In the first settlement you try and enter, the marshal runs you out of town and threatens to shoot you on sight if you ever return. Soon you move on from the bounty hunter role, occupying the body of a Pigman, a grossly disfigured semi-porcine human who’s reviled by all. In one section, we wiped out the entire leadership of a cult after discovering their duplicity, only to have to go through with their mission anyway, because that was the only story quest marker available.

There are also plenty of moments that feel unfairly scripted rather than a direct consequence of your decisions, for instance when your reputation suffers as a result of committing a crime that was witnessed by nobody. That may well be true to life, but it’s also frustrating in a game that claims to give you unlimited agency. Although all courses of action are open to you, some just prove too difficult the battles they trigger making you face such overwhelming odds that even after multiple attempts you realise you just can’t follow your convictions and have to settle for the more survivable route. However, this is a feature that works better in theory than in practice.

Take down a bandit outlaw and you’ll get a reward, but any surviving henchmen or family members may well start a vendetta against you, waiting in ambush to exact their own bloody retribution for your killing or capture of their friend. It’s a key tenet of the genre, which believes strongly in player freedom and consequential actions.

In Weird West it’s perfectly possible to shoot key characters, and once dead they never come back, their plotlines and quests lost forever. Save and quick save are bolstered by frequent auto saves to give you a range of possibilities if you make a mistake, either by getting discovered too soon or accidentally killing someone you’d rather have kept alive. If you played Dishonored you’ll already be familiar with the save scumming that’s absolutely encouraged in these games.

Weird west initial release date