Weird West

"I hate robbing banks"

Juno Reactor - Pistolero

 

I suppose any game that lets you stuff a rat carcass full of a Tardis' worth of bacon, corn and venison and cook it by lobbing a Molotov cocktail at it can't be all bad, but when that's the high point of your adventures... well, there's a reason Weird West is on permanent sale from 70-90% off. Actually, many reasons. I motivated myself at least as far the werewolf story because... well, for the obvious reason, but rapidly lost interest, and I'm not the only one. On its Fandom wiki, the first of Weird West's five stories boasts several pages of detailed instructions and notes. The next three waver between less to more than a page. The last is a stub. And while the first story may indeed be markedly longer, it's more a matter of boredom setting in.

On the plus side, Weird West bases character advancement not on racking up kill XP, but on finding skill and feat points (aces and relics) while adventuring, or it could've been a truly unbearable grind. Unfortunately, every single enemy everywhere patrols more or less its entire map, meaning you usually end up having to clear maps anyway.

Laudably, it also imitates Divinity: Original Sin's "surfaces" so you can combine oil with burning or water with electricity, shoot arrows through AoE to gain its effect, etc.. Unfortunately, multi-part combos are far less reliable in real-time combat, making these largely useless compared to just emptying your clip at the enemy while backing away.

Are you noticing a pattern?

Intriguingly, it offers a great deal of environment interaction, for instance killing unconscious enemies by dropping them in puddles (poor pig-man brute, we hardly knew ye) or kicking, jumping and dodging around in fights. In practice, you'll never use them. Most maps you'll clear by sneaking up behind enemies which are always completely blind in their rear arc and one-shotting them. And remember I mentioned they all patrol over huge distances? When they spot a corpse they don't sound the alarm or actively pick up your trail but only rush over to gawk. 

the crate review system would have a field day here

Meaning you can sap one sap, then let patrolling saps continue pathing into it, positioning themselves for endless sapping, until your interest in combat is entirely sapped away. Then toss a stick of dynamite at the only enemies travelling in a pair or group. For every map. See my similar criticism of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.

To challenge you, it has no passive health regen and weapons with finite ammo, imposing resource management. But you can loot far more ammo than you'll ever use and regain health not just from eating but form drinking water which is often available in infinite quantities, plus the routine of drinking from cacti to heal 5% at a time was cute for a couple of maps, but it quickly becomes a 'click twenty things twice' chore with no further resource management incentive. Cash is comically useless.

Like We Happy Few, Weird West's open world elements are blatantly tacked on to a completely unrelated concept because Everything-Must-Be-Skyrim! though at least it dodged WHF's pitfall of forcing you to start the loot-scrounging all over again with every character. Unimaginative/randomized level design makes exploration unrewarding though. The only interesting map was the haunted mansion in the indian's story.

You can get a couple of NPCs as your 'posse' and yes, as you can probably guess, they are preternaturally adept in catching your own bullets, when they're not too busy running headlong into all available enemies to die.

Visually I'll admit the heavy outline comic book look works well for its spaghetti western purposes. The audio's nothing to write home about, but competent enough - that meow-meow music track was quaint at least. But if you'd hoped all Weird West's failed or wasted potential might be salvaged by good storytelling, guess again.

The main plot(s) (an immortal mind-jumping between adventurers, each with grim decisions to make, generally involving betrayal of trust and dark secrets) could've been great, and remains interesting enough despite fumbled presentation. Some lesser flaws include dialogue which barely tries to sound period-appropriate, telegrams written in florid, soulful prose, and highly repetitive, generic flavor text from your posse. But the main problem also explains why professional critics so deliberately inflated this otherwise mediocre game's ratings: it panders to the usual politically correct idiocy. Interestingly, on the most obvious point of contention for a western, genocide against Native Americans, it's rather muted. The third story inspired by Great Lakes mythology has some groaners like townsfolk without fail referring politely to "natives" instead of calling them damn dirty hinjuns as the rednecks would've in the 19th century, or "medicine person" a phrase which would've incensed most braves into punching their squaws in the face on principle. Still, the evil you fight is itself native, the natives are not immune to its lure, and overall Across Rivers' adventure is the sanest of the four I've played through, albeit slightly blander as well.

