Weird West Is The Closest We’ve Got To The Dark Tower | Best Games Of 2022

"Going to see Mama again..."

Weird West
Weird West

Somehow, we’ve managed to make it to the end of 2022, so with that in mind, we’re celebrating some of the best games to have launched in the past 12 months. Today, we’re travelling to a version of the Wild West that’s a bit weird. Makes sense that it’s called Weird West, huh?

“Aim with the eye, shoot with the mind, kill with the heart.” The Gunslinger’s mantra from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series has never been applied to a video game quite as efficiently as it has with Weird West.

That abridged version of a lengthier litany boils down to the idea you need to think before engaging in combat, a core piece of what Weird West asks of players. But it’s not the only road Wolf Eye Studios’ Western immersive sim travels alongside Roland of Gilead.

In a fine year for games, Weird West is the one I feel the greatest fondness for. Developer Wolf Eye Studios is headed up by former Arkane (Dishonored, Prey) devs, so that caught my attention well enough, but the kind of immersive sim it made is a bold one, even with that pedigree. Now, several experimental runs deep, and with updates that have drastically improved early technical issues, Weird West just keeps getting better the more I learn about the world and its physics. A genuine title contender for the 2022 GOTY crown.

Weird West
Weird West

If there could be one valid complaint about Weird West, it would be that it doesn’t give off much weirdness in its opening chapter. It does, however, make up for that by getting weirder by the hour, culminating in a multi-character story arc to decide the fate of life as we know it. That, for me, was where it drew its closest parallels to the multi-book epic of The Dark Tower. A simple chase across a dying world that unfurls into something far bigger than that simple premise would have you believe.

But another part of that setup resonates with a particular Dark Tower tome, that of the Drawing of the Three, where Roland effectively gets a window into the lives of his companions to be. Weird West also takes a body-hopping route through its story, with you as an interloper in the bodies of a set of characters with very different backgrounds.

You begin as a retired gunslinger, then move on through a Pig Man, a lycanthrope, a native wrestling with a curse, and a cultist. You are all of these people and none of them. Each change of scenery comes with a fresh perspective not only from your new host, but with the characters you previously inhabited, who you can go and seek out, and even enlist in your troupe for the next part of the game. You can essentially end with the five characters united, but deliciously, anyone could die permanently during your playthrough.

Weird West
Weird West

I love the journey that can take you on. Alongside the fact that events can occur all across the game world in your absence, and with or without your influence, having characters you’ve got to know, and have literally walked in their shoes (well, the ones who wear shoes anyway) makes for a more personal impact.

The Dark Tower has one more connection to WolfEye’s Western oddball and that’s the breadth of its imagination within a grounded world. Weird West offers a world of possibilities. A superb immersive sim with the weight of cosmic consequence hanging over it.

READ MORE: 10 Best Western Movies of the 2010s

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