Análisis de Weird West

«[Western] is a story that the American people have been counting through generations to understand their identity," wrote Our partner Alberto Crown in a text in which he tried to channel the different ideas present in Red Dead Redemption II. For this reason, because it is fiction, collective memory, and has a certain folkloric character, the Wild West has been opening throughout history to also adapt to the tastes and sensitivities of those _ North Americans who often did not see each other same in the most conventional approaches to the most conventional gender. In 1932, more than 30 years after the first pistol tapes and a decade before his golden age put the mitification of the cowboy figure, Robert E. Howard published a small horror story in the magazine weird such that It was settled in the catacombs of a native-American town that protected a great richness with a fierce curse. The horror from the Mound was the story that introduced the figure of the "magic Indian", an approach to the US natives who did not pass by representing them as wild threatening or secondary allies but imagined them as members of an old culture and closest to the Earth that the newcomers who tried to conquer.

This imperfect rupture with the original hero, the violent man, rude and lonely who faced a love world under certain ethical codes, opened the door to what in 1970 would begin to be defined - thanks to the series of comics weird Western Tales - as Weird West, a heterogeneous mixture of terror, science fiction and dark fantasy that operate under the codes of the Western, in many occasions subvirtaining them to the surprise of the reader. In its Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns Paul Green welcomes under the gender's umbrella from works as conformist as the saga the dark tower of Stephen King to all those films within the Blaxploitation used by Western to denounce the racist character of American culture. Currently, and given the renewed interest of cinema and literature _mainstream for speculative fiction (Journalist Juan Sanguino reaches in his book HO we have changed that now there is no "geek" because everything is popular culture), interest Towards the Weird West is pursuing thanks to the success of series as Westworld or wynonna Earp.

In this context, that Wolfey Studios and Raphaël Cantanio have decided to call his last WEIRD WEST game, A dry, it seems a statement of intentions. The promise that this approach between gender and means will be a definitive event, which will set the standard by which all rare westerns within the video game will be governed from now. However, the appropriation of the label, as many other things at Weird West, is only to impact, to bring us certain ideas and referents that the game itself never intends to explore. Weird West is a strange story of jeans that seems to be afraid to be truly _rara. That he does not want to think about the world he builds or look at his monsters to his face.

Like so many other Westerns, Weird West is built around revenge. The first of the five characters that we can control along the adventure is Jane, a suckling withdrawn that must be taken back after a band murdered her son and kidnap her husband. After leaving her destiny in the air, we went to the story of Pigman, a fucking character, half half a pig, who must find the witch guilty of her situation. The chapters starring the protector and the wolf man are as similar as opposite, with both representing different types of tribes and cultures against a force as oppressive as "modernizing". Finally, the initiate, allows us to know how to know from within the sect we have crossed on as many occasions, as well as acquire indispensable powers to face decisions during the final stretch. But although the cast of characters is attractive and varied, allowing us to know the different natures that operate within the title universe, neither the gameplay nor history adapt to reflect the difference between characters.

The WEIRD WEST world is strange but static. Inert. The characters have objectives but at no time -Ni through actions or dialogues - show the feelings they should accompany them. In Jane, for example, the loss of her son ever is something more a trigger for the story of him, and the relationship with her neighbors is nothing more than a backdrop that acts as we know the past of her as Cazznecks. The links between the protagonists and the secondary ones are based exclusively on gratitude or revenge, as we have completed or not the secondary missions of those who are part. Thus, by saving a woman from the hands of some traffickers we will grab a "friend for all life" that will appear at the most difficult moments to help us, without this relationship translated into anything, not even in a conversation. Although the different protagonists have a different set of special skills and different skills that unlock and use, the game always proposes scenes so similar that we will actually come to _Reear the characters and feel every part of the game as separate and differentiated pieces within the same universe.

The way the world works is too rigid and remembers more to a board game than a videogame. Being a proposal in a broad world, Weird West allows us to accept different missions along with the main objective of each character and move on the map at a pleasure trying to complete them as we face a time limit marked by the passage of the days. The map, which is represented directly as a recreation to paper, has different locations marked that can be interesting and what we can press to start our trip. While we are going to locate locating, we must face different random meetings that can lead to new missions or in ambushes from which we will have to leave alive. The main problem is that these meetings based on action can only be faced directly, firing against enemies, putting us covered and dodging their bullets, without giving us the possibility of executing shares beyond violence or using tricks and traps We do have at our disposal in the rest of the missions.

