Weird West review – strange cowboys

metro.co.uk:

An immersive sim from the founder of Dishonored and Deathloop developer Arkane takes a trip to the extremely Wild Wild West.

Like walking simulators, immersive sims belong to a genre that’s sold short by its meaningless name. Games like Looking Glass Studios’ Thief, System Shock, and Deus Ex, or more recently Arkane’s Dishonored 2 and Prey don’t really need a separate designation as while they do all emphasis freedom and experimentation in their gameplay they’re still all very different experiences. That’s certainly true of Weird West, the first game from new studio WolfEye, started by one of Arkane’s original founders.

All of the above games use a first person viewpoint but the most eye catching difference when you start playing Weird West is that it’s viewed from a top-down perspective. It’s also set in a version of the Wild West that has a considerably larger population of werewolves, zombies, and wraiths than is traditionally portrayed.

You start the game playing a bounty hunter wrenched out of retirement when someone kills her son and leaves a fiery brand on her neck. Grabbing her shootin’ irons, she sets off to hunt down those responsible and wreak revenge. Very quickly you discover that this is no ordinary case, with whispers of a 4,000-year-old immortal, cannibalism, and shape-shifting sirens to go with the usual outlaws, sheriffs, and dusty one horse towns.

Walking around its map, distances are measured in days and hours, with the day and night cycle deciding whether you arrive in town to find the shops closed and have to break in through an unsecured window or loiter until morning to do your trading. The only 24-hour service is the sheriff and his bounty board, where you can agree to take down outlaws in return for