Weird West – Zero Punctuation

With a jolly interesting setting – it’s a Western but in an alternative world where the wild west was basically the way Lovecraft thought it was like while he was living on the east coast and refusing to leave his house in case the Irish immigrant family next door implanted him with chestbursting parasites. So as well as cowboys and indians and outlaws and bounty hunters there are several factions of bizarre fantasy races like witches, werewolves, zombies, sirens and Chinese people. It drew me in because with the mashup of Lovecraft and western I could enjoy both a bit of gribbly horror fun and getting to hear my actions being narrated by a very throaty-voiced man with a Southern drawl every now and again and feel like I’m in the Dukes of Hazzard. Anyway, our adventure begins with us taking the role of a bounty hunter who tried to escape from their violent past by setting up home in the middle of ground zero for a major interfactional occult conflict, yeah, that was gonna work. Oh you built a farm. Real fucking original. Look around, asshole, everyone’s building farms. Why couldn’t you have retired to run a bowling alley or a middling capacity convention space.

Anyway, some baddies come and kidnap your husband so you have to go back to your bounty hunter ways to get him back, because of course you do, you fucking hack. Now, one thing that did strike me as odd for an immersive choices matter RPG was the complete lack of character customisation. I mean, how am I supposed to play the way I want to play if my protagonist isn’t the closest possible facsimile of Mr. Bean? But then my bounty hunter rescued her husband a suspiciously short way into the game and we switched to a completely different protagonist somewhere else in the world experiencing a completely different plot. In all there are five story campaigns played in linear order, so I think I get what happened. They couldn’t get the character customisation to work, so they figured if they just gave you five random protagonists at least one of them will be marginally more Mr. Beanlike than the others. Oh you know I’m just being facetious. At least I hope you do, these last fifteen years will have seemed like a bit of a roller coaster otherwise. You play as five different protagonists as part of an overarching plot concerning a mysterious scheme by ineffable cosmic forces and the random individuals caught up in their machinations.

Which is all very well, but I feel like something fundamental is lost in a role playing game if we’re not continually building up the same character. How can the game reward us if we’re going to lose it all in a few hours when we get to the chapter where we play as a pig with the face of a boy? Yeah, you can hook up with the previous version of yourself and add them to your posse for the sole purpose of harvesting all the primo shit you left in their inventory in a manner that’d probably make a good hard-hitting metaphor for something, but there’s only, like, four levels of equipment quality so once you have a decent set of guns you’re about done with character development. None of the unlockable perks feel like game-changers. Ooh, ten percent crouch walking speed increase? That’ll help the next time I forget to leave the toilet roll within arms’ reach of the toilet. And I basically never used the unlockable special moves because I was using up all my ability power on the Max Payne slow-mo bullet dive that you get for free, and anything that isn’t moved by a Max Payne slow-mo bullet dive probably won’t be troubled by – checks notes – a thing that makes your next rifle shot silent but not any of the other ones.

Combat doesn’t benefit from that kind of exactitude. It’s a pretty standard immersive RPG affair, that is, you stealth-throttle as many of the patrolling guards as you can so you don’t get overwhelmed when the inevitable cockup cascade occurs and you have to start blasting, probably because you accidentally phased through a guy you were trying to stealth throttle and he found the back of your head very alarming. This is a not unbuggy game. Occasionally a guard’s pathfinding fucks up and he’ll respond by trying to tunnel his way into the floor with his spurs. And then there was the time I moseyed into town for a sidequest but my contact for the sidequest had turned into a chair. I tried sitting in the chair opposite but then the chair tried to start a game of poker with me. Probably not the kind of weirdness the game was aiming for. I assume this was a glitch in the many complex world systems, but with the lack of meaningful rewards, I didn’t see much point in engaging with those systems. You can burgle houses at night by using a rope on the chimney but is the monetary gain worth the risk of bringing down the lawmen? No, it isn’t, I already bought a horse so now I only need money for when I’m bored and feel the urge to draw a little moustache and glasses on a picture of a famous president.

The horse is important ‘cos it means travel time won’t rival that of a budget airline during an escalated terror threat assessment in the mid-2000s, and a couple of bounty missions would usually be enough to afford it, unless you bring a bounty back to town only to be told that the town hasn’t elected a sheriff yet so you’ll have to wait. What? Fucking systems! Who even put up the bounty poster if there’s no sheriff? A vigilante graffiti artist? Still, if I’ve assembled this many nitpicks I must’ve been pretty engaged with the game. Didn’t see much point in doing anything but follow the storyline but it’s an interesting story dusted with the powdered sugar of a fun setting and with a squirt of cream from the aerosol can of decent action. The ending’s a bit of a flop. All the intrigue hinting at the grand mystery behind the five campaigns is paid off by having us fill out a questionnaire and what five second ending we get depends on our answers to that rather than any of the preceding events. But I’d say this is one of those games that does better in the vertical slice test, in the individual moments rather than the big picture assessment. You know, by the same principle where you focus on your date’s lovely eyes so you don’t see the faint traces of a moustache on the mouth of her dead conjoined twin.