West of Loathing (PC)
There is an understated brilliance behind West of Loathing’s use of stick figures for its wild west role-playing game. On a surface level, it prepares you for something rather silly, its comedic take on a western featuring beans used to cast magic and mines where you dig up meat rather than gold. With the kooky concepts at the forefront though, a more deeply realized art style could have demanded too much time from the small development team to realize such jokes. West of Loathing’s basic appearance allows it to put most of its attention into the humorous writing instead, and with little needed to realize a setting or situation beyond words, West of Loathing packs in so many entertaining scenarios that it’s hard to pull yourself away from exploring this wild wacky west.
Another rather effective approach taken by this stickman RPG is how it decides to craft this goofy world you’ll be exploring. West of Loathing isn’t some circus where all the jokes are thrust in your face for immediate reaction, the characters occupying its odd take on 19th century American westerns not really registering the absurdity around them. In this land, a life-changing event occurred not a few years before you begin your adventure, this referred to simply as when The Cows Came Home. An ominous twist on a familiar phrase, even when you start to encounter the hellish bovines responsible for wanton carnage and see some just look like ornery cows, the characters treat them as proper threats. The narrator though seems more on the player’s side, a little better able to see the absurdity and direct your attention to it, but this setting also has a large goblin population running about with no one questioning why such fantasy creatures find themselves here. You will get moments where you head to a new town, drop by the saloon, play poker in the back, and then go riding off on your horse in search of adventure, but the way things are skewed keeps things constantly moving to new odd situations while being surprisingly consistent. The game doesn’t just abandon the goblins and hell cows, weaving them into its wider setting and even laying down mysteries about its world that mean your interactions aren’t just going to be attempts to trigger some new hilarious encounter.
West of Loathing is certainly not lacking in laughs though, especially with how wide its world is. Your custom character sets out west and there isn’t much direction beyond that save for seeking opportunity, and while this does lead to a rather anticlimatic ending point should you stick only to the main narrative path, West of Loathing is really about the many places you encounter along the way as you learn the frontier. There are over 70 unique locations to uncover all with their own purpose or short little narrative, and finding out what lies out there is definitely the strongest driving force in this adventure. Some places are humble like The Silver Plater, although not only does the guy running the place offer you nice upgrade opportunities for your gear, he can give you a literal silver tongue if you’re willing to see how that manifests. You can find a jelly bean museum where the guy running the place has none to show since bandits apparently deemed them worthy of stealing, but elsewhere you can also find some surprising dark elements or truly strange sights. You encounter things like El Vibrato technology that shouldn’t exist in this time period and isn’t just there for a joke as well as a brief injection of horror as the little homestead you find isn’t just the host for some new comedic concept. Areas like these add the little extra spice to roaming that keeps West of Loathing continuously interesting, this amusing adventure not just a string of attempts to make you laugh.
However, the delightfully ridiculous situations are definitely the star all the same, and there are even random events that occur when traveling to locations on the map that can throw you into an amusing scenario. Very few areas or situations ask you to linger long or even are technically necessary to complete properly, and there’s often room to influence the scenario with a few dialogue options or actions so you can feel like you’re more than a witness to the lunacy. Sometimes you can finagle your way into entirely peaceful solutions to what looked like a brawl about to happen, or you can bypass something more involved provided you’ve got the right tools or skills. Experience points to level up your skills can be earned through battle but just as often, going for these events that lean more on the game’s writing over action will provide just as many rewards, meaning you don’t feel cheated just for trying to see what is often the more interesting outcome to an interaction.
When it does come to combat though, West of Loathing takes an approach that makes it clear the fights aren’t meant to be as important as the situational comedy. When the game begins you can pick your class for the adventure, all three feeling decently absurd but useful. The beanslinger is the bean mage mentioned earlier, but you also have the snake oiler who can brew tonics in battle or literally use a snake as a whip and the deceptively simple name for the cow puncher is a much meaner threat once you realize what taking on a cow means in this world. They do have unique tricks to get out of certain situations or earn special rewards, but their main differences are in battle where they emphasize different attack types and gradually learn new abilities. A fight in West of Loathing will always start you off with full health and Action Points, the player able to use their abilities so long as they have the AP to afford them. AP starts off very low but most battles are also fairly quick, and while the combat is turn-based, there are techniques that don’t use up your turn and you’re actually free to utilize as many items as you like in a turn to boot. West of Loathing definitely doesn’t want players scared off by battles or RPG systems, including an auto-leveling system or the option to invest in stats and abilities yourself, and the penalty for losing is often just to get the Angry effect where you’re stronger for the next fight but getting angry too often causes you to pass out and the day moves on. A day moving on can mean you lose passive boosts from things you ate or drank that can provide some powerful benefits in battle so you likely won’t want a day to end, but you’re never locked out of a situation should you fall in the simple combat.
