I’ve long thought that within the medium of video games, the Wild West, or even the Old West setting more generally, has far more formative innovation within them than just leaning into the typical shooter or traditional open world adventure genre templates (hello Weird West!). Enter then Blood West (no relation, but hello anyway) from developer Hyperstrange and publisher New Blood Interactive, a first-person open world stealth RPG FPS that at once is a love letter to the days of PC gaming yore, while also looking toward contemporary influences to craft an atmospheric Wild West effort that is absolutely like no other.
Blood West PS5 Review
To distill Blood West to the sum of its parts and influences, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Hyperstrange’s western outing feels like 1990s Thief by way of Cormac McCarthy and John Carpenter with the appropriately fetid essence of Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown 1896 sprinkled liberally throughout. Naturally as someone for whom all of those points of influence carry significant sway over both my brain and my mouth to never, ever shut the heck up about them in polite conversation, it naturally tracks that Blood West was always going to appeal to me in spades.
As the Undead Gunslinger, a wayward and unfortunate soul prematurely separated from their mortal coil on sacred Indian lands, you are tasked with ridding a Wild West which finds itself plunged into eternal night from the myriad foul spirits and generally weapons grade evil folk that are romping around on it by cleansing cursed artefacts and laying waste to the big nasties that manifest in their wake. After a brief tutorial which runs concurrent with your awakening in a dank cave filled with undead horrors, it’s off to the figurative races as Blood West wastes little time in unfurling its core mechanics at the player’s feet.
When your grim journey begins you have little at your disposal other than a rusty axe and (hopefully) some semblance of self-preservation. You see, especially early on in Blood West, stealth is the order of the day here. Not only do you decidedly not have the required armaments to go ‘Full OK Corral’ on your foes at this point, but even if you did chances are that you’ll be battered into the ground anyway. Indeed, even gunfights when they happen early on at least, tend to be frayed and panicked affairs where you attempt to frantically point the business end of your firearm at whatever monstrosity is charging toward you and hope that you can score a skull-shattering critical hit – which can often seem driven by a cruel sort of luck rather than any kind of skill in that first hour of play.
Nope, Blood West in its early stages is very much a survival stealth adventure where poise is everything and knowing your environment is crucial. Success will only come if you’re patient and deliberate with every movement and action. Awareness is your best friend in Blood West and the best way you can remain aware is to pay religious attention to the stealth bar which manifests in and out of being depending on your circumstances.
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Indicative of both sight and sound (which is important as some creatures seemingly have a better sense of one over the other), the bar will gradually fill and contract depending on the sensory perception of your adversaries. Spend too long in their line of sight and they’ll come claws a’ swingin’, while making too much noise or spending too long creeping around them can result in the same unfortunate outcome. Naturally then, it’s all about doing just the right amount of sneaking – not too much so you get detected and not too little that you don’t reach the flank of your foe in time to land a devastating critical attack from behind with your trusty axe, or whatever melee weapon you happen to have to hand.
As you might well expect this dynamic generates a whole heap of tension as enemies can sometimes turn around when you least expect them to, or, you can simply be caught out by not spying another adversary in your periphery. As ever then, vigilance is your best weapon against being put six feet under, both early on and throughout Blood West‘s later acts.
After an early and initial chaotic tarry with firearms like a panicked virgin at third base, it isn’t long until you start to apply the same level of care and consideration to Blood West‘s ranged game. This means that same careful approach will win the day of carefully lining up your shots, sticking close to cover (you aren’t the only gunslinger out there in them dusty wastes), and keeping a keen eye on how much ammo you have left since reloading your trusty six-shooter in particular can take a little old while as you carefully load each round into the chamber.
On a purely aesthetic level, all of Blood West‘s firearms feel and sound great too. From the pointed crack of a revolver sending a silver round through the mush of a gun-toting Birdman, to the ringing boom of the shotgun which creates an absolute kill zone immediately in front of you, Blood West’s firearms are all fantastic to use and if you’re more of a quieter, bow and arrow type, then Blood West also has you catered there also.
You won’t be consigned to skulking around in the shadows forever either, as Blood West has a very definite progression curve that not only essentially changes up the core gameplay by letting you take on the forces of darkness more readily on your own terms, but is deeply fulfilling also. Essentially, as you get better weapons, better trinkets which buff various abilities and begin to level up your build overall, you become exponentially stronger to the point that stealth is no longer mandatory – though of course depending on your build – you can stealth until your black heart is content. Put simply, the creative latitude for build tailoring in Blood West is equally as impressive as the sense of empowerment that you get from just, well, improving yourself and your monster murdering capabilities.
