West of Loathing Review: True Stick (PC)

    Last time, I reviewed Death Road to Canada to celebrate its birthday update. I actually managed to make it all the way there on my first time. Unfortunately, the border guard wouldn't let me in. From what I could tell between the cast-iron hockey stick beatings and their insistence that I was a hoser, they frown upon people revealing Canadian military secrets in order to make a Neon Genesis Evangelion pun. However, I still have some time to go travelling, so let's go west, young me and audience of indeterminate age! It's Asymmetric Production's West of Loathing!

Yee-haw! - Jon Arbuckle, Lasagna Cat, 12/03/1991

    A wise man once said that way down yonder on the Chattahoochee, it gets hotter than a hoochie-coochie. But down yonder over West of Loathing, it gets hotter than a... bunch of... clothing? Look, I'm not good at making up rhymes for country songs on a dime. What I am good at, however, is going to the wild frontier in order to serve justice and get rich. It's a very situational specialization, but it's coming in handy now, so let's use it. We only have to worry about things like bandits, rodeo clowns, and the fact that The Cows Came Home, resulting in herds of demonic cows roaming the west.

    West of Loathing isn't Asymmetric Production's first game. They made Word Realm, an RPG based on putting letters together to make words in order to fight enemies, but the better example would be Kingdom of Loathing, a free browser-based MMORPG and the precursor game to WoL. Kingdom of Loathing has you play an adventurer doing a variety of quests in order to free King Ralph XI, who has been inprismed by The Naughty Sorceress (get it? Because he's in a prism?) Quests include such wackiness as finding the Holy Macguffin, helping the Highland Lord Black Angus order a pizza by lighting some signal pyres, and starting and ending a war between hippies and frat orcs. KoL helped define WoL's brand of humor and aesthetic of minimalist graphics and stick figure people. Having played KoL for just over a decade, I would be lying if I said this game wasn't made for me
    WoL was announced last year in an interesting way. In KoL, after beating The Naughty Sorceress, players can ascend and reincarnate, starting the game over again with some new perks or challenges for their next run. Mid-February last year, the seasonal challenge for players was 'Avatar of West of Loathing,' which let players play through the game as a prestige class based on the character classes that would show up in WoL. Those classes would be the Cow Puncher, a Muscle-based class who fights best when unarmed, the Beanslinger, a Mysticality-based class who uses beans for magic instead of pasta or sauce, and the Snake Oiler, a Moxie-themed class that specializes in using six shooters, making potions, and administering medicines of dubious quality. There was also a monthly item which granted access to a telegram office that lets you go on Western-themed quests. It was pretty cool to see an announcement for a new game integrated into Asymmetric's first game like that.

Granny Hackleton, one of the bosses of the Western-themed quests, the septuagenarian matriarch of a bandit family...along with her wheelchair-mounted Gatling gun.

    Just over a year later, I was able to attend PAX East and actually play the demo for WoL. My first adventure into the game had me become a Cow Puncher who visited the town of Boring Springs, a quiet Western community that served as a hub for the game's tutorial/demo area. While I rushed through the demo somewhat so others could play, first impressions were pretty good, as I saw the humorous writing and wacky humor from Asymmetric shine through, such as a man named Cactus Bill, a guy who, by complete coincidence, became a cactus/man hybrid from drinking too much cactus beer. Even though I rushed and did some sidequests in the wrong order, I still managed to find a decent percentage of the secrets in the tutorial/demo area, including a book on how to walk like an honorary member of the Ministry of Silly Walks.

"Nothin' here but us tumbleweeds. Oh, and that weirdo who gets wasted on cheap tequila and pretends he's one of us."

    When I picked up and played the game for real last week, my new character was Fozzie Moyer, Snake Oiler, a man determined to make his fortune by selling "miracle" solutions to weight loss and any sort of herbal medicine, even if it's untested by the FDA and winds up melting the consumer's liver!

    Oh, wait. That's Dr. Oz. Let me correct that last paragraph.

   My character for the full version of the game was Fozzie Moyer, Snake Oiler. A man determined to make his fortune my selling tonics made from snake venom and mixtures of water and opium!

Big difference from Dr. Oz. See, laudanum actually does something good!

    When I made it to Boring Springs again, I found myself penniless (or meatless, rather, because that's the currency of the game,) with nothing to my name except for some stupid walks, a briefcase filled with various snake fluids, and some lock-picking knowledge from a book given to me by my dear mother.

Charitable soul that I was, I gave the book to those who truly needed it.

    Knowing what I did from my first time in Boring Springs, I managed to get through the tutorial/demo pretty quickly, only missing a few of the secrets. I drove off some bandits, I retrieved some bizarre horses, and I was ready to head to Dirtwater, the hub town for the main game. The game gives you an option to take along a "pardner," who serves as an extra party member and a quest log for when you forget your quests. Out of the three I could choose, there was Doc Alice, a doctor in her 50's who turned to drinking because her patients kept rising from the dead, Crazy Pete, a crazy prospector who requires no sidequest to unlock, and my choice, Susie Cochrane, a hardened widow seeking revenge against the demonic cows that killed her family. One of the secrets I missed was the last pardner, who...let's just say I mistook them for a combat tutorial.

