Howdy! ~West of Loathing~

Snakes, skeletons, cows, clowns and hooligans, can you handle the dangers of the West, pardner?

West of Loathing is an RPG developed and published by Assymetric Publications. It’s a homage or a parody of the old comedic westerns that were popular back in the day. As usual, I came across this game while browsing Youtube. I swear that place is starting to be a better game finder than Steam.

World

 

                The map is divided into three segments which you will unlock as you progress through the story. Each segment is filled with locations that you are free to explore at your leisure which you should do as they contain loot that will help you a great deal. There are also random event that may trigger as you move from location to location, these events break the monotony of the traveling and are basically just fun 1-3 minute interactions.

Narrative

 

                There are also tons of side quests that you can participate in, so much that you can get side-tracked for hours on end and forget your main objective. These mini adventures are engaging and reward you with more experience and loot so there’s no point to not doing them unless you’re on a time constraint.

Gameplay

                Since this is an RPG your character has various skills that you can improve, mainly three of which will affect how you fight. These are Strength, Moxie and Mysticality. Strength increases your melee damage and resistance, Moxie increases your range damage and resistance and finally Mysticality increases your magic damage and resistance. It’s a rock paper scissors type of RPG except a stat has no advantage over the other. It reminds me of a more primitive version of the South Park Stick of Truth. There’s also the obliglatory speed and vitality stat.


The only difference is you can increase these stats by drinking, applying and eating items from your inventory. Coincidentally, the number of items that you can intake is also determined by their respective stats.  There’s also a lockpicking, foraging and safecracking check.

You also have different skills that you can use in combat, these are dependent on your chosen class though you can gain new skills through some of the skillbooks that you read. There are also perks that you can gain which will either increase your stats or decrease them.

Conclusion

                West of Loathing has a lot of problems, one of them being the combat. In my opinion, it’s too simplistic and there is absolutely no balance, you either win combat through brute strength and usable items or die almost instantly to a 80 strength cow.  This leads to necessary grinding which is bad as it messes with the flow of the game. Fortunately those problems are overshadowed by the fantastic dialogue and storytelling, if you’re looking for a cowboy story with some RPG elements I definitely recommend West of Loathing.