them through a top-down window, a viewpoint popularized by isometric and trimetric projection role-playing games from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. But they also tend to allow enemy avoidance through stealth or mechanics like hacking, and sometimes even dialog, as in an RPG. They lean heavily into manipulable physics and environmental interaction, giving the player the freedom to do things like setting a trap by putting a mine near an oil spill to cause a fire to damage multiple enemies. They’re typically in first-person and frequently allow, if not require, shooting as a means of combat. While roleplaying games are such a widespread field that people are broadly aware of what makes one (build up your character by selecting skills/attributes/perks, maybe pick a backstory, make gameplay choices that affect the narrative), immersive sims are an elusive genre to define. Weird West is a top-down combination action-RPG/immersive sim. The result is action-adventure with a stealth emphasis that captures the pulp novel vibe by dividing its story into an anthology connected by an occult interlocking narrative with overlapping characters on a shared map. It’s the first game from WolfEye Studios, formed by Raphael Colantonio and Julien Roby, former executives at Arkane Studios, the developer behind Dishonored and Prey, and it digs into the Weird West hybrid genre, which combines fantasy, horror, and sci-fi themes with a Western setting. Weird West feels like if you took the twin stick shooter elements of a game like The Ascent and set it in a world that combined gameplay and thematic elements from Red Dead Redemption and Dishonored. ![]()
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