Each time you get into a groove and start manipulating its systems, they buckle and shove you back out. And while it's easy enough to smile at AI and interface quirks as you mosey around a settlement, they wear you down when you're infiltrating enemy hideouts, occultist temples and mining facilities. Trying to progress through stealth is difficult, as the game's lofty camera angle and dusty color palette make it hard to pick out enemies or tell which way they're facing. It's thus essential to rely heavily on the mini-map, with its red splotches and vision cones, regressing to the dated routines of 1998's "Metal Gear Solid." Yet even that's no help when enemies start to short circuit on patrol.

Weird West isn't a horror game, but it has at least one narrative arc involving cannibalism. In some scenes, citizens in quaint Old West towns lay dead in the streets for mysterious reasons. In others, red-soaked pentagrams are etched into the dirt, surrounded by animal bones. A large man wearing a pig's head as his own walks slowly through the dust, shirtless and splattered with blood. Miles away, in a flooded cavern, a 20-foot-tall monster with sleek black skin, no eyes and a grinning maw of shark teeth lurches forward for the kill.