With the controls in hand, the best presentation letter for a studio such as Wolfeye, founded by Raphael Corantonio and Julien Roby, are the games behind him. They are well listed on their website: they are Dishonored, Prey and Arx Fatalis, a quite incontestable trio. Undoubtedly is present at Weird West, the debut of this new study, that ambition to "deepen the simulation and the playable possibilities of focusing on the interactions", the mantra of the immersive sims than with such skill and intelligence (and, al Less until now, also with constancy) have worked since its inception. The "simplified visual production process", which has always been part of the treatment, translates into a greater importance of your presence in the world, of what you can do and not do in it, of the traces you leave and the traces that Leave in you.

It is not easy to ride something like this and also do it consistently, but Weird West goes out of his way for things to come out well. It is a game that rewards the planning and attentive observation, even though sometimes your camera can be problematic; Too far to understand clearly what happens around you, if you get it, and too close to see anything, if you approach it. From the beginning you are encouraged to think about encounters with enemies as an opportunity to experiment with the possibilities of places where they develop; quicksave and quickload are two words that you want you to have very present in your vocabulary, and lose the fear of trying the most crazy things by exploiting the systems that move the game is essential to start scratching what weird West has to offer.

On paper is just what has to be; In practice, the thing changes a lot. The routine of the quicksave and the quickload is interesting, but it works better at closed and complex levels; The feeling that WEIRD WEST NO is played like that is pressing: the way in which the decisions you take with each character (or the consequences of your acts, premeditated or not) are filtered in the following does not suggest both a special importance of planning In the long term as the convenience of knowing how to come, developing the eye to squeeze the game systems on the fly instead of knowing thoroughly and dominating specific situations and scenes. This ability to control the situation _When Shit Goes South is a classic of the immersive sims, of course: Dishonored understood it well enough for Arkane to do, years later, an entire game, Deathloop, exploding that idea. In Weird West the chaotic situations that are generated when the plans go wrong are much less grateful; The fighting, for a long time bullet, are somewhat stuck, not stimulating not so much because of Game Feel and for the way in many cases they stop the game, breaking any inertia you had. The quickload is perceived, then, not as a possibilitator of experimentation but as a luck of Ctrl + Z for when you get confused and you do something you did not have to do; More than others of his style, Weird West encourages playing conservatively, betting on optimal strategies, by pure negative reinforcement.

This does not mean that there are no moments when the pieces fit, in which the game moves as it is expected from it (as the same tutorial encourages you to expect it to be moved, basically: there is the rod to measure more appropriate in this case), but they are not frequent enough to be what you usually expect when you arrive at a new location or when you crosses with a random event on the map (what a great opportunity, "for pose small interesting situations! ). It ends up having more bald ones than it seems at the beginning; Internal tensions are noticed that almost seem to get away from the deepest moments, in which it is most noticeable to make a people who clearly can afford to use Arx Fatalis or Prey as a claim for their new professional adventure. Are there, but to find them you have to separate the grain from the straw: the grace of the immersive sims, which gives them their immersive quality, is that everything is grain, or everything is straw, but there is no obvious way of differentiating both. At Weird West it is much more evident.

WEIRD WEST is a title that has everything to molar. It is visually shocking, belongs to a genre with possibilities to create all kinds of original situations and has some protagonists capable of awakening the player's imagination. However, the title has nothing to say, nor find anything that wants to tell. Its scenarios end up being similar, all full of cabinets, boxes and barrels with the same hidden objects that we discovered again and again. Its enemies seem interchangeable, although the descriptions specify that they are members of different clans, families and species. The Wild West of Wolfeye and Calantonio is not a "American Tale" or a nightmare about his identity. It is not an interconnected world loaded with action, but action scenes distributed by an interconnected world. Whatever the intentions of the team look like here they do not give in the nail. The shot fails, the bullet moves slowly. The strangest west is still unexplored. His mysteries return hidden, silent, waiting for a new opportunity.