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West of Loathing - An Adventure Game in Stick Figures

Started by Dracos, August 28, 2018, 03:05:52 AM

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Dracos

So I wanted for a relaxing simple affair over this past week.  Something that could run on a low powered box.  West of Loathing delivered.

I was only tangentally familiar with Kingdom of Loathing, the long running free to play.  Largely due to its account creation breaking on me.  But I gave this a go...and was pleasantly enjoyed.

It's one of those, now rare, adventure games that has a combat system tacked on.  And I definitely mean tacked on...  It's not a terrible battle system, but I am pretty much certain it is viable to beat the game without ever seeing it.  I'm fairly certain it is possible to complete every single quest with less than 10 fights.  It'd likely be actually very difficult, but at the same time...no combat, and so no real loss conditions at the same time?

It was kind of refreshing in a sense.  Battle and powergaming were, for the most part, an irrelevancy.  There were dozens upon dozens of equipment options which is unfortunate because combat didn't matter.  Actually really, since high base stats were the big Solve Problems both in and out of combat, it was quite reasonable just to do those for equipment.

So yeah, it can kind of be taken that the combat is kind of meh, most of the abilities and options for it made pointless on account of just the enormous variance either way base stats can introduce (Either swinging things toward instant wins or 'huh, these enemies can almost instantly murder me').  It's a simple set of 2 3x3 grids with gun (and only gun) blocking obstacles that largely most fights are 'hit enemy harder' or 'hit many enemies' or 'use ability that defeats enemy no matter what'.

I found the writing and humor charming.  Playing around both with the concept of a comical western, a self-aware in a poorly drawn stick figure world vibe, and also self-aware in a game vibe at times while rewarding and punishing paying attention to it.

  Spittoons for instance were challenge treasure chests that subject the player to a few pages of 'this is horrifically disgusting, why are you doing this?' followed by a generally better than currently available set of gear as a reward.  The continue box of course swapping places, to make sure you're actually paying attention and not just clicking through.  It even has the last one just openly ready for you to be disgusting, given up at trying to convince you not to basically stick your hand in biowaste.

The logic runs on a childish and fitting for a stick-figure world ruleset, thwarted by demonic cows and evil circus clowns where tiny introductions can turn washouts into big time successes and sometimes criminals just need to be shamed about stealing a jar of jellybeans.  At the same time, there is a handful of 'seriously, pay attention to the writing, take notes, you are going to have to have to put together clues from six or seven different disconnected statements, take them to a single location and whisper the decoded phrase into a stone' level puzzles that do genuinely reward paying attention and playing along with gameplay unwinding.

And they are all nicely optional, for those who just want to cruise on through.  Also wikieable.

On both the bad and the good side, in late game, there is still reasons to track back and forth across the entire map with a handful of long running sidequests or reward items requiring it.  Good since you don't just neglect the first two areas in your three area story world.  Bad because it does start feeling very awkward having sometimes as many as a half dozen locations visibly not quite resolved yet, and then having them all domino through an eleventh hour adjustment to be resolvable.  For instance: You can very slowly grind through the El vibrato quest, slaying robots, putting together equipment, helping the professor... or at the very end of the game you can (in the last related spots) get enough pieces of plot item to trivially march your way through all of it in like 10-15 minutes.  It'd probably be sort of impossible though without the translation I suppose, but it still kind of felt like the entire thing trivalized itself alongside unblocking things over the last moments.

There is even small townbuilding in the game as you can lure shopkeepers back to the first town to build it up with upgrade shops.

Largely, I give it a smiley face.  https://openclipart.org/image/2400px/svg_to_png/258249/Excited-Smiley-Face.png that one.  That is all.

Well, Goodbye.