Weird West is available on Gamepass. Get it there, or don't get it at all.
I finished Weird West, and I think I did it out of contempt - either for myself or the game itself, it's hard to say. It starts out well enough, a western fantasy with all the expected trappings: You hunt bounties to buy your first horse, collect upgrade points by picking them up off the ground (Weird West does not use a Level system. You get two 'currencies' found in the field: one per character and one for your 'account'), buy some guns, realize that the Jump Dodge is the most powerful ability in the game and you get it for free, and then complete the first character.
And then you realize that changing characters resets all of your ability points. And the characters share 95% of their ability pool, save for 4 somewhat unique and largely irrelevant and ignorable abilities. And then the horror sets in.
Yes, the game does expect you to grind back up those abilities you were just using again, four times in a row. Yes, you will be expected to farm up a horse for each character. No, none of them change the game significantly between the five, and you will be using Ambush Silence Rifle attacks to solve every single problem in the game.
And that is where this review started.
I got suckered in. PREY was a long time favorite, and Immersive Sims are a genre always in need of love, and who doesn't like the 'Choices Matter' Tag. But Weird West's structure begins to creak early, and you can hear the bulkheads buckle at roughly the same time as you realize that the game primary system of progression for every intent and purpose does not exist .
While yes, you can pick up relics and cards (Your character and account progression, respectively), the only thing relics do is allow you access to your Action Point (Mana) abilities, and AP is tremendously easy to burn through, so you're heavily encourage to spend it on the show-dodge (which slows time to a crawl, gives your guns free reloads, and allows you to shoot up to 100% faster, which is wildly, *insanely* overpowered for it's cost) and a silenced rifle shot that deals critical and 200% amped damage. These two tools and the crabwalk sneak will get you through Very Hard without incident.
But that means you only need one (1) upgrade point. Show dodge is free and silenced sniping is a single relic.
You can easily beat the game with only these two tools and a sufficiently powerful rifle and pistol, both of which can be earned less than an hour and a half in the game. And that's...it. You can get a little more health from the Gold Cards, but you reach a point in the game where more money and more abilities simply don't help you. And that means you have no pressure to explore, and it means that the whole game turns to busy work almost instantly.
Pathologic 2, the Patron Saint of immersive sims, knew that the difference between "A catastrophic waste of time" and "I found a single bit of string I am saved" is how tightly you control the pressure on your player. *Pressure* is what makes an immersive sim an immersive sim. Weird West has no pressure, exploration grants you nothing, and it all gets reset when you go to the next character anyway. So why bother? After a few hours: You don't. So all of the incentive is to just rush the main story quest, and while you're doing that, the game is constantly intoning about an oncomming Zombie Plague, or ghosts who might have secret quests, or secret artifacts with even more fantastic power.
I never found any of them. No plague ever arrived. I never located a single ghost quest. The only relics I ever found game me abilities I didn't need to use. There are a lot of flowers, totems, and weird anciliary items that aren't labeled as junk but also don't seem to have any actual use in game. They might be locked behind a side quest or a special area or the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ alignment of the stars, I have no idea. The game might have an entirely different strata of systems that I never engaged with, but I need to stress that absolutely nothing points you to them.
The game is constantly screaming "Explore! Do things! Be free!" but the sum total of that freedom appears to be the age-old trap of "Ooohh, you can kill everyone in this town! Even the quest characters! Digital Freedom!" which as an RPG game design habit is as bad as the "Battle Royal" is to the FPS. Yes, it sounds very good on paper but there's a reason only a few legendary games pulled it off. The ability to shoot a town dead is only as good as what you get from it, and the constant drag hanging over weird west is "What do I get from this?", and the answer is often a resounding "Poorer in bullets and weaker in consumables." I wouldn't say the game actively discourages exploration, but it does absolutely nothing to encourage it.
And we should talk about "Freedom". See, the thing about being able to just do whatever is that you need to be able to make your own story if you're going to just hand over that sort of power to the player. Starsector, Kenshi, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Crusader Kings know that if you're going to try to sell a Sandbox, then *the player* is the one who gets to say what the story is about. Weird West can't afford that freedom, because the plot must adhere to it's rigid structure. You can't go back to previous characters once their story is over. You have zero control over what towns get repopulated or taken over by bandits. Things just happen, and while the game will talk about your choices, it's all roughly the same level that Skyrim . In otherwords: Go ahead and slaughter the west down to the last screaming ghost, you're not changing anything.
Despite it's pedigree, despite it's effort, despite the pants-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane price (if you take nothing else from this, take this: You are being scammed if you buy it at $39.99), Weird West can not rise above feeling like a Game Jam test case that out-grew it's mold. Like the devs got a contract to make an Immersive Sim only to realize 30% of the way in that they never found the fun.
I, at least, never did. I finished it because the mystery was compelling enough to deal with Use Gun On Man for 20 hours, but not compelling enough to forgive the absolute disaster that proceeded it. And that ending, for what it's worth, is not worth the effort it took to get there. The final moral boiling down to a slightly edgier reading of "The Journey is what matters" comes across more as a desperate attempt to avoid rendering more than two endings. "What did I feel", asks the game in it's final moments.
Pissed off, mostly.
