Arkane co-founder's new game Weird West will be out in January

Weird West, the immersive sim in development at Rafael Colantonio's WolfEye Studios, will be out on January 11. The release date announcement comes alongside the first of a series of videos that go deeper into what the game is all about.

Colantonio is known for immersive sims—Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah, Dishonored, Prey—but Weird West is a big departure from the games he worked on at Arkane in one big way: It's isometric rather than first-person. We said in a preview earlier this year that the unusual perspective doesn't take away from the experience, which promises to be "as complex and chaotic an immersive sim as the best of them," and Colantonio emphasized that aspect of the game in the first "Road to Weird West" trailer.

"One of our goals for Weird West is for everything that seems interactive to actually be interactive," he says in the video. "We can loot things, search anything, take items from inventories or place items from your inventory into the world, carry bodies, bury bodies, kick things, set things on fire, and more. If you see something that seems possible, chances are it is possible, and it feeds in the simulation to create gameplay opportunities."

Unlike many first-person immersive sims, Weird West is more explicitly an RPG than a shooter. Players will be able to customize abilities and perks, embark upon quests, or just explore and see what's out there: An overworld travel map will enable open-ended roaming, complete with random encounters.

Weird West is available for pre-purchase now on Steam, and of course doing so will score you a little bonus—in this case, a horse named Calamity who will provide various bonuses and a bit of extra starting loot. To find out more, hit up weirdwest.com.