Blood West: Open World Stealth Done Right?

Wait, why does this heavily edited thumbnail just look like Battlefield 3…

Intro

I would like to begin this review by saying that while I love to write about games, I currently do not make any money back from playing them. This greatly effects which games I beat and which games I don’t, because as of now, the only benefit I get from playing games is the game itself. This isn’t new for 95% of game enjoyers out there, however I bring this up because I think it’s important to contextualize how I feel when I play these games. I have absolutely no pressure or ulterior incentive to finish a game once I’ve started it, and am completely fine with dropping a game if it gets boring, or if I don’t like it. All of the games I play I’ve paid for, and as of now I don’t get any of that money back from playing them. This isn’t like the million plus “I Played X Game so You Don’t Have To” videos online, where people are only torturing themselves because they financially benefit from it. When I beat a game, it means something to me, because it means that there is something special about it, whether it be bad or good, that drives me to see the end. Getting to the point, Blood West is one of those games for me. For the last 26 hours of videogames I’ve played, all 26 have come from playing Blood West from start to finish. I have stayed up overnight on two separate occasions because I could not fathom stepping away from my computer once the end to an act was in sight. This game was good, quite good in fact, and while I don’t think it’s for everyone, there was enough going on while I was playing that made me want to complete it.

If you’ve seen gameplay of this, or have stumbled upon screenshots, or are looking it up for the first time now after reading this, you’ve probably asked yourself “So… what is this exactly?” I did too when I first saw it, and I’ll say that I didn’t inherently understand what it was until I was around 5-10 hours in. Blood West is a stealth-action game that has combat and stealth mechanics similar to Hunt: Showdown, but is an entirely PvE experience. The game has looting mechanics similar to games like Resident Evil and Escape from Tarkov and the sole goal is to search the many different structures and settlements on the map for quest items to progress the story, whilst contending with the world’s hostile inhabitants and managing your resources. I should stress that this game is not an immersive sim, since there is only one real way to solve your problems in this world: killing everything before it has a chance to do you in. I’ll get more into the sandbox elements later, in this review.

The Gameplay

The gameplay loop can be boiled down to this: Prepare at your base camp before embarking outward into the world to find items that increase your lethality and survivability. You fill up as much as you can in your bags, rearranging and stacking things so that you can get the most out of your journey, before inevitably having to go back to camp to trade, re-arm, and do it again. This might sound on paper like an extraction shooter, but I feel like that doesn’t really place it. There are few things you can lose upon death, and while extraction shooters tend to separate their ‘safe zones’ and combat areas by instances, Blood West is one consistently running map that you are always a part of. You do not ‘queue’ into raids, or get into drop pods, or teleport to an instanced safe zone upon extraction to do your item managing. In Blood West it’s one map that you’re apart of, and early game you will be physically walking back to the safe zones that you’ve discovered. 

So that’s the game in a nutshell: walk to the different areas, kill as many people as you need to safely get all of the loot out, trade what you don’t need for gold, stock up, and repeat. It reads simple, but there is something so refreshing about the way that this game functions. It’s an ‘open world stealth game in the literal sense, but it is quite far from games like Far Cry and the newer Assassin’s Creeds which dominate that corner of the gamespace. Blood West is concise, with small levels that can be walked from corner to corner in only a few short minutes. The bloat associated with Ubisoft’s open world games is not here, exchanged instead for a smaller and more intimate map that can be traveled by foot. It should also be stated though that this game isn’t completely linear. Certain objectives must be completed in a specific order, but not all, and while maps are unlocked in a sequential order, once you enter one you are free to roam just about wherever you want. The game reminds me often of Elden Ring in its open world design, where open spaces and curated dungeons balance each other. The open world operates like a typical open world at first, a big open map sprinkled with baddies, but this changes when you enter structures. Once in these spaces, the game becomes Dishonored, tightening into a sort of gauntlet; testing your stealth skills in a more rigid and constrictive environment. These two approaches to level design: the open world and the claustrophobic labyrinths, make this game feel really immersive, and engaging.

Loot

This is helped by the loot in this game. Blood West doesn’t just populate its maps with ‘points of interest’, it’s entire map is full of interest. If you buy a map from a vendor, the towns, landmarks, and other curiosities will get labeled, but a lot of stuff will not. There are so many unique and entirely missable items sprinkled in this game that it soon becomes apparent that to find all of them you need to search every structure you see. You will come across small clusters of houses, beached steam boats, tree-house villages, abandoned cemeteries, all unmarked on your map, and nearly every one of them will have a unique artifact or weapon that can completely turn your playstyle upside down. This was especially true around the second and third areas, where items started to have some absurd perks, like teleporting you around the map every five minutes, but giving you money whenever you damaged an enemy, or healing you instantly at the cost of spawning a mini-boss somewhere random on the map. Even if I wasn’t going to use some of them, I was constantly, from start to finish, making sure that I cleaned out every possible structure on the map for all of these items because it was impossible to guess ahead the curve.

