I’ve played Weird West for about ten hours at this point. That should be more than enough time for me to have completed at least the first Journey (the game is split up into five chapters called Journeys), but I’ve hardly made any progress at all on story content. The reason? I just keep doing bounty hunts.
The first character you play as in Weird West is Jane Bell, a retired bounty hunter who picks the trade back up when her husband is kidnapped and her son is killed. She’s basically this world’s version of John Marston, only instead of being at odds with the law, she’s facing off against a band of cannibals (called Sirens).
That’s a pretty good setup for a game set in the Wild West, right? Well, to really be true to this concept, Weird West allows you to pick up bounty missions at bounty boards in towns (pretty much exactly like Red Dead Online, actually). Each bounty comes with a 15-day limit (in-game days, not real-life days), so you don’t want to pick up too many at once. But I like to grab one or two whenever I’m in Grackle (the game’s first town).
Now, this is a game that gives you a pretty incredible amount of freedom. If you want to be an absolute scoundrel and murder every NPC, the game is just going to let you do it. If you want to simply hunt bounties while Jane Bell’s husband is probably being nibbled away at by cannibals, you can do that too.
And this whole bounty thing is kind of addictive. You’ll pick up a mission at a local bounty board, then you’ll head out to whatever abandoned outpost the game sends you to. While there, you’ll deal with the target’s posse and attempt to either kill or capture the target. When you’re done, you’ll return to town to collect your reward. You’ll probably also notice that there’s another quest marker over the bounty board, so you’ll pick that one up and start the whole process over again.
I like to take a stealthy approach to these bounties. I will lie in wait until one of these roughnecks wanders out of eyesight of the rest of the gang. Then I’ll get up behind them, knock them out, and drag them out to the edges of the map, where I’ll relentlessly slaughter them and take all their stuff. And then I’ll head back to find the next victim.
Eventually, there will only be a few posse members left, and I’ll find cover and take them out with my trusty revolver. By the time I get this far, I have a full inventory of useless junk, which I’ll sell off the next time I’m in town.
Basically, my character is growing rich while her husband’s trail is growing colder by the day. I’m sure I’ll find him at some point, but he’s going to have to sweat it out for a bit longer. You see, I’ve got to kill or capture Luna Huerta at Gavan’s Horn, and the clock keeps on ticking.
Disclaimer: I was given a review code for Weird West on Steam, but the opinions expressed in this article are my own.
