It’s there in the isometric perspective in the simple, disposable companions who function primarily as a way to draw fire and expand your inventory space. It has to be said, though, that Dishonored isn’t the first game that springs to mind when stepping out onto Wolfeye Studios’ warped frontier. Or you could call it exactly what you’d hope for from a team of key Arkane veterans behind Dishonored and Prey. Or the perfect emblem for Weird West, a game which excels at finding concise expressions of unconstrained player choice. You could call this the dark fulfillment of Peter Molyneux’s promise of an acorn that, left alone, would grow into a tree in Fable. Weird West even suggests you head to the local cemetery to loot any bodies you’ve missed - though its reputational system implies you should ensure nobody’s watching first. But you can change that, should you so choose: shoot up the bank or fight a duel and, the next time you return to that settlement, new plots will have appeared for every life snuffed out. The graveyard there is uncannily empty, save for a similarly bare tree.

It’s not that way in Bripton, the next town over. Filling the graveyard has been a solemn bid for order in the wake of so much chaos.

It’s a concise expression of everything the town’s been through: the rampaging bandits, the cannibal kidnappings, the swirling tornados. “Graveyard’s full,” says Timothy Hall, the man prodding the bones of the piano at the saloon in Grackle. Arkane founder’s first indie outing is a chaotic soup of colliding systems, and that soup tastes absolutely delicious.

Free for mac instal Weird West