Sandbox

So when it comes to sandbox, I’d say it’s a mixed bag. There arguably aren’t a lot of weapons or tools for destruction, and when it comes to interacting with the environment, your options are limited. I will say it again, this time in bold. This is not an immersive sim. This game does not have the complexity that comes with the term. Maps are static and cannot be broken down, there aren’t any crazy combinations regarding skills and objects in the sandbox. There aren’t even spells to combine with traditional weaponry akin to Bioshock or the aforementioned Dishonored.

There is however, build expression, but I want to put a massive asterisk on this, because this doesn’t matter as much as it sounds. This game gives you a lot of skill points, like, way more than you’ll know what to do with, and it leads to an odd ‘goldilocks’ effect where your character is only a unique creation of your doing for about 8-10 hours in the middle of your playthrough, because before those you have basically no skills, and after those hours you will have nearly all of them. If you don’t like the idea of having to think of a build, or consolidate your power, or be dedicated to any specific way of play because of your actions, you’ll probably like this system. Because with this, there will only really be those 10 middle hours where you have to live with your choices and strategize, but everything after that you are free to just completely shift things around, and sometimes even play the complete opposite of your intended build just because of how many skills you are given. I’m less a fan of this, in all honestly. The ability to freely alter your stats out of combat is fine, but it does feel a bit much when by the final third of the game yo are able to simply do everything. It makes choice you made in the opening 10 hours feel a bit superfluous, since by this point those skills have probably been maxed out for like 10+ hours, and you may not even be playing the game in a remotely similar way. 

So are there builds? Yes. There are many skill and weapon combinations that drastically change the way you play, and likewise, there are skill and weapon combinations that don’t, and you are expected to think and find the better combos for yourself, but that is just about it, and there isn’t necessarily any commitment past that. In terms of gameplay as a whole, I would say that the skills can be compared more to a side of fries, as opposed to being the main dish.

In terms of how you’ll be interacting with the sandbox, it’s quite similar to how you’d interact with the sandbox in Hunt: Showdown. It has the staple clunky old-west firearms, molotov cocktails, dynamite, just like Hunt: Showdown you will be doing a lot of sneaking. Obviously, given the game’s focus on PvE, the stealth is a little more fleshed out, and while the AI is much more predictable than any player in Hunt can be; there are quite a bit enemies in this game. I counted 32, enemies in total, and while a couple of these are only slight variations of each other, I found what was there to be honestly really surprising. Each biome has its own enemies, and some of them have some interesting twists that can really test your reaction speed and problem solving on the fly. I will never forget this one time when playing where after killing an enemy, and accidentally alerting the whole room, I quickly went into my inventory, dropped my axe, picked up the dead enemy’s repeater rifle, and proceeded to gun down every enemy that was running at me. It was so satisfying, to have a game that rewarded me for being able to navigate its menus while in combat without ever even saying it was an option.

I would say one thing I realised about this game as I played was that it was quite easy. As I mentioned before, one of the reasons that I struggled to call this game an extraction shooter was that you don’t really lose anything upon death aside. There is a mechanic where every time you die, you accrue a Soul Flaw, a minor debuff, that will evolve the more you die. You can prevent these by carrying a Golden Coin in one of your trinket slots. This mechanic is almost never used. You will have so many of these coins, that you can play this game and never get a soul flaw. This means that in many of the areas, you can loot as much as you want, get to the end, loot the unique item, die, and respawn with absolutely no consequence other than you are missing out on whatever items and xp your killers had. The looting is easy as well. It took me a while to realise it but the stash you are given in this game is infinite. I was honestly kind of sad when I discovered this, because in an instant an entire layer of difficulty got wiped away completely, as the now the only time I had to worry about inventory was when I was out in the field. In total I think the gameplay systems are a bit too loose on the player, and with a couple of adjustments this game could start to even draw on some of the aspects that make survival games so tense and enjoying.

Story

The story is very much an excuse to change scenery for the main game, and that’s just about it. There is an evil entity causing all of the paranormal things in the barren lands, which is the area of the world you operate in, you are trying to cleanse it, and you go to different areas and try different methods, which culminate in the form of its bossfights. There are a couple characters you can talk to and do quests for, but you have no effect on the story. There is one ending that you cannot change. The most you can do as a player is choose to despawn one of two characters at one point, one of which is written to be very evidently corrupt with no redeeming factors, and the other is a woman you can hit on; so this choice isn’t really nuanced at all.

There are notes around the map from a doctor that describe the enemies and the things they are weak to, and a couple that detail a couple survivor experiences, but that’s it. The survivor notes leave a lot to be desired, as they are extremely short, with the entire accounts being split into five or more pages that you have to seek out to get the whole picture. Because of this, I never got to experience a whole story from any of lore pickups, so not only was there not really a story, but the game didn’t really have any real lore either.

Conclusion

I want to reiterate that so long as you know this game doesn’t have a story, and you know it isn’t an immersive sim, this game is a great pick, and without any real tutorial you can give it the two hours on Steam, and actually get a taste of what the game is like.