 

Then there's comical incompetence like this.

The bulk of the bigoted pandering though is as usual reserved for bashing men and glorifying women. I won't go into every single example. Though it does provide a couple of villainnesses, just assume the eternal mantra of "man bad, woman good" is played up, that almost every man you meet will (purely by coincidence) turn out to be stupid or evil or both, and women get applauded at every turn as smarter, purer, stronger and in every way more bionic than their male counterparts.

etceteree, etceterah

The most blatant example is the entire second adventure, the man cursed into half-pig form. If you're thinking it's a "men are pigs" slam, think again: pigs are presented as an improvement on men. Just try to imagine what every critic would've rated the game had it reversed the polarity on that. (Not that there was any mystery you'd turn out to have been an evil pimp in your past life as soon as a brothel was mentioned.)

A more over-arching problem comes in the form of "with us or against us" roleplaying. Your few choices come in the form of flat good vs. evil dichotomies, usually straining to paint the politically correct choice as absolute good. The pig man, for instance, is at last faced with the stupid whore who got him cursed. Aside from the fact you're just expected to take her word about your past misdeeds, the scene lacks any option to say: fine, I was a villain, you got your revenge and then some, let's leave it at that. You're pushed to either grovel at her feet in penitence, or kill the stupid whore. Zero nuance.

So I killed the stupid whore.

 

The few less stupid bits tend to be stock figures and morals, like the greedy scheming fatcat politician. I'd been hoping for some decent werewolf action at least, but even lycanthropy is trivialized. Standard action fantasy instant shapeshifting, plus nobody acts the least bit surprised at your existence and you're being mass-produced by an official authority, as usual missing the point of the mythical skulking quasi-human stalking the fringes of civilization. And with that I uninstalled.

One last observation: the cannibalism taboo is a powerful storytelling tool, but not if you ride it into amateurish monomania. Not every story in your collection should revolve around people-eating sirens, people-eating pig-men, people-eating werewolves, even lip-chewing. Do we need to have a lie-down with papa Freud about our oral fixation?

Pssst. Hey.

Hey.

Why did Hitler punch a woman in the panties?

He wanted to fight a clit's brig.

Re: purpose?

"Tell me why, tell me who, tell me you don't know what to do"

Caravan Palace - Russian

 

Continuing my run through Weird West, I'm somewhat impressed by its many interesting mechanics, and very very unimpressed by their shallow implementation. I've tossed exactly one electric grenade in combat, to open a fight with a couple of cave terrors by slowing their movement. And why cook food when you get infinite free healing from water sources? Or why bother farming low drop rate animal hides when you get free level-appropriate gear for each character or can easily buy better gear with the gigantic pile of useless cash you rack up? Which in turn brings into question why you'd bother hunting bounties. Even the few useful gimmcks clash. Real-time combat renders complicated combos useless for their extended setup, your posse block your own shots more than enemies' and being tracked down by surviving mooks with a vendetta would be a great twist... if they didn't pop up and start a fight when you're trying to stealth around an enemy camp, promping nothing except an instant reload. But the real noodle scratcher's that in a cRPG so focused on wild west gunfights, you spend most of your time sapping victims unconscious a la Thief.

Did you forget what game you were making halfway through?

Well, it's not an uncommon occurrence.

 

If I'm not personally defending it, the Northern Empire's lost it.

I decided a few years in Calradia might be good for my health, but while Bannerlord understandably pushes its big selling point of large-scale warfare, it does so to the exclusion of the adventuring party lifestyle around which M&B was originally based, or even homesteading your fiefs. The AI is programmed to force constant warfare, no matter in which direction, and moreover seems to constantly lose territory wherever I'm not personally conquering towns for others to rule. It was great for the first few dozen sieges, but I'm beginning to sorely miss my caravan escorting and bandit hunting days, or being able to do anything other than rush to the next siege.

 

Or take Rimworld as another example. Two of its expansions, Biotech and Ideology, add a great deal of both practical and aesthetic customization to your colony. But the other two? Princesses with psychic powers and "cabin in the woods" horror with dungeon delving? How the hell do those build on the game's core Robinsonesque base-building conceit?

