West of Loathing

While West of Loathing is trying to pass itself off as an RPG, it's really an adventure game at heart. While it does have turn-based RPG battles, equipment and stats, the game is really about going back and forth between NPCs and figuring out puzzles and riddles between them and finding the key items to progress. The game is definitely comedic in nature, think something like South Park Stick of Truth but with slightly less crass humor. The graphics are all black and white with stick figures characters, and surprisingly it works damn well despite the minimal look. There's never any instances where objects weren't clear what they were and they aren't unpleasant to look at either.

While the game features countless hilarious moments, the game however doesn't pose much of a challenge. Let's say the first half of the game can be done pretty much on auto-pilot, talk to people and try all the options, win all the battles no matter what build you are going with and even if you die the consequences are very minimal. The experience here is mostly about having fun and encountering all these weird ass NPCs that say the most random shit, I've had my fair share of laugh out loud moments while playing. But in the end it's an RPG that doesn't require you much to think to succeed, you'll eventually be able to pass all your obstacles as you are constantly getting xp and improving your stats (moving from one location to another brings a random event, which ends up in XP gain most of the time). As you enter the 2nd and 3rd part of the map the encounters start off as being somewhat hard, but you just have to wander around and you'll eventually get some gear and proper stats to face them head on. The whole game takes roughly 8 hours to complete and I can't say that I didn't enjoy my time here, but when the ending rolled around it overall felt like a rather empty experience. You can can get your comedy fix here, but don't expect it to be a complex RPG experience.