Summary

West of Loathing is a comedic adventure RPG developed and published by Asymmetric Publications in 2017. In it, you do...stuff? In the west? The plot descriptions were notably sparse. One imagines there will be absurdity.

This one's a total mystery. I know absolutely nothing about it and don't think I had ever heard or seen it before. Just came on recommendation by Alex.

Review

Good game, consistently funny humor. Excited to get to Shadows Over Loathing at some point. I would say one negative is it feels like the combat does not hold up over the course of the game. There was a distinct point where I got powerful enough that no one could stop me. Which felt nice, but also the rest of the game became fairly rote with regards to doing the silly turn-based stuff. Lots and lots of battles after that point consisted of me blowing someone to smithereens and just having to click click click through the prompts to get there. I think there needed to be a bit more depth here and for it to be a little more difficult to remain interesting. As is, it's a bit too easy and not chonky enough. An example I have where a turn-based combat system in a primarily parody-esque game that still works well would be Mardek RPG. Old favorite flash game of mine from the Newgrounds days. It help up for much of its runtime because there was a good amount of depth there to support it.

I do know that West of Loathing does support you not engaging with the combat at all, which is laudable. But doesn't remove the fact that when you do do the combat, there comes a point well before game's end where it's no longer interesting. Still a pleasant experience, but it's a notable callout.

Links

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVGo_V4DS4U&list=PLW8bBqYTgOHI