21:40
The train is already on fire when we land. Somebody in our lobby, a stranger
with a sombrero and a name we could not pronounce, has lobbed a fireball into
the first carriage before the rest of us have finished loading in, and a ghost
bandit comes tumbling out of the smoke with its hat still on. We shoot it. It
does not stay down. Our mate on voice chat laughs so hard he drops his
revolver reload halfway through. Welcome back to Far Far West.
21:52
Quick reminder of the shape of the thing.
Far Far West
is a one-to-four-player co-op shooter from Evil Raptor, a small studio in
Lyon, published by Fireshine Games. It went into Steam early access on 28
April 2026 at £15.99, and the plan on the store page is roughly a year in
early access with a price rise at 1.0. You take bounty contracts from the town
sheriff, ride out, shoot monsters, sling spells, and come home to spend what
you earned on guns, spells and perks.
22:05
The numbers are the reason we came back tonight, so here they are, with the
caveats attached. Steam itself shows the game at Overwhelmingly Positive, 96%
of roughly 21,000 reviews, and the recent 30-day window sits at Very Positive
on about 1,200 reviews, which tells you people are still turning up and still
mostly happy.
PCGamesN
reported 250,000 sales inside the first 48 hours, and the publisher announced
a million units sold around 18 May, a figure we can only pass on as the
publisher’s own claim. On the player side, SteamCharts shows an all-time peak
of 47,031 concurrent in May, then a drop through the summer to a low of about
1,300 average in July, then a climb back up: around 2,400 average players
through October with a monthly peak of 8,341, and just over 3,000 online as we
write this on a Saturday night. That is third-party tracker data, so treat it
as a strong estimate rather than gospel. The team size is the shakiest figure
of all.
PC Gamer
and Giant Bomb both describe Evil Raptor as an eight-person studio, headed by
Nicolas Meyssonnier, but we found other outlets saying four, six and seven.
Eight is the best-sourced number. Hold it loosely.
22:18
Second contract. Capture, not kill, which changes everything about how we
move. The target is a Cryptic Vulture perched on a mesa, and the trick is that
bullets only soften it up: you have to get close and actually lasso the thing
while the rest of the posse keeps the undead off your back. We get it wrong
twice. The third time our stranger freezes the ground under the boss with an
ice spell, we chain lightning through the puddle, and for about four seconds
the whole arena is a blue strobe. That combo is what sold the game at Next
Fest in February, and it still feels illegal.
22:31
Dead. All four of us. Nobody ragequits.
22:34
What strikes us, watching the lobby reform without a word, is how little
friction there is in the loop. A contract takes 12 to 20 minutes. You are
never more than a couple of minutes from either a shootout or a shop. The town
hub is small enough to cross in a jog, the upgrade tree is readable at a
glance, and the Jokers (the random modifiers you pick up between missions)
give every run a slightly different flavour without turning it into a
roguelike spreadsheet. Early criticism, including a Gaming Trend preview that
called the two-currency split lopsided, has been chipped at in patches.
PCGamesN covered one update in May that halved the prestige grind. We noticed
the difference tonight: we hit a new rank before midnight and we were not even
trying.
22:50
Someone in chat asks if we have tried Redwood yet. We have not. According to
reports on the 22 October update, labelled Fear Fear West and version 0.3.0.0, the patch added a forest map
with multi-level terrain, a jetpack secondary weapon, a Disturbance system
that ramps difficulty as a mission runs long, and moved matchmaking over to
Epic Online Services to sort out connection problems. We have only seen that
from one secondary source so far, not the studio’s own notes, so file it as
reported until you read the patch text yourself. The Halloween event
reportedly runs until 12 November.
23:04
Redwood is gorgeous and we die in it immediately.
23:20
Here is what we think an eight-person team got right, for whatever our evening
is worth. They picked one strong idea, robot cowboys who are also wizards, and
built every system to serve it rather than hedging. Nicolas Meyssonnier told
PC Gamer the robots cast spells “because magic is always cool,” and a
GamesRadar Q&A
has the studio admitting they mostly went with a vibe. That reads as a joke,
but you can feel it in play. Nothing in the game exists because a competitor
has it. The gunfeel is loud and chunky, the spells are readable from across a
map, and the session length respects a school night. A big studio would have
added a battle pass by now. This one added a jetpack.
23:41
Last contract. We lose the Vulture again, over a cliff this time, and the
stranger types “gg” and leaves. We sit in town for a minute spending Uranium
on a perk we will probably regret, then the lobby empties and the lantern
outside the saloon flickers. Three thousand other people are still out there
somewhere, shooting ghosts.
We log off.