The (mostly unfilled) world map, with Dirtwater all the way in the lower-right corner.

    Now let's get into the nitty and the (true) gritty of gameplay mechanics. The game world is made up of various map locations that are discovered through quests, exploring locations, and as a possible outcome from random events that only spring up when travelling between locations. In the locations, you move with WASD and interact/examine with things automatically by walking close to them. This can be a bit finicky at times, so given the game's great writing, this can be annoying when you miss a joke the game makes, but it manages to work fine overall.

I guess bar brawls have gotten a little too common in the West.

    When you wind up throwing down and having to fight, you enter into a field divided into two 3X3 grids. One for your posse, and one for the bad guys. Based on initiative, you and the other fighters fight it out until the enemies are wiped out or you personally run out of HP. To compensate for being the load bearing leader of your party, you can use as many items as you want during your turn, and you have access to special moves that use up AP. Luckily, you don't need to eyeball your HP and AP out of combat, as both refill when things get peaceful, and your pardner fully heals from any injuries they suffer, no matter how lethal.

You can also gain situational allies at points in the game. Unsurprisingly, the clown betrayed me seconds after the fight.

    So with bandits, evil Nex Mex magic being used to raise the dead, and the aftereffects of when The Cows Came Home, how do you improve yourself? Well, when adventuring, you get XP, which can be invested into your stats, passive skills, and combat skills in a classic point-based system. The game gives you the option to automatically distribute the points in an attempt at making a well-balanced character. However, I've heard that this winds up making your character an under-powered master of none, so it's probably better to distribute them yourself. Hell, my snake summoning skill was pretty much useless by the first boss because the snake was just too weak compared to the things I was fighting at that point. Your pardner, meanwhile, upgrades automatically when you do a certain action related to their character. Susie, for example, became stronger as she marks more cow kills on her rifle, while Crazy Pete improves by certain random events when travelling.

Good news, snake! You might be able to do some damage now! Bad news! You leveled up in a text box that used 'clowns' and 'bedfellows' in the same sentence!

    For a game with the aesthetic of a notebook doodle, WoL has a surprising amount of depth. Many quests have multiple ways of handling them, with a good example being the Dirtwood Jail quests, where you have to bring in five gangs of bandits, dead, alive, or a combination of the two. One gang is holed out in a cave, wanted for banditry and crimes against fashion for their ridiculous striped cowboy hats. You can simply sneak up to them and engage them in normal combat, or you can explore a bit and open a door warning of a spider. When you then go into the cave where you normally fight them, you get stopped briefly by the sounds of people being attacked by sexy Shelob a regular giant spider, and then you can bring in the bandits alive, but very sticky.

Seriously, though. Why the HELL is Shelob turning into a hot evil lady a thing now??

    The team behind WoL actually were interviewed by Gamasutra recently, where they talked about their experiences with designing WoL and their previous games. One thing that stuck out was their reasoning for this setting, given that KoL is a wildly anachronistic medieval-fantasy game. Zack Johnson, the head of Asymmetric and known as 'Jick' by KoL fans, said that "It's got an immediately comprehensible level of technology, plenty of cliched good vs. evil tropes, an inherently hostile environment to explore, a focus on fighting and treasure. There are so many reasons it works as a fantasy setting. It's always been genuinely surprising to me that more RPGs aren't set there, and I guess I wanted to do my part to correct the oversight.”

    Traces of the team's old work can be seen in quite a few places in WoL. Their very first patch, among other things, corrected 11 unfunny typos, and changed a reference to Christmas into the proper holiday Crimbo. In the game itself, meat is used a currency, food, booze, and spleen items provide buffs, and the stats include Muscle, Mysticality, and Moxie. There are also some more obscure KoL references I noticed that wouldn't count as spoilers:

Strange but true: I own this man's skull.

Huh. It doesn't seem to be April Fool's day, yet...

    Deep and well-written as the game is, it does have a few weak areas. The fact that you automatically inspect or interact with things by getting close to them combined with the somewhat finicky nature of the examining text means that if the game offers unique dialog for the first time you examine it, you can easily miss a joke or two. In addition, the option to auto-distribute XP is under-optimized, so the game may be more difficult if you leave it on. Of course, if you don't know what you're doing, spending XP manually may also leave you weak and unbalanced. Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other, eh?

    As a long-time fan of KoL, West of Loathing really managed to pull me in with its brand of wacky humor and simple yet detailed artistic style. The deceptively simple graphics hide a game with a great amount of depth that is best discovered over multiple playthroughs in order to see the multiple endings. All in all, I never knew how much those stick figures had meant to me, but I learned how to shoot and I learned who I was, a lot about livin' and a little 'bout loathe.