My recent jaunt through Fallout 3 reminded me expanding on anything with a story-based campaign in fact has always been a bit iffy. Back when it was made, companies tended to market DLCs as paid cheats, mimicking microtransaction pay-to-win schemes from multiplayer. The "content" you were buying often amounted to little more than a reskinned suit of armor with overpowered stats. But even if that trend has diminished (albeit not disappeared) you're still left with the problem of appending more content to what should have been a full campaign to begin with. Otherwise what the hell did you originally charge customers for? The spate of blatantly unfinished games marketed at full price over the past decade soured many on the concept of buying anything at release. Rare is the company like Larian which will refuse to further milk a cash cow like Baldur's Gate. (My hat's off to them on that point.) But even ignoring those issues, tacking on more content to a finished campaign so frequently smacks of pointless, gratuitous filler, like Kingmaker's endless randomized dungeon crawl minigame.

 

Or, conversely and comically, pared-down DLCs can expose needless fluff in the main campaign. We Happy Few's three add-on standalone adventures lack the main three's open world or RPG leveling elements yet play just as well or better, confirming the suspicions of everyone who pointed out the pointlessness of scrounging and crafting mountains of redundant loot. They'd obviously conceived their opus as adventure game sleuthing, and failed pretty badly at lugging that precept onto the Skyrim bandwagon.

 

It's honestly hard to discern whether more pointless bloat and feature creep stems from developers desperate to play a strength and stand out in a particular niche, or the reverse: overcooked fads and industry standards. Either way, have you noticed all the gameplay you've paid for yet neither played nor gamed?

Dumb Animals

"I was caught in Fangorn and spent many weary days as a prisoner of the Giant Treebeard."

- Gandalf, in an early draft of LotR from The History of Middle-Earth

__________________________________________________

 

Amish guy smacks Berlin in the face with a bedpost, news at 11.

While I welcomed its predecessor Moon as hard science fiction at a time when the superhero movie craze was just amplifying, watching (and increasinly skipping through) Mute I found myself constantly wondering why this was made into a SciFi story at all, aside from the hero regaining his voice by technological means, which foregone conclusion hardly justifies two hours of padding. Where Moon solidly anchored its plot to its scientific precepts, Mute looks like Duncan Jones decided to make a cyberpunk flick, just because, and backfilled generic details as an afterthought. So, obviously it needs some robots for the techno angle, plus lotsa pimps 'n hoes for the gritty film noir angle, and the rest is extended shots of the hero or antivillain brooding. So much brooding.

Visually at least its cold, inhuman urban wasteland aesthetic fits the bill (and is rather skillfully conveyed, e.g. that two second time-skip at the library) but even in that department you have to giggle at the occasional gratuitous interposition of <something techy> into the scenery to remind us we're at least nominally watching SF. The plot itself (a plucky squire pure of heart and doughty of bicep, racing to the aid of his lady love) offers nothing you couldn't get out of ten thousand children's fables no matter how many broken noses and transvestite hookers you toss in to jack the rating out of PG territory. Even a potentially solid ending is undermined by sap and a lack of attention to how exactly our hero will contend with the scores of mobsters he's just set after his blood. Tone shifts hardly help either, undecided from scene to scene whether it wants to be Blade Runner or Pulp Fiction, and stock politically correct characterization just nails that coffin shut. Every man is a cackling sexual predator except the one-good-man protagonist, women are innocent victims and goodness intrinsically tied to cuteness. And of course the primitivist angle goes hand-in-hand with the feminist one for bonus purity points. If you want more depth than that, you won't find it watching Skarsgard sit dramatically at various tables.

I'm reminded Tolkien said there was only one part of LotR which flowed leisurely, which he wrote basically in one go once he had its basic idea, and that was the Rohan / ents / Isengard conflict. Of course that's largely because the ent angle runs on a stock nature vs. tech juxtaposition (and yes, it was stock even in the early 20th century, and had been for a century prior) and he lifted the hubristic comeuppance angle from Macbeth (twice: no man of woman born / 'til Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane) because he disliked Shakespeare's handling* of those plot twists. His original idea was pure fairytale fluff, in which giants fee-fi-fo-fum and carry off victims to their lairs; not much to it. Fairytales were invented by simple minds which simply imagined bigger versions of themselves, giants as giant humans, because that's as far as a dirt-farming illiterate's imagination could stretch. Tolkien did not abandon that source material ("ent" shares its linguistic root with "ettin") but tweaked it into a more naturalistic extension of the world beyond ourselves.

