Blood West

Concept is good but overly difficult just to mask that there are only 3 maps. If you die you start at the main checkpoint and enemies respawn. No manual save and upon dying you get debuffs as well. First map was enjoyable, but abolutely hated the second map and couldn't progress due to difficulty.

How about getting penalized for your many deaths? BONUS! Enemies respawn randomly!

Nothing to complain about, fantastic game with a great DLC. Strong recommend.

Blood West is a stealth/survival horror romp which will remind you of Thief, Resident Evil 4, S.T.A.L.K.E.R or even Dark Souls. Its gameplay loop is simple: some flamboyant weirdo vaguely points in the direction of the next McGuffin, and it's up to you to traverse a wide open level to get to it. And the game won't make it easy for you: enemies hit hard, ressources are scarce, and death is pretty punishing! Direct combat is risky and clunky, so sneaking, sniping and backstabbing your way through environments is pretty much the only way to go. Thankfully the stealth is smartly implemented, and overall very fun. There are always places to hide and alternate paths to your objectives; taking time to explore will yield worthy bounties; headshots are brutally efficient and satisfying; and foes, while deadly, are just stupid enough to leave you some margin of error. BW may be hard, but it's also fun and rewarding as long as you put efforts in it! And it has character, too! The low-poly graphics (similar to Postal: Brain Damaged, the devs' previous success) are among the crunchiest on the market, and do a great job of depicting this sinister version of the American Frontier. The guys at Hyperstrange have a real knack for creating striking atmospheres on a budget. The issue is that on the long run, BW's simplicity kinda works against it. While some describe it as an "immersive sim", it lacks the environmental interactivity associated with the genre: all you do is kill, sneak and explore, which for me got quite repetitive after a while - and the frustration of dying on the regular only rubbed salt into the wound. There's about 20-25 hours of content, but 15 would have sufficed. Still, while Blood West is not all that replayable it's fun and well-made, and definitely has something for you if you enjoy first-person games with a challenge. Hyperstrange has been putting out banger after banger since Elderborn, and I can't wait to see what will be their next!

I was a little iffy at first but the game quickly grew on me, it was really difficult in the beginning, I had to avoid most enemies if I couldn't get behind them or ambush them for a quick insta-kill but it was pretty fun finding ways to clear out locations Over time you get quite a bit more powerful making it a lot easier to sweep through locations by just shooting everything in the head with your pistol or shotgun, but even if you are more powerful, getting in to open combat is such a detriment that you want avoid it at all costs and not even bother putting point skill points in to stuff that doesn't make stealth easier or mitigate the difficulty of open combat (Such as more health), stealthing is pretty easy after maybe 2 hours of playing and does get slightly more challenging in Chapter 2 (In a fun way imo) but Chapter 3 is just tanky enemy spam to the degree of point blank headshotting something with both of your Double Barrel shots from stealth and it still not dying, annoying but I didn't die a single time through out the entire game so I can't complain too much I guess The inventory management also got pretty irritating, mostly because you get so many items and weapons that just aren't super useful, and the ones that are useful are locked behind a huge price tag from a trader so you have to carry that stuff back with you to sell if you want to good stuff, and not to mention that your stash is also limited in space so you can't just hold on to much stuff to try later, you have to sell it or use it, you do get bags you can keep in your inventory for extra space but most of that ended up being taken up by ammo with how many different types there are that don't stack The game isn't super nuanced but blowing creatures heads off from the shadows is satisfying and the useful items and weapons that are there, are pretty fun to use and *can* be a big upgrade over what you had previously IF they don't have some awful debuff to go with it