spoilers

At first glance, this seems like a largely frivolous mashup, the Pride & Prejudice & Zombies of gaming, a modern successor to old b-movie fodder like 1966’s Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Look a little deeper, though, and it’s clear that Undead Nightmare’s Weird West skin is a vessel for further analysis of the western as a genre. The ending in particular is quite damning of the whole idea of the western expansion and Manifest Destiny, the lingering effects of colonialism plunging the world into chaos. By the end, Marston returns the stolen Aztec mask which caused the zombie outbreak, and all seems well. However, the grave-robber character Seth rushes back into the crypt and steals the tribal artifact once again, reigniting the zombie plague. Even when there’s an easy, obvious solution to the problem, the settler population continues to desecrate native cultures and fuck everything up all over again, in a seemingly inescapable cycle.

One of the most striking moments in this expansion is the Sasquatch hunt sidequest. A farmer tells you that there’s a bunch of Sasquatches going around eating babies. Marston sets off in search of them, killing the mythical creatures without much second thought, as they are other and look more like animals than humans. Once you get to the final Sasquatch, though, he begs you to kill him, speaking quite fluently and maligning that his entire species has been hunted down and killed. It’s terrifying how easy it is here to dehumanise another group and wipe them out, a deeply disturbing allegory for the treatment of Native Americans throughout the western era (which continues today in a myriad of ways). It’s a totally surreal scenario, yet its underlying theme is just as real and relevant as anything the main game provided.

Gameplay wise, the basic mechanics are about the same as the main game: you have an array of bolt-action, lever-action, and semi-automatic weaponry, along with a couple of throwable explosives. The third person, auto-lock targeting system where headshots are top priority plays out basically the same as Grand Theft Auto V, aside from the different arsenal. There’s also a bullet time feature, as with the main game, but here you get it at max level from the start, encouraging you to use it far more. There’s a couple of new weapons, but most of them are in fairly short supply and don’t shake up the formula too drastically.

The other main difference from the base game in this respect is the zombies themselves. They’re slow, lumbering things that walk out in the open. Cover is basically useless here, instead you’ll be running and gunning your way through zombie hordes. The emphasis on headshots is even greater, as body shots don’t do much to keep the zombies down. I actually find this combat a lot more enjoyable than the main game, though it’s a tad too easy most of the time. The game claims that ammo is scarce and you should conserve your bullets, but beyond the first town or two that was never really an issue for me.

The main structure of the game involves you roaming from town to town, clearing out the zombies to help the survivors and then doing a variety of sidequests for them. There are a few “main” missions, and in typical Rockstar fashion some of these are quite heavily scripted, but overall this looser format gives the player far more gameplay freedom than their other recent titles. It does get a little repetitive at times, though, especially once you get to Mexico and there’s not really much further amping up the stakes. The structure of the narrative as a whole feels somewhat slapdash and thrown together, leaning heavily on established relationships from the base game, giving each major player a quick quest or two, and then on to the next town.

Even though there’s plenty of great individual moments here, they don’t really form much of a coherent whole, at least from a character or plot perspective. The one thing that ties it all together is how most of the survivors, instead of banding together, dig themselves even deeper into their own prejudices, blaming the apocalypse on everything from Mexicans to Jews to African Americans and beyond. It’s an eerie echo of increasing tensions in the world right now, decades of prejudice and mistreatment once again bubbling to the surface of popular culture.

It’s also quite entertaining to see how fed up with all this shit Marston is, he even deliberately lets a couple of racist dickheads get eaten by zombies when he easily could have saved them, and threatens people at gunpoint several times. Unlike the main game, where he was framed as a redeemable character trying to be a better person, he’s just totally done and letting his violent instincts takeover, and this characterization fits way better with Rockstar’s misanthropic satire. There were many annoying characters who I just wanted to pull a gun on and get it over with in the main campaign, and it’s very satisfying to see Marston finally line up with that (does this make me a bad person?).

If the main game drove home that by 1911, the west is pretty much dead and the cowboy life became totally unsustainable, this explores the one way in which cowboys could’ve been relevant again: a total stop in societal progress by means of a zombie apocalypse. As grim and fed up as Marston becomes, there’s a perverse pleasure in returning to the gun-slinging and horseback-riding ways of old that’s not lost on him, nor the player (nor on Rockstar, it would seem, who had to rewind time itself to for Red Dead Redemption 2 to be possible). The apocalypse destroys the very world which Marston, Dutch, and co are hopelessly railing against, giving them one last chance to be outlaws again, even if it costs the entire world.

Much of Red Dead Redemption's most sincere moments exist in this Treehouse of Horror esque DLC.

Abigail bantering with her son, Jack, asking that when he returns after University to have spare her - "an old crone" - some pity when he's kicking her off of him in the street.

The silent look John gives Bonnie - and her silent, mournful acceptance - over her father's zombification.

The little way the nuns laugh when John calls the Mother Superior "sister".

The conversation John has with the 15 year old girl Millicent after saving her from some zombies. She says the curse is her fault for kissing a boy she isn't betrothed to. John reassures her if their sins are the cause, he has more blame than her.

These don't sound like much on paper. Nor are they numerous. But in a game full cheeky zombie humour - it's the kind of zombie game where characters can play around and have fun with the slow, half-witted zombies - these really stand out to me. And they even stand out compared to the main game, which I don't think has enough of these moments.

The reveal for the zombie curse in this game too is quite nice. I thought the game was just reusing a certain NPC model and I thought nothing of it and then, lol, the ending kind of minorly blew my mind for a second. Nothing to write home about but I dug it.

As a side note: I bought this in 2013 and only played it now. That eight years is the longest I've gone from owning a game to starting one. I wish I wasn't so afraid of zombie games and played it sooner.

FromSoft's first open world game and they absolutely nailed it. I was initially worried that the move meant they would have to compromise on level design, but that wasn’t really the case here. Despite its vast and seamless world, the majority of it still has the same level of varied intricacy as the rest of their games. Like sprawling castles with detailed interiors and immense verticality, random caves you may stumble across that lead to massive underground systems, and of course plenty of unique bosses to fight.

That’s its biggest strength for me, the exploration. What sets it apart from many others is the complete lack of endless map markers or quests to focus on, rather just letting you get lost in a world with so much to see on the horizon that you can’t help but want to explore. And it rewards this curiosity by always having something worthwhile to find, whether it be useful items, boss encounters, or even paths to entire new areas. This also makes approaching difficult bosses a bit more manageable, as you can always just go somewhere else if you’re stuck and try again when you’re stronger.

And as a setting I loved The Lands Between. I’m not sure how much influence GRRM had over the world-building, but its mysterious lore is ever present all over and it’s wonderfully realized. It’s still as somber as From games have always been, but it also felt more grand given how open it is in comparison.

The only real gripe I had was the smaller catacombs you can find felt a bit too repetitive. Most of them look the same and some bosses are reused for them, basically serving as ER’s version of chalice dungeons which is eh. But I still enjoyed going through them so didn’t mind too much. Performance also seems… not great on most platforms, but I played the BC version on PS5 so was pretty much locked 60 for me. Hopefully they can iron its issues out for everything else.

But overall it’s yet another masterful game by From and now among my favorites. I’m excited to see where they go from here, cause it really did feel like a culmination of all their work up to now.