Weird West and the Matryoshka
There’s a great deal to be said about role-playing games/RPGs. Whether they tell a grand story of heroics and triumph over evil, or of a wandering vagabond trying to make the most out of the apocalypse, or some deal in-between, they’ve found purchase in our collective game libraries. We like to pretend, we like to improve, and we like to explore worlds truly not our own. That was what drew me in to Wolf Eye Studio’s Weird West (2022): another RPG, maybe a little more action-heavy than others, and with that sweet, sweet veneer of the cinematic Old West. Good guys, bad guys, and six-shooters. So I started playing, and all of a sudden…the game shifted. And it shifted three more times throughout the game, going deeper and deeper with each shift, like a funky little Matryoshka doll. It was familiar enough to get its foot in the door, and then kicked it the rest of the way open.
Players control five unique characters throughout the game, each one at a time, each struggling with their own unique circumstances. But despite their differences in situation and skill, the game is still similar throughout the myriad cast: combat, exploration, dialogue, and decisions. The only thing that changes is how deep players’ understanding becomes, and how far the ripples of their decisions carry.
Weird West thrives on its level of scope. The entire game takes place in a sprawling map, peppered with different settlements, mine and cave networks, and landmarks throughout, easily traveled via the world map. Random encounters do occur in those travels, but not nearly to the scale of older Pokémon and Final Fantasy treks. The scope, for each “shift,” is largely relegated to one of the major regions of the Weird West, but it doesn’t prevent players from exploring outside that scope. But it presents the world in pieces, more easily digested than the entire scop of a continent, or planet, as other RPGs may be wont to do. Think of Midgar in the Final Fantasy VII universe: players learn how this one city operates in the grand scheme before the scope widens to encompass all of Gaia. Similar principle with Weird West: we’re exposed to the world, and then witchcraft, and factions, and magics, and conflicts, broadening our knowledge of the world bit by bit. With each new layer of the Matryoshka, we are more knowledgeable without being overwhelmed.
Next, its length. Traditionally, RPGs tell one big story that centers around one very important character. Weird West tells one story by telling five smaller stories around five disparate characters. As such, instead of dragging yourself on a longer narrative arc with the one character, players can experience more compact, more thrilling highs and lows in a shorter frame of time, before starting over again with another character. On a more concentrated playthrough, players can burn through a character’s story in a few hours. Additional exploration, bounty hunting, or lawlessness may tack on more time. Still, compared to the twenty, thirty, forty hours it can take to complete other RPGs with only one main character to follow, Weird West progresses at a steady clip, allowing multiple trips through the narrative peaks and valleys of storytelling. And so is the joy of revealing another layer of the Matryoshka.
Lastly, the decisions and consequences. In each arc of the story, each individual character’s journey, decisions are made. What’s fascinating is how big they are for that character, tied up in their individual journeys so tightly: tales of revenge, of closure, and of destiny all, distilled down after the fact into its ripples on the world. Does the boss you missed return to terrorize the West? A newly-cursed enemy still haunting the wilderness? Have you given rise to a powerful new faction, or prevented that very same rise? Big things in the moment ripple into actual effects in later arcs. Decisions have consequences, consequences that you, as the player, can experience. We don’t have to wait for the ending cinematic, or the closing minutes of the game. We can make choices and see what comes of them more quickly, more satisfyingly, than in many other stories, and they only impact what’s to come. Each layer of the doll is determined by the space of its next largest layer.
To be absolutely clear, I love RPGs. The Final Fantasy series was, and still is, truly formative to my love of storytelling in games. Fallout & Fallout 2 are some of the few games I’ve gone back to play a second time after save data got blasted into oblivion. But I also love how those stories we tell within that genre can change with time. Whether due to developer limitations, or a change in narrative priority as it comes to players’ time, Weird West may not be perfect, but it is an interesting step in a new direction. I’d love to see other takes on the structure, if not for the story structure of it all, then the stories themselves. It feels like I know the spirit of Weird West more after having seen it from so many different, and sometimes opposing, perspectives. And, joy of joys, if I ever want to pull a Fallout and revisit Weird West from the start, I can put the dolls back together, change around a few things at various points in my run, and uncover entirely new layers altogether.
