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Weird West

This game is unusual for a bunch of reasons, but does that mean it's good? I'll try, if not to answer that question, then at least to give an idea of what the game itself is like.

Setting-wise, it's the Wild West with all sorts of unusual things, like sorcerers, zombies, and monsters. We're not given any special explanations, and we don't really need them. Gameplay-wise, it resembles a so-called immersive sim, but with a top-down view. How so? You can climb onto boxes to reach inaccessible places — I'd even say it's almost meta — you can play stealthily or go in guns blazing, and there's interaction with various objects — that's where the resemblance lies. Overall, the game doesn't push you toward any particular playstyle; it just says "here are your tools, off you go," and that's it. The only way to lose is to die — you can't fail a single main quest, not because they're so linear, but because if you kill the quest giver, you'll find a note or a key on their corpse; if you're given an NPC to protect and they die, the game just says "these things happen" and you continue the story with some changes. Overall, the game is positioned as one you can complete either without killing anyone at all, or by killing everyone you meet, including every quest NPC (well, there are cutscenes — NPCs in those are the exception). The combat — you run around with the keyboard and use the mouse for aiming and shooting, all from a top-down view; it's called a twin-stick shooter 🤓. Objects are scattered around the battlefield — barrels of oil, poison, water, explosive ones. There are also often kerosene lamps — hitting them starts a fire. At first, the barrels will be placed so that there's a bunch of enemies around, you shoot, you see the result — but that's only at the start. Later on, they're scattered more randomly, and you'll need to either position them yourself somehow, lure enemies into them, or just hope for the best. Overall, fights can look really cool when, during a shootout, something suddenly catches fire somewhere, something explodes somewhere else. The game in general has a ton of cool interactions between the environment and items; I'll mention just one that absolutely blew my mind. The game has food that you can cook and eat (no, that's not what blew my mind). And it so happened that during a fight we ended up on a cornfield that caught fire. Grass in this game burns and the fire spreads — I'd seen that before, so I wasn't surprised. After the fight, I decided to look for corn in the field to cook it and heal up. Imagine my surprise when the corn turned out to be already roasted, but I was completely floored when it turned out that some of it had turned into popcorn. Neither before nor after did I ever see popcorn in the game. Let me emphasize — this isn't some moment the game inevitably or even strongly nudges you toward to wow the player; no, this was genuinely pure chance, related to the fact that, first, I took a generic side quest, and second, I couldn't manage the fight inside the estate and panicked, fleeing to the field, where I accidentally spread the fire. In other words, the devs didn't care that nobody might ever see this; they just added mechanics for fun, to make things cool. I'm sure this is one of those games where, like in childhood, you can say "did you know that if you do X, Y happens?" and every time you learn something new.

Now for the bad stuff. If you think about it, my description above only covers combat and environmental mechanics, and that's it. Because everything else in the game is monstrously empty. I'll leave the story for last; we're skipping that for now. The game has side quests — they're randomly generated and boil down to "go there, find the item, bring the item back to me." There are handcrafted, more interesting side quests — but there are monstrously few of them. In fact, I only remember two (and the game took me 35 hours). There's also the option to take contracts on outlaws — those are randomly generated too. Some of them are tied to your actions — the first couple of times it's cool that you did something and then saw that a bounty was placed on some guy because of it. And then you realize that most of the consequences of your actions boil down to just that — a generic quest being added to the bounty board. Just because there's a familiar face there doesn't change the quest's essence — there won't be a unique battlefield, unique enemies, unique dialogue, nothing; it's just a regular generic quest, but with a familiar NPC's name on it. These quests themselves take place in copy-pasted locations — no, not ones that are merely similar to each other (though that happens too), but literally the same ones, where the placement of every single crate is repeated.

The game has a map, roughly like in Fallout 1 and 2. The tips tell you — "step off the beaten path and forge your own legacy!" I tried doing that and entering randomly discovered locations. It turned out they're copy-pasted dungeons with no unique loot, no unique enemies, no unique atmosphere, nothing at all. It got to the point where I remembered Fallout 4, and the comparison was in its favor — at least there were some notes to find and funny teddy bear placements. Here, absolutely nothing. The game has towns — a couple of them are made uniquely, the rest are the same copy-paste, one-to-one. If I still had any doubts that this was just generation, they were dispelled when I realized I had two pairs of towns with identical names — not two towns, but two pairs: Alabaster-Alabaster, and I forget the second one, let's say Rock-Rock. In other words, there's absolutely nothing to explore in the world, and if there is something, I never found out, because I ignored all locations except quest ones — and what else was I supposed to do, diligently sniffing copy-paste? At least the dungeons have some conditional loot, but the peaceful locations have nothing except, occasionally, a generic "fetch and carry" quest.

The game is full of bugs. The Steam version (as in the picture, if it hasn't broken) is called the Definitive Edition — meaning you shouldn't expect any major fixes. I won't list all the bugs; I'll just say I wouldn't mention it if bugs weren't a regular occurrence. Fortunately, almost all of them are fixed by reloading. Alas, one of the bugs is caused by reloading.

The reason for many of my complaints became clear when I finished the game and saw the credits — the development team is quite small. They managed to add mechanics, but couldn't fill it with unique content. Understandable, but as an end user, that doesn't really concern me.

Finally, let's talk about the story. Here we play, one after another, as 5 different characters. Each of them has their own personal storyline and history, but at some point we realize they're connected by some overarching plot, the essence of which, nevertheless, eludes us. We're very carefully fed mystery in small portions — enough to keep our interest, but not enough to easily unravel everything. The characters' personal storylines aren't super interesting, but they're not super boring either — a solid middle ground. The overarching plot intrigued me enough that I wanted to find out how it all ends. Rating a story is usually a subjective thing, but it seemed decent to me, though not a masterpiece. This is also the only part where we get to taste any unique content — they give us characters to interact with and opportunities for choices — sometimes in dialogue, sometimes through actions. As far as I could tell, there are no super-secret options here; if there's an alternative, the game will always clearly tell us and hint in which direction to dig for it, and as a rule, it's all pretty obvious. Upon completing each character's playthrough, we get a final screen that reminds us of what we did and what we chose, hinting that at those exact moments we could have done things differently. Some of those choices genuinely affect the world. That's cool.

So what's the verdict? If I try to sum it up in two sentences — the game is both more than you expect and less at the same time. A bunch of mechanics you'd never expect (popcorn is just an unusual example, nothing more), but at the same time — a bunch of things you do expect (proper location and quest design) that just aren't there. Did I like it? Probably yes. Can I recommend it with a clear conscience to everyone and anyone? Definitely not. Is it worth trying? That's why I wrote this review — it was monstrously lazy, honestly, but the game is so unusual that it can't be given a verdict of "Sky, you can play it" or "Sky, don't play it." If the description piqued your interest, then it's worth a try.