And simple does feel like it describes most fights in West of Loathing well. You can have a partner on your side but they can’t do much even as you get them to their maximum strength. Fights can often feel more like tests to see if you’re strong enough to be in the area of the map you’re exploring or if you made good use of the equipment, upgrades, and food and drinks you’ve earned through interacting with the multitude of kooky quests you encountered on your journey. There are very few things that feel like proper boss battles in West of Loathing and yet there are definitely likely to be fights you pull through by the skin of your teeth, mostly because you didn’t realize you had to toughen up to take things on. There is a fort you can find where you do historical reenactments that provide actual tactical fights, but otherwise the combat seems to be more a quick barrier and itself a possible solution if you possibly don’t have the tools or skills to otherwise solve a problem. West of Loathing thankfully doesn’t lean on the combat as the core appeal, there are a good deal of puzzles, some very involved to the point you might need to take notes to keep up with their details, but others instead play into a growing web of interconnectivity across the west where the people you meet and things you find can prove useful elsewhere. Not only are you developing your character to have a wider range of options in a situation, but your activities out in the world aren’t just there to make you laugh, West of Loathing the kind of game where you keep piling on plans as you realize what you can now do elsewhere while getting distracted by the novel things you stumbled across on the way.
THE VERDICT: West of Loathing builds a beautifully bonkers world with just a few stick figures and oodles of creativity, it striking a perfect balance of integrating the absurd but approaching it with such casual dry familiarity that it doesn’t feel like a farce. A map packed with locations hooks the player’s curiosity as they can’t help but keep exploring for new unusual situations and each new place can help build up your character into someone better able to find alternate solutions and new strange and hilarious interactions elsewhere. When you’re in an actual fight things can feel a little lacking, but the combat is just another way to interact with a world that is surprisingly rich despite its kooky comedy, an excellent balance meaning individual experience are condensed and quick yet they contribute to a more involved overall adventure.
And so, I give West of Loathing for PC…
A GREAT rating. The writing in West of Loathing is snappy and silly and yet the passive blank stares on the stick men delivering the lines matches the game’s approach to setting things up quite well. West of Loathing doesn’t need to pack a bunch of punchlines into a scene and is happily to dig deep into a concept if it feels it has legs, and perhaps more importantly you are contributing to the scene through the choices you made in building up your character. A goblin might be trying to pawn off some absolutely horrible art to your character, and while this is likely to end in a fight, you can learn the goblin language to finagle your way out of offending him or even learn how to hornswoggle him into handing it over for free. While many role-playing video games focus on how character growth impacts your combat ability, West of Loathing loves to lean more into how your development instead can help you find extra ways to overcome a strange situation, exploration already rewarding because of how intriguing places can be but it’s further strengthened because all your activities can help build you up with new passive effects and skills. This does help the game avoid having to build up a decent battle system and it might have been nice to have some stronger foes to see the true limits of what your abilities allow, but the fact the game gives you so little AP to start and fairly limited companions feels like the true indicator that battle is meant to be a tool in your kit the same way having the right item or dialogue response might be.
West of Loathing’s range of locations does make it easy to get swept up into its addicting absurdity, it finding the perfect limits for how much western iconography to leave intact and where it can twist it into something hilarious without losing the feeling of a united setting. It’s a world where systems interact consistently so your efforts to find ways to grow or earn new goods can pay off and yet you aren’t asked to focus too much on the particulars as you’re kept content on a diet of constant comedy. Even if the jokes only land some of the time with a player, the game embracing its strange ideas as part of a fuller setting still keeps this strange world fascinating, a remarkably rich world with entertaining and diverse activities awaiting people willing to pull on some chaps and dive in despite the fact those pants won’t even show up on the stick figure they’re playing as.