Blood West
Blood West, a survival-horror-western FPS, was recently released on Steam in Early Access. It's one of the best games I've played in years.
"The Western is dead," declared Mr. Riches, my Producing 301 professor in film school. "No one can make Westerns anymore. No one will ever be able to make a Western again in this town. I mean it's a shame, I like Westerns, but it's just a fact. They don't make money."
"I'm going to do it," I said. This was 2018. Our final for the class was to prep and pitch a treatment for a screenplay. "I have an awesome idea for a horror Western. I'm going to do it."
"It's your F, I don't know what to tell you. There's no market there. You shouldn't, but I won't stop you."
Two days later, Red Dead Redemption 2 came out. Mr. Riches gave me an A.
(My pitch to him was, for the record, awesome. You can buy its novelized version here.)
Whether or not RDR2 proved the spark that would reignite the Western in cinema is hard to tell in this post-COVID wasteland. I think not. I do think, however, that it's safe to say it was the catalyst for a resurgence in interactive Westerns: Hunt: Showdown (2018), Desperados III (2020), This Land is My Land (2021), the forthcoming Weird West (2022), and now Blood West in early access (2022). These are mostly independent titles, true, but they're legion enough to reflect a surging uptick in interest with cowboys, revolvers, and horses among game developers and players alike.
I love Westerns. Nothing beats the atmosphere of Stetsons and six-shooters. I write Westerns, I read Westerns, I play Westerns, I watch Westerns. Incidentally I also live in a Western; I grew up in a place that looks like this:
The genre is extraordinary in its versatility. A good writer can do anything with a Western. Thus Undead Nightmare feels no less 'Western' than wrangling Dutch Van Der Linde in the hills of West Elizabeth. Even funny hats and Southern accents aren't central to that feeling: what matters is the dichotomy of wilderness and civilization, of law and lawlessness, of sanity and insanity. This is why Fallout and Mad Max are both Western franchises, but The Mandalorian is not a Western show.
All this is a roundabout way of saying that I play pretty much every game on Steam that looks like it might have cowboys in it. For a long time now I've been desperate for a game which uses the generic versatility of the Western, and the preponderance of awesome 19th Century guns, to pitch the player against the forces of evil in an awesome, atmospheric FPS.
Blood West is that game.
The West is Bloody
One of the things Professor Riches taught us to do in his class was to analogize our projects using the old cliche: it's like X meets Y! I did this, as instructed:
"The Banshee is like Bone Tomahawk with a Kill Bill twist!" I proclaimed before the class during my final presentation
He dinged me for points. "Don't just say it's like X meets Y," he said. "Explain what your project takes from X, what it takes from Y, and how it synthesizes them."
Blood West is a game best explained in these terms, I think. So bear with me for a moment while I attempt to do just this.
Blood West combines the singleplayer open world zombie-fighting exploration-action of Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare with the punishing stealth and survival systems of Hunt: Showdown. The player takes control of a deathless man; thus the game utilizes the semi-permadeath system of a Souls-like, respawning ludonarratively at "Spirit Totems" rather than reloading previous saves upon a failure state. Finally there are significant RPG elements, including an immersive-sim reminiscent Tetris-style inventory and a skill tree with powerful passive perks; these can be combined with what are effectively Dishonored's bone charms found on enemy corpses, tailoring individual playstyle as the player sees fit.
There are no crafting or durability mechanics.
Blood West is not a highly original game, but then game design is iterative. What it lacks in originality it more than compensates with excellence in execution. This is one of the best games I've played in years.
Early Access
All that follows should be caveated with the acknowledgement that Blood West is in early access. The currently available content seems to be roughly 1/3 of what will be present after the full release, scheduled for Fall 2022. What I played is well-polished and bug-free, but only took about five hours to complete. Replay value will be limited.
With that said, I also paid $11 for it; I think the full game will easily be worth $30.
The Game
You wake up with amnesia. This horny skull, or one of his friends, informs you that you're dead. You won't find rest until you've dealt with The Evil that plagues this land. Better get killing.
