The game’s combat is, in large part, a major saviour. Eleanor in Let the Right One In.īut despite the narrative being threaded from loosely-held-together tropes, Evil West still manages to deliver a satisfying, bloody romp with enough spark and tongue-in-cheek charm for it to be a worthy entry in the Gothic Western canon. Think Claudia, from Interview With The Vampire. Main antagonist Felicity, for example, is a reimagining of the common Not Growing Up Sucks trope – she’s a young girl cursed with vampirism, but blessed with a deadly and terrifying intellect. It’s not just in the gunslinger trope that the game cribs its tale. ![]() In arena battles and journeys through moonlit nights, Evil West pays homage to a storied genre, with a clear reverence for the past. ![]() There’s nothing too surprising about the game in that regard. In the vampire hordes, we have a traditional, faceless enemy –monsters that stalk the shadows, with a taste for human blood. In Rentier, we have the classic lone gunslinger buoyed by thoughts of bloody revenge – think Jericho Cross, Roland Deschain, Blade, or Abraham Van Helsing. In fact, it’s trope-filled and fairly standard, representative of a large portion of fiction in the subgenre. ![]() Those who enjoy Gothic Western fiction will note a strong familiarity with Rentier’s story. With an electrified gauntlet by his side, shotguns for monster mashing, and a strong right hook, Rentier sets forth on a quest to redeem his family’s institute and battle an array of strange beasts as the night unfolds, and the action of Evil West gets weirder. Like his father before him, he works for the Rentier Institute, a decades-old secret organisation working to rid the world of supernatural threats, against the backdrop of American industrialisation.Īs the last bastion of hope in a changing world, Rentier represents ‘the old guard’ – a classic cowboy hero of the past. In Evil West, you play Jesse Rentier, a vampire hunter from a long line of vampire hunters. With solid combat and snappy dialogue, it’s a power fantasy adventure with a tasty, familiar bite. It’s a revival of this niche subgenre that feels needed after years of mediocre offerings. Video games played a major part in the popularity of this genre in the same period, with titles like Darkwatch introducing mainstream audiences to classic gunslinging and vampire slaying.Įvil West, the latest game from developer Flying Wild Hog, owes a lot to Darkwatch – and to the wonderful world of Gothic Westerns. The supernatural-infused Gothic Western genre has phased in and out of vogue, with its greatest successes littered throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s – in The Dark Tower, Vampire Hunter D, Near Dark, From Dusk Till Dawn, and other adjacent tales. It’s also birthed an array of literary subgenres, including Gothic Western or ‘Weird West’ hybrid fiction – where the West holds sinister tidings, and evil monsters wait in the wings. The Wild West has served as a backdrop for emboldening anti-hero tales, political commentaries, and analysis of Americana. ![]() The mythic Wild West has long fascinated fans of pop literature, with the cruxes of these tales – cowboys, vast desert landscapes, gunfights – being twisted into new and more daring forms over the decades.
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