I
f you were to play a word association game
involving eerie frontier adventure Weird West- and the studio behind it, Wolfeye – you would
pretty quickly arrive at the idea of ‘weird
wolves’. It’s a term that could easily apply to
the lycanthropes that hide among the game’s nascent,
ramshackle communities as blacksmiths and bank
tellers, or else terrorise the former as bandits. But it’s
also a great band name.
As it happens, Weird Wolves is the performing name of
Austin musician Ava Gore and Wolfeye’s creative director,
Raphaël Colantonio. Their sound – or more pertinently,
their mood – is at the very taproot of Weird West. It’s from
there that the studio’s new game has sprouted, and from
there that branches can be traced back over decades, all
the way back to the beginnings of Arkane.
Soon after Colantonio and Wolfeye decided to blend
Americana with the supernatural, he and Gore picked up
their guitars and wrote a song called Ghost Voices. It was
a simple but effective statement of intent: Colantonio’s
dark, minor arpeggios on the electric guitar underpinning
Gore’s sighing, wordless vocals, a Where Is My Mind? for
the gold rush generation.
Having a unifying mood piece to work towards
evidently helped Wolfeye’s team of two-score developers,
split across four continents. Ghost Voices not only backed
Weird West’s reveal trailer, but now doubles as its main
menu music – matching the finished game just as well as
it did that first concept.
Listen back through Colantonio’s games and you’ll find
evidence of a similar approach. For Prey: Mooncrash – a
project that coincided with his last days as Arkane’s
president – he and Gore recorded Realization, an end
credits song. While briefly comparable to Ghost Voices inits zero-g guitar intro, Realization ultimately resolves into
a pneumatic, industrial echoscape, perfectly reflective of
Prey’s enjoyable space horror.
Players of Dishonored 2 , meanwhile, might remember
the lullaby sung by a witch through Dunwall’s
loudspeaker system – a ghoulish ode to insurrection in a
city commandeered by a force for chaos. It’s since been
performed by Weird Wolves, though Colantonio and co
allowed other instrumentalists to embody Dishonored 2 ’s
street musicians. That’s wise, perhaps, in a game where
any NPC is targetable with thrown bottles and fruit.
Colantonio was brave enough, however, to put his own
playing in Arx Fatalis. Throw a gemstone to the bard in
Arkane’s debut and he’ll strum a characteristically
mournful tune on his lute for you.BAD GODS
Together, these appearances tell the story of a career in
games intertwined with music. For Colantonio and his
peers, sound has been just as important as sight –
enabling the stealth and palpable atmosphere that became
Arkane’s calling cards during Colantonio’s tenure. Each of
these games is, in itself, a mood piece – a bath to sink into,
allowing its strange waters to envelop your ears and
change the way you hear until, at the end of a session, you
emerge into the real world again.
Any Arkane fan who ducks their head into Weird West
will see elements they recognise from the studio’s
melancholic worlds. The outlaws drawn on wanted
posters have a craggy quality – reminiscent of the many
portraits hung around Dishonored’s courts and castles.
Then there are the various otherworldly beings in human
skin who interrupt your travels to ogle and interfere.
“All this so-called life, it’s no more than snatches of bad
weather,” sighs a mysterious, dead-eyed girl. “Sky’s emptyWOLF OUT THE DOOR
What happened when Arkane’s founder went indie with WOLFEYESTUDIOSBELOW: Colantonio
co-directed
Dishonoredwith
HarveySmith.
ITEMS OF POWER
Where magic lives in Raf Colantonio’s gamesNIMP RELIC
These shards of
bone oncebelonged
to an ancient and
absent species. Now
they’re collected to
unlock your abilities
in Weird West.BONE CHARM
Carved from whale
bones, these witchy
tokens are forbidden
throughout
Dishonored’s
empire. But they’re
handy upgrades.SARETH
Dark Messiah of
Might and Magic’s
protagonist was in
himself areceptacle,
for a succubus who
rattled around his
head. Charming.