The repercussions of your gunshots echo back and forth across the desert with a convincing crack. As a result, the same NPCs who happily traded their wares one week might greet you with guns drawn the next. Bodies hidden in town are discovered, and locals connect the dots back to you, the stranger passing through. Bandits who once fled your bullets return to stage ambushes, looking to avenge their fallen bosses. Meanwhile, your past deeds catch up with you. Nature is healing, or else being paved over. Ghost towns are slowly refilled, either by human beings or something even worse. New sheriffs are installed to replace the dead ones. During travel across the Weird West, time quickens to a blur, and it’s as the calendar pages flick by that the most far-reaching reactivity occurs. Something about bovine NPCs screams Fallout, regardless of their total number of heads.īut most pertinently, the influence is there in the modest maps - the homesteads and cave networks you can see almost from end to end on a single screen - and the abstracted overworld that connects them. It’s there in the isometric perspective in the simple, disposable companions who function primarily as a way to draw fire and expand your inventory space. It has to be said, though, that Dishonored isn’t the first game that springs to mind when stepping out onto Wolfeye Studios’ warped frontier. Or you could call it exactly what you’d hope for from a team of key Arkane veterans behind Dishonored and Prey.
Or the perfect emblem for Weird West, a game which excels at finding concise expressions of unconstrained player choice. You could call this the dark fulfillment of Peter Molyneux’s promise of an acorn that, left alone, would grow into a tree in Fable. Weird West even suggests you head to the local cemetery to loot any bodies you’ve missed - though its reputational system implies you should ensure nobody’s watching first. But you can change that, should you so choose: shoot up the bank or fight a duel and, the next time you return to that settlement, new plots will have appeared for every life snuffed out. The graveyard there is uncannily empty, save for a similarly bare tree. It’s not that way in Bripton, the next town over. Filling the graveyard has been a solemn bid for order in the wake of so much chaos.
It’s a concise expression of everything the town’s been through: the rampaging bandits, the cannibal kidnappings, the swirling tornados. “Graveyard’s full,” says Timothy Hall, the man prodding the bones of the piano at the saloon in Grackle.
Arkane founder’s first indie outing is a chaotic soup of colliding systems, and that soup tastes absolutely delicious.
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