When you’re not caving in heads with axes, blowing up fiends with dynamite, or blasting abominations across the room with a shotgun that almost cuts them in half, you’ll be scurrying about Blood West‘s world in search of precious loot, new weapons, items and more secrets besides. Each of the main areas in the game, the Canyons, the Swamp, and the Mountains, all tap into that classic notion of Wild West Americana, which encapsulate the location that have been archetypal backdrops for innumerable Wild West movies, books and television shows set over the last 100 years or longer. In Blood West however, where a perpetual night lingers, these traditional Wild West locations take on a more sinister aspect.
Across a landscape where the American Dream can damn your soul, developer Hyperstrange has twisted all of the mainstays of Wild West romanticism in various grotesque ways to match this conceit. Instead of busy saloons slick with high proof whiskey and folks playing cards, those same watering holes are now largely abandoned, the carelessly spilt liquor on the counter now substituted with deliberately spilled human claret, while the vague chattering of mask wearing ladies of leisure for whom those masks hide a terribly warped visage, stalk its rooms with life-ending boomsticks.
Further afield, foreboding swamps stretch out before you and lean very deeply the dark folklore mysticism of the Louisiana Bayou, with grotesque horrors that slowly creep their way across mossy rocks, while old mines which snake their way into the bowels of the world are filled with undead miners who find themselves doomed to repeat their vocation in life of trying to separate the precious colour from the veins of the earth. Whether you’re destroying massive, acid-spitting insectoid creatures, putting down the gnashing legions of the animated dead, cleansing Indian burial grounds or conversing with dark spirits, Blood West takes the Wild West setting that we all know and love and absolutely flushes it all down a corrupted voodoo toilet. More of this kinda thing, please.
In terms of actually finding your way around this inverted Wild West hellhole, Blood West is very much adherent to an older school of thought which doesn’t hold your hand and which encourages you to read maps and find your bearings in a more traditional way. There’s no mini map or blasted yellow paint here – just a map that you’ve paid for (and you should pay for it) and an idea that you’re roughly heading in the right direction. Speaking of exploration, Blood West rewards those who have an eye for the shinier things in (un)life, with all manner of loot, items and other such goodies often hidden in funky little crevices, among the detritus of the environment or in some other nook and cranny of wherever it is you happen to be. Put simply, it pays to explore in Blood West and I love that.
Beyond the trappings of Blood West‘s quests that have you retrieving cursed items which must be cleansed in order to trigger the boss at the end of each act, there’s also something funky going on with how you can rest and regain health. Sure, you can use bandages to stop bleeding and potions to heal yourself as you might well do in just about any other similar title, and yes, you can even rest in certain beds to replenish your health entirely. The kicker here though, is that when you do rest, some enemies will respawn which lends the proceedings a dash of the ol’ Soulslike game design.
As such, there’s a certain wistful old-fashionedness about Blood West that really appeals to me and which also scratches something of a Soulslike itch. You can rest and grind XP, money and gear if you wish or you can plough on with the main and side quests should you so choose and yet in both cases, you really do feel like meaningful progression is never out of reach.
It’s worth mentioning that there are some design oddities however. Some missions for example sometimes don’t always ping the correct area on your map for you to go to, while inventory management is clunky in that, well, you kinda have to do it all yourself without the token automatic smartness we take for granted in contemporary inventory management systems. Essentially, you have to make room in your inventory for new loot by moving things around in order to fit new bits in. So yeah, it’s basically inventory Tetris and while I quite enjoy that (and find it oddly soothing), I can understand why some folks may not.
A quick glance at the technical presentation of Blood West tells you two things. Firstly, it’s not some identikit, Unreal Engine 5 stutter-fest and secondly, low poly retro visuals still slap with aplomb – especially when they scream along at a buttery smooth 120 frames per second. Though the distinctly mid-90s PC SVGA presentation with its near draw distance horizons might seem outdated to some by contemporary standards, it nonetheless suits Blood West perfectly and provides a level of atmosphere that is both palpable and unexpected, permeating the game with a real sense of perceptual dread. Shambling horrors that appear in the distance for example, appear almost as ill-focused silhouettes which lack the sort of clarity you might otherwise get in a brighter, more fidelity focused effort. The result? A void of uncertainty that your mind fills with terror until you get closer for your eyes to tell your brain the truth of the matter.
A breath of fresh malodorous air, Blood West‘s take on ponderous demonic murder in a Wild West that is as weird as it is wild feels overdue for a setting that has otherwise stagnated with traditional open world efforts and fairly dunderheaded shooters. Sure, it’s a little rough around the edges and the low-poly, retro 90s visuals invariably won’t be for everyone, but there’s an old-fashioned earnestness to its design and approach to progression that is almost overwhelmingly endearing all the same.
Blood West is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.