WEIRD WEST

How a team of former Arkane devs wrangled an increasingly Wild West

- NIALL O'DONOGHUE

Format PC, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Developer WolfEye Studios

Publisher Devolver Digital

Origin Various

Release 2022

When you think of an immersive sim, it’s unlikely that you’d picture an isometric game. Where genre stalwarts such as Deus Ex and Thief work to ground you in the perspective of your character, Weird West is more distant, literally placing you at a remove amid the great American wilderness. Yet poke around the edges of any given level, and Weird West soon reveals itself to be a true example of the form.

Yes, you could kick down the door of a bank controlled by the Stillwater gang and blast your way through hordes of enemies to free a prisoner. But what if you climbed up a ruined structure nearby instead, using your vantage point to spy a second-floor window for entry? In time-honoured cowboy fashion, luring out the Stillwater leader for a high-noon shootout is an option – provided, that is, you learn the right insult to provoke him. Talk to the bartender, meanwhile, and you could procure drugged wine: just the thing to slip to the prison guard.

This stuff seemed to come naturally to the team at WolfEye Studios – which was, after all, co-founded by Raphaël Colantonio, founder of Dishonored and Prey developer Arkane Studios, reuniting with many of his ex-colleagues. One of them is WolfEye co-founder and CEO Julien Roby, who lays out the key design principle that is Weird West’s inheritance from that studio: “One of our big pillars is saying ‘yes’ to the player. We want to make sure that the game rewards the player for being smart and rewards them for trying something.”