12/19/2023 0 Comments Goblet of blood west of loathingThere’s still plenty of dark and cynical humor, but it never drowns out how you want to interact with the game world. Even more unexpected is that playing as a nice person feels strangely mature, lacking any ridiculous subversion for going about and doing good deeds for the sake of it. You get meat bonuses if you go looking for riches, while adventure or caring style players get experience bonuses by playing into those archetypes. There’s a surprising amount of freedom in terms of role playing, as that motivation you give at the start decides how experience or meat is given out. This is still a Loathing game, so while some elements are played more straight, you can expect the game to mess with you a bit and not always give you the reward you’ve been trained to expect from other RPGs. The Shaggy Dog Cave sticks out as a highlight, as does a hidden treasure in an early game mine during the prologue. All the writing is fantastic, with plenty of out and out jokes mixed with a proper grounded scenario and dialog writing that sometimes gets used to build up to a punch line. You travel around, talk to people, get quests, do them, and so forth, but there’s also a ton of hidden stuff for you to find if you so choose to get curious. The game plays like what you’d expect a modern RPG to play like, though on a 2D plane with a turn based combat system (bringing comparison to Paper Mario, though there’s no button inputs to worry about in fights). It’s subtle, but that touch of detail really adds a lot, as does the epic western score (and player piano cover of Cotton Eye Joe). There’s real defined depth, and that keeps the world interesting to look at for long stretches, tricks with shading and shapes used to craft defined cultures through architecture and effects. It’s still stick figures and goofy doodles, but now there’s an actual graphics engine that creates 3D spaces for a pop-up book look, with shadows that shift with light sources. Yeah, goblins are like fungus here.ĭespite being apart of the Kingdom of Loathing universe, West of Loathing doesn’t use that as an excuse to phone things in on the presentation end. You can bring along a crazed miner, ex-rancher out for revenge, drunk doctor also out for revenge, or a mischievous goblin who wants to explode himself in order to reproduce. Oh, and if you want, you can do less interesting side stuff like fighting demon clowns and hell cows who wish to bring upon the apocalypse, not to mention that cult making all those skeleton soldiers or that other cult obsessed with spirals that may or may not be connected to ancient alien ruins and an old god. After a stop in the barely existent villa of Boring Springs to find a traveling companion, you find yourself in the growing town of Dirtwater and join the railroad company to help them move the tracks further west. You also get to choose a class, each getting different out of combat options, including the kinds of crafting you can do and your given way to solve problems. The game cast you as the kid of some poor farmers who decides to go west for one of three reasons you get to decide on (helping people, money, or adventure). This could have easily been a case of trying to entertain a wider audience and failing, but West of Loathing managed to strike the balance and made for an engrossing single player RPG with satisfying choices that just so happened to include ghost pickles that turn you into a ghost for a day and inheriting your grandmother’s briefcase filled with snakes. While playing through a crude joke is hilarious when you’re doing it with countless strangers, the novelty would wear itself out in a single player narrative heavy experience, so West tried balancing a solid narrative framework with the humor of the MMO. The attempt by Jick (Johnson’s name in Kingdom of Loathing) and team was to create a single player Loathing experience, but this did require a few tweaks to the tone and writing. That makes West of Loathing, a 2017 spin-off taking place in the 1800s wild west, a bit odd. It’s still going to this day and shows no signs of stopping, the ultimate pisstake for the RPG world. There’s a boss you can fight called Man Made of Bees and he is a man made of bees who says that he is bees and hates you. It was a terrible looking game of stick figures and scribbles, where your classes of choice included “seal clubber” and “accordion thief.” Your main currency was “meat,” and enemy types included the likes of ASCII smileys and zombies but with the name misspelled because of magic. In 2003, Zack Johnson and his Asymmetric Productions launched the single greatest MMO ever created and ever will be – Kingdom of Loathing.
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