Nota bene, Treebeard did not shift completely from being a mean giant who imprisons good guys to a member of Aragorn's army. He (and his kin by extension) is still prickly, standoffish, dangerous independent will alien to the world of men (as magical creatures are by default outside monotheistic folklore) not evil but best left alone. And though Eowyn in turn was given the right-of-way in her big speech about being denied her chance at glory just because she's a woman, she never descended into a trite feminist "strong woman" stereotype slapping boys around to show 'em who's boss. In fact she was at one point meant to die on the Pelennor Fields, her mad quest for glory being a mode of self-destruction driven by hopeless infatuation and family tragedies, yet another victim of the defeatism Saruman/Sauron's machinations instilled in their enemies. The point being not least that anyone who actually wants to go to war must be at least partly cracked.

 

And he achieved that added nuance by moving past set pieces or stock heroics and even by critiquing The Immortal Bard Himself! But that took a lifetime of study and reconsidering many drafts, not just pumping out the lucrative Hobbit sequel his publisher had demanded.

Publish or perish. It's often remarked that Dickens' books are padded due to being paid by the chapter. But of course plenty of 19th-century writers also padded their works for the very same reason. They just lacked Dickens' flair and so have dropped from memory. How many movies have you seen which featured one or two decent scenes but obviously should never have been more than a 15-30min short - dragged out to two hours to pay the mortgages of armies of third camera grip understudy foley wranglers and buy a fifth private jet for a studio executive? How much less wasteful would it be to simply pay all such potential creators a universal income simply to exist, and let them create at their own pace, rather than actively push an economy based on the mass production of waste?

"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

__________________________________________________

 

 

* I'm of mixed opinion. I find Tolkien replacing "no man (of woman born)" with a woman instead of caesarian birth a more fitting resolution, but I do still prefer Shakes' original non-supernatural solution to the removal of the wood. (Don't get me wrong, I love the ents, but still...)

Oh ye of loosey goosey.

Oh ye of little john.

Camelot is pig country

"when I'm in this idiom I sometimes get a bit, sort of, carried away, you know"

- Lancelot in Holy Grail

_________________________________________

Spoilert for the first player character's bestie in Weird West

_________________________________________

 

 

While social justice warriors can be infuriating, they're often also unintentionally hilarious in, as I've so often noted here, tripping over their own propaganda. Weird West, as I predicted, does try to temper its rah-rah girl power, racial minorities rah-rah initial presentation after a bit (via some grimdark edge) but doesn't quite stick the landing:

Maybe the best way to help women as legitimate figures of authority or blacks as... just, y'know, people... isn't to draw, in a single paragraph, an explicit and direct comparison to CANNIBALISTIC MONSTERS LURKING IN OUR MIDST ! Where did you get this, out of some 1950s space invader allegory about the subversive red menace? Because you might've misunderstood those movies' political stance on the menace.

 

Shit like this is why so many people's reaction to social activism on their behalf rapidly sinks from

'The cavalry has arrived, huzzah!'

to

'Please stop helping!'

__________________________________________

P.S.: Attentive comic book fans might notice this is an old issue, most glaringly noted in The X-Men, which has tried for sixty years to equate its "mutant rights" with real-world minority movements, while at the same time demonstrating, issue after issue, the seemingly endless destruction caused by mutants. In this case, BROWN SKIN DOESN'T EAT PEOPLE, nor raise the question of what'll happen whenever you run out of helplessly incarcerated criminals to summarily execute to your own appetite. Last time I checked, weren't prisoner rights and fair trials a black American issue too?

It's not that you can't fit such elements into the same story, or hell, even combine them purposefully as provocation, be the gadfly and all that, if you'd displayed any awareness of what you were doing, if you were at least deliberately offensive. (Hell, I've done it m'self.) But tone-deaf lumping as many gimmicks as possible for attention does no-one any good, least of all yourselves as storytellers.