With that you're let loose onto the map of a Zion, Utah-esq desert. There are two human NPCs, a handful more totems, and tons and tons of monsters. The NPCs will give you missions and buy and sell items. The totems will direct you to retrieve certain artifacts from across the map, effectively giving structure to the game, forming the backbone of the 'plot.'
You can also tell the Spirit Totems to get bent and go off exploring on your own. I don't recommend that; you're going to quickly find yourself outmatched if you're not careful. Blood West is a lot of things, but it's not easy. Unlike other Souls-like games you lose nothing upon death here: instead, death leaves you with a Soul Flaw. Each Soul Flaw grants a perk which confers a small malus to a specific stat. Earn three to receive a curse.
I don't know how bad curses are. I worked hard to never earn one. My guess is that you'd rather never find out, too. Soul Flaws can be removed or avoided through use of special tokens or a rare, expensive type of booze--just like real life--but this is really only viable at higher levels. Early on, stay alive or get fucked. I died twice, then got serious about living.
This is a rare incentive to care about your own life without resorting to draconian punishments involving replaying content. Most games, especially shooters, don't accomplish this half so well.
I say Blood West is a shooter, and it is later on, but really it's a stealth-survival game. The only sure way to stay alive is to sneak up on the living dead, axe them, or avoid them altogether.
The stealth itself is extremely simple. It boils down to two components: can the enemy see you, and can the enemy hear you? If either answer is 'yes,' the bar at the bottom of the screen will slowly fill. Once it's full, you're spotted. That's all there is to it. Any enemy you sneak up on, except for a wendingo, can be instantly killed with a melee attack.
This isn't disengaging, but it's a bit lame. There's no peeking around corners, no need to carefully watch enemies. Keep your eye on the bar and it's almost impossible to be spotted: if it's nearly full, stop moving and let it drain. A lack of depth in stealth is Blood West's biggest flaw because sneaking around enemies is so central to the game as a whole.
This is a small criticism. The mechanics are functional, and when so much rides on even a small mistake, simple is not necessarily bad. Any more complexity in stealth and the whole game might become too difficult.
Level design is where Blood West shines brightest. The map itself is small. It takes no more than a few minutes to walk from one corner to the next. What it isn't is empty.
Every inch of the Barren Lands oozes content. Interesting loot can be found in every building. Stuff is everywhere. There's always an incentive to go explore. Complex, but not frustratingly so, tunnels honeycomb the entire map.
There isn't much in the way of narrative to uncover in the environment. What little story the game has is well voice-acted but mostly explained to the player by the Spirit Totems, backed up by the gameplay but nothing more. Although the dialogue system looks like a cRPG's, conversations are limited and linear: your choices do not matter, with the exception of whether or not you want to turn in one specific quest reward. That's fine, though. Blood West is an immersive sim at its core, and, with the exception of Deus Ex, ImSims never have dialogue trees that matter. As far as influencing the outcome of the narrative--this game is about killing Evil. What influence do you want to have?
From here-on out things become more challenging to discuss, because I don't know what the future content updates hold. There are only a handful of weapons currently available: the revolver, the levergun, the shotgun, the bow-and-arrow, the axe, and the knife. There are several variants of each of these, including unique versions, but they're all mostly the same, although the weapons themselves feel different in compelling ways, and they're all tons of fun to use--and very Western.
The developers--Hyperstrange--have made the hyper-strange decision of making the levergun an 1873 Winchester, but the revolver what looks, sort of, like a Colt Army 1860 cartridge conversion. I would've preferred if the low-quality "Rusted Revolver" were the conversion and the higher quality "Revolver" you find later on were a Single Action Army. That would make more sense, all things considered. I know this seems like a small nit to pick, but given such a lack of variety in arms overall, a small amount of visual and historical variety would have made a big difference.
I found the Sawed-Off Shotgun to be the most competitive weapon. Some other critics have complained that guns feel underpowered; in reality, you just need to land headshots. A single headshot with any weapon will kill any enemy except CoffinMen and Wendingos. At close range shotguns are the easiest for nabbing headshots, and although the extra 4 meters of range on the full-length shotty is nice, it isn't worth the extra six or seven square of inventory.
