West of Loathing
In 2003, Zack Johnson and his Asymmetric Productions launched the single greatest MMO ever created and ever will be – Kingdom of Loathing. 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. 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’s still going to this day and shows no signs of stopping, the ultimate pisstake for the RPG world.
That makes West of Loathing, a 2017 spin-off taking place in the 1800s wild west, a bit odd. 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. 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. 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.
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