Over the last few years, there have been a fair few “____ West” games trying to put a spin on the tried-and-true Western genre. So I wouldn’t blame you if you had no idea what Blood West was by name alone. Even I didn’t know what the game truly had in store until I booted it up for the first time. For the similarly uninitiated, Blood West is an indie horror first-person shooter from developer/publisher Hyperstrange.
The game sets you free on a barren and wicked Wild West where you play as an undead gunslinger brought back for a mysterious purpose by powers greater than your own. If that sounds vague, that’s because it is. You can talk to a few people and things on your journey and the game even has dialogue options to let you ask the questions you want, but the answers are often cryptic. The game gives you control without much preamble and before long you’ll be facing-off, or more likely crouching-past, loud and gurgling enemies.
Blood West is an immersive sim that leans heavily on stealth. In fact, you will more likely than not get frustrated with the game if you run in like it’s a typical first-person shooter like Call of Duty or even a stealth-based first-person shooter like Dishonored. Sneaking up to an enemy and dealing a silent critical blow will almost always be the best option when compared to using your revolver or bow-and-arrow. As you play, your arsenal will grow but after five hours with the game, I still don’t have the confidence to run in guns blazing. Especially in the early hours, enemies can be real bullet sponges while your own character can feel like a cardboard cutout on a windy day.
The game is not advertised as such, but calling Blood West a Souls-like shooter is an apt description nonetheless. Taking on an enemy that has spotted you not only takes away the crit opportunity but it gives you an understanding of just how underpowered you are. Whether it be winged outlaws or supernatural creatures, they hit hard and encounters are over before they even start. Furthermore, when you die or rest, some of the enemies you were able to put down will rise back up and resume their mindless roaming. I could count the fact that enemies roam like hard-wired sentries as a negative but it’s fitting for the setting so I’ll give it a pass.
A key aspect of Blood West is the trait-based character progression. This gives you new strengths and abilities to aid you on your mission. To that point, there are also certain artifacts you can equip in your inventory that give you certain advantages. You see, in Blood West, death can have further penalties. You can wake up after dying with a punishment that feels like adding salt to the wound. You can have up to three punishments on you at a given time and by the fourth, it becomes a curse. So utilizing artifacts and unlocking new perks to gain additional resistance and increasing health and stamina is very important to survival.
What I think will really make or break Blood West for someone is the presentation and setting. The game’s low-res, low-poly 3D visuals manage to still retain detail. The landscape of Blood West‘s Wild West is haunting and desolate, dotted by danger and shrouded in perpetual night. As of now, two of the game’s three chapters are available to play and while the first has a pretty standard Western backdrop, the second sends you into the swamps. The maps are well-designed with plenty of off-the-beaten-path surprises that reward you for exploration. (If you can survive that is.) I also like the soundscape which, and it might be the fact that I played the game mostly in the dark and at night speaking, I think added wonderfully to the atmosphere. You can always tell there’s an enemy in your surrounding by sound alone and the score accentuates the intensity nicely.
Blood West is an immersive first-person shooter that is challenging and atmospheric. Despite the official Steam page tempting you to “unleash a hail of gunfire,” stealth is baked into the core of the game. Sneaking up to enemies and utilizing all the traits at your disposal is the only way to stay alive long enough to find the evil you are tasked with destroying, and finally dying for good. Blood West has been in Early Access for over a year and though there is no release date yet, I don’t foresee it being too much later. The game costs $15 and is available now on Steam. A code for the game was provided by the publisher for review.
