The expanses of the frontier have been attracting the recalcitrant for more than a century and a half. And if the classic stories about cowboys and Indians have long been part of the cultural foundation of humanity, then the horror of these desolate lands settled in popular culture not so long ago. What kind of horror can there be for a fearless guy with a gun? But will there be enough bullets and dexterity against what is stalking in the eternal desert darkness?
Almost all my life, the Wild West, or rather the setting of Westerns, caused me unpleasant anxiety. After all, what will be left of the western if you remove the western itself, with fascinating stories about cold-blooded heroes? There will be a void. An absolutely empty, no-man’s-land, a world of dust and withered wood, where there are two equivalent nightmares.: are you completely alone in this meaningless world, or is there someone Else here. It is into this liminality that the game Blood West immerses.
The dead man
The plot begins with our cold corpse being dragged by a shaman of an unknown tribe, passing out an exhibit along the way: white people, with their greedy carelessness, have awakened an ancient evil that has gladly turned them into their disgusting servants. But by the will of the shaman, we return to a kind of life, which we will drag out until we deal with evil in this endless night.
The beginning of the story
The story doesn’t exactly end with an ascetic introduction. Standard narrative elements fade into the background, and from the notes we learn more technical information about how to survive in a dead world. Everything looks the way it looks just because it looks that way. And this is an important aspect that I will return to when talking about the visual part of the game.
The Eternal Wanderer
The genre of the game has never been horror, at least not in the gameplay. It is a measured immersive shooter in an open world, with an emphasis on RPG elements and stealth. In the first stage, almost any opponent will tear the hero to pieces. And ammunition is in terrible short supply, which pays tribute to the Evil Residents. Shooting here is hardcore, it’s just necessary to be accurate here.
Who's sneaking ahead
A lot of small things work for immersion: a long reload of a revolver, one round at a time, animations of treatment, the use of all kinds of drugs, meticulous work with inventory. For example, it is necessary to manually unload captured pistols in order to collect cartridges. However, all this is not enough to bring Blood West into diving simulations. The level design does not give much creative freedom, and the passing style depends more on the choice of weapons. A bow, an axe, a revolver, a sawn–off shotgun, or a rifle-anything but two at a time. There are also no audio diaries and there are stairs. The initiates will understand.
The beginning of the game is misleading with a demonstration of stealth mechanics with distracting opponents. No, stealth works great: the opponents have sight and hearing, and the protagonist has an endless supply of pebbles to distract the evil spirits with noise. And sneaking past a lot of opponents is a very real task, but you shouldn’t do that.
It’s all about leveling up, which is of great importance. Experience is given for dead opponents, not for the player’s stealth. And the loot needed in trade is best collected from defeated enemies.
It's not the horses that are hiding in the stable.
Thus, stealth very quickly boils down to handing out headshots from behind cover and cosplaying Patrick Bateman with dealing critical axe damage. You don’t have to be too afraid of your own death: in the best ARPG traditions, you will be transported to a safe zone with all the loot. What is dead cannot die, but the abuse of such necroportation will be cursed: three deaths in a row will provide a debuff that can be begged from the amalgamation of spirits living in cattle skulls in the same safe zones.
The RPG element begins to prevail very quickly, and in just a few hours the game changes its references from survival horror and stealth to a kind of action RPG. But it feels great: we are becoming more and more a hunter instead of a victim.
The appearance of monsters
The graphic stylization of computer games from the turn of the millennium is very well done here. And these are computer games, not the dancing polygons of the first curling iron, which everyone is already pretty tired of. Unfortunately, there is no CRT filter in Blood West to fully immerse yourself in the era. But there is something else.
In one video, I heard the thesis that a significant part of the Polish game developers (yes, I have beaver lovers again) worked or at least visited People Can Fly for tea, the studio that made Painkiller– without exaggeration, my favorite computer game. And it has a very interesting moment of narration through the general atmosphere of the location, with the same liminal notes, linking the opponents’ design to the setting, and the design itself is very clearly inspired in places. All together, this gives a Lovecraftian feeling of unknowable horror, because the game simply doesn’t have enough lore to describe everything around it. In those moments when you don’t have an active action, you start asking questions like “why is this night taking so long?” and “what made monsters exactly like that?”
On the other hand, the retro aesthetic of the game implicitly flirts with the phenomenon of Source games: the feeling of serene and frightening emptiness at the same time is constantly present here. At the same time, Hyperstrange, the development team, clearly did not want to scare us very much. Their other games, like Postal: Brain Damage and Elderborn (the latter is a must-read for all fans of Conan the Barbarian aesthetics and Dark Messiah games), consider different facets of the style of computer games at the turn of the century, whether it’s acid madness or a rusty palette passed through analog filters. Here, rather, the atmosphere of those half-empty worlds, which were so often painted by designers working at source, is reliably conveyed. Strange flashbacks reveal lost amateur maps from the conditional collection of the best mods for Half Life for 99 years.
The whisper of the wind
As for the sound, it resembles the first Half Life in some places: although the beautiful ambient is almost always present, the samples are terribly compressed in some places. This feature perfectly complements the graphic style, but its aesthetics are much less obvious and can be annoying when playing at acceptable acoustics.
The musical component is very pleasing. The ambient on the locations, although it smacks of a default story about wild western evil spirits, but it synergizes very well with thoughtful and intense gameplay. All these howls work great for immersion, and the slow pace of the game, where you are a hunter and a victim at the same time, makes you feel like you are in a real horror. Moreover, it’s more like a hero of a movie than a computer game. Well, the opening musical theme in the dark country-rock style is very good.
There is a bit of lore in the description of special items
Interestingly, in the settings, you can reduce the frequency or completely disable the “cool phrases” of the protagonist. This is a very good option, since the main character should be more of a secretive quiet guy, rather than Duke Nukem, and excessive loquacity ruins the image a little. The hero won’t stop burping from magic potions and moonshine, but thanks for that.
Dark West
This game came to me very timely. In the post–Christmas kingdom of darkness, when it’s still too early to get dark and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for officially approved joy, the best cure for the blues is to kill monsters in the long evenings. An hour or two of this Gothic nightmare in the evening is a great distraction from the truly unpleasant routine. Despite all the darkness and complexity, you can defeat these monsters. And finally, a small confessional disclaimer: at the moment, I am only in the first of three chapters, not counting the DLC. As far as I know, little changes in the future, but perhaps later I will give a detailed comment about further adventures. Someday. Trust me, this is not a game you want to rush into.
Blood West is paradoxically interesting in its scarcity, it pleases the eye with visual austerity and fascinates with a simple and understandable system. I want to immerse myself in this inhospitable world. Immerse yourself in a leisurely reality devoid of unnecessary digital noise, gradually subjugating this damned world. Perhaps this is reminiscent of the very therapeutic effect of the Dark Souls series. It’s also a portal at the best time of the digital age, when everything was already there, but there wasn’t too much. When a computer could be an independent terminal, a window into the world of amazing, creepy and inexplicable things. And the Internet didn’t have to be turned on at all times.
