Weird West is a messy, and magical, mix of gothic horror and RPGs

polygon.com:

I wake from my bed in the middle of the night, startled by noises outside. Resting next to me on the bedside table is an old oil lamp. I pick it up, hoping to shed some light on the situation, but I miss-click, and suddenly my avatar hurls the lamp against the wall. It shatters, spreading fire across the little wood cabin. The bottle of whiskey on the table ignites and the wooden chairs shatter, while fire crawls up the curtains and through the window, catching the chicken coop just outside. I hear a few loud squawks and see a fatal burst of feathers as I stand in the middle of the chaos, being slowly licked to death by the flames of my own stupidity.

Ah, this is one of those games, I think. Like Disco Elysium’s fatal tie incident, except with physics and chemistry and propagating fire.

This is the first game from the newly founded WolfEye Studios, whose co-founder, Raphaël Colantonio, worked as a creative director on Dishonored, Prey, and more at Arkane Studios. In other words, systemic chaos is to be expected. Like Dishonored, Weird West is a real genre-bender, mixing the open wilderness and gunslinging Western with horror and fantasy. There’s “frontier justice” and duels at high noon — but there’s also witches, werewolves and vampires.

While Weird West comes with plenty of systems and simulations, at its heart this is a familiar computer RPG rather than some spectacular new translation of the immersive sim. Think of Larian Studios’ recent Divinity games, where you can pick up almost every object in the world, set elements ablaze (in real time), and sneak around and pickpocket people. Weird West also comes in a slightly more condensed package — the world feels far smaller and less cohesive than many big RPGs, instead