Despite these minor quibbles with the presentation of the firearms, I found Blood West's arsenal to be satisfactory overall. The levergun in particular is tons of fun to use: I found one in a bird's nest overlooking a camp full of the undead and proceeded to pick off eight or nine zombies with headshots from thirty yards off. There's something about using Western guns that never grows old. Blood West scratches that itch.
Outside stealth, melee seemed underwhelming. The perks available for melee aren't as powerful, relatively, as those you can buy for ranged. Getting in close once enemies are alerted almost always exposes you to unnecessary danger, and there's no way to block or dodge incoming attacks (except for one passive perk which gives you a small dodge percentage change). Recovering HP is so challenging, and death so punishing, that I don't think wading through zombies with an axe is a viable method of play in the current build. The melee tree needs significant buffs to be competitive with firearms.
Before I move on, a word about the graphics: they are low-fidelity.
They have a distinctively 2000-ish feel to them. They're also clean, readable, and excellently styled. I love the design of the monsters. Each enemy type is easy to tell apart from a distance. Its weak point is always clear. You know when it's been alerted. Some enemies, like the Prodigal Daughters, even have high quality voice acting after they've spotted you, which really drives home a retro feel--Blood West never feels janky, it just seems, at worst, old. The low graphical fidelity was a style decision, and it works for what the game is doing.
Dead Man Walking
It was the Indian spirit guide's line "my name is nobody" which gave it away, but there's clear inspiration from Jim Jarmusch's 1995 Western Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp, in this game. Just like Depp's character, the protagonist in Blood West is a dead man in the charge of an Indian guide, buried before being brought back to life by the spirits (only metaphorically in the film, but the similarities are still hard to miss).
But the parallels manifest more in the music than anywhere else. Dead Man--an excellent film, which I highly recommend--has a fantastic, haunting soundtrack by Neil Young, filled with stinging guitars. Blood West's score follows after this fashion. It has some of the best atmospheric music I've heard in a game in years. I was four hours in before I realized I hadn't turned on a podcast, Richard Thompson song, or audiobook--almost unheard of for me. (It was ten minutes before I turned my music back on while playing Wartales, for comparison.) The music is what drives home the game's excellent atmosphere, which is fundamentally why it's such an engrossing experience--and why I couldn't put it down until I had finished it.
The last point of praise I want to draw is toward the protagonist himself, the Dead Man. The developers made the unusual choice to have him partially acted. When he finds a cool piece of loot or nails a headshot, he'll comment in his gruff, vaguely Nukem-esq voice with a one-liner, driving home what's just happened, reinforcing the value of what was just found, generally making you feel badass.
I do not like voiced protagonists in shooters. I think they are, generally, a big mistake. But the Dead Man's voice is fantastic. It's never not awesome when he says "Go back to hell!" after you blow the brains out of a zombie. Not only does it feel Western, but it actually serves a purpose in the mechanics: it tells you when you've picked something valuable up and it reminds you, like a hitmarker, when you've killed an enemy. You know you're out of danger when the Dead Man says it's all clear. This is a subtle but excellent piece of design, of exactly the sort that Blood West is filled with.
So while I don't have much more to say about the story--it works, I like it for what it is, it could be better and I wish there was more to it but I'm glad it's not overdone--I think that, overall, the Dead Man's presentation elevates Blood West's narrative design to a category well above average. These designers knew what they were doing.
Recommendation
If it isn't clear by now, I highly recommend Blood West. I beat the whole game, or at least what's currently available, in one late-night sitting. Hyperstrange's excellent team of designers have put together a team that competently navigates its genre, synthesizes the most interesting mechanics from a slew of different games into one cohesive whole, and ditches the baggage from similar games--like durability and crafting mechanics--without losing anything of value. It's currently in early access and available on Steam here. For my part, I can't wait for future updates. It's already a great game; one year from now, it'll probably be spectacular.