Zack Johnson, designer of open world comedy RPG West of Loathing, detailed the difference between a comedy game and a game with just some comedy in it during two talks he gave at GDC 2018 on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"Instead of a game with jokes in it, which happens all the time," Johnson said of West of Loathing, "this was sort of a game made out of jokes."

With humor being the primary focus of West of Loathing, and funny text appearing in everything from item descriptions to conversations to menu options, Johnson didn't want to throw roadblocks in the path of players who were bent on discovering every last bit of humor. Combat, therefore, which some reviewers criticized as being too easy, was easy by design.

As Johnson put it during his talk: "A joke is better than a good thing that's harder to make than a joke." You may have to read that a few times before it makes sense, but Johnson cited two of the gambling minigames in West of Loathing as example. The first game, poker, was something he agonized over and kept putting off during Loathing's development.

"It was a bunch of work," he said, "it resulted in this thing that was not particularly interesting, nobody talks about it." The poker game wasn't bad, in other words, it just wasn't funny.

The other game, found in the town of Breadwood, was called Pharaoh, and it was a game in which players simply lie about how many Egyptian pharaohs they could name. "That works, right?" Johnson said. "That is actually kind of funny."

The poker game took 268 lines of scripting, and was "not funny at all," admits Johnson. "The Pharoah game was 89 lines of script." That brings us back to Johnson's statement, that a joke is better than something good that is harder to make than a joke.

Puzzles, too, were designed to not be so challenging that they'd slow a player down for long, and while there are a few pretty complex puzzles in the game, they're off the beaten path and not required to make progress.

"If there's a puzzle that requires a needle as its solution," Johnson said, "we don't want the player to live in a world where there is only one needle, and if you didn't find it you can't get past the puzzle. So we just decided to put the needle in every haystack."

Johnson also spoke about the value of the narrator of West of Loathing.

"The narrator as sort of an honest character and honest reflection as who we are as writers also lets us be a little self-deprecating about stuff," he said, "which is a fantastic way to cover up fundamental flaws with your game, act like they're on purpose. 'We meant to do that, because isn't that funny?'"

Breaking the fourth wall, as the narrator does from time to time, is also more than just a gag: it's a way to simply and plainly give important information to the player. When players reached the final cutscene in West of Loathing, said Johnson, "It just tells you, this is not gonna change anything about your character or the state of the world, you can just watch this cutscene and then you can leave and do something else and then you can come back and do it again.

"I wish [more] games sort of had the confidence to let you know stuff like that," he continued, "because there's nothing more annoying to me than getting 40 hours into some RPG and then not knowing that I'm about to do something that means I should have saved, or have to revert to an hour ago."

Johnson also revealed a spreadsheet used during development of the game to track the status of dialogue, interactions, items, and monsters in each of the game's locations. One column of the spreadsheet was labeled CPG.

"CPG was my metric for whether this was a Loathing game," Johnson explained. "Does this room have a Couple of Pointless Gags?"

He referred to an area of the game where the player could explain to another character how mining equipment worked, despite not knowing how mining equipment worked, thus earning a perk called 'Minesplaining.'

"That stuff," Johnson said, "I think that is where a lot of the kind of memorable soul of the game lives."

No development tool has had quite the same impact on indie games as Unity. Its impressive knowledge database, flexibility, and tiered pricing scale all ensure that Unity is one of the most accessible engines available. According to Unity’s website, five billion copies of Unity-driven games have been downloaded since late 2016. Even Telltale might be jumping on board the Unity train soon.

Unity is currently changing things up quite a bit with its annual version update, 2018.1, which went into beta in January. Unity 2018.1 is putting an emphasis on performance and graphics, and is expected to expand on what developers can do with the tool in some big ways.  

The updates and tweaks arriving in the version update can get quite technical, so we opted to talk to a few indie developers about their thoughts on Unity 2018.1. Is it the panacea for the plentiful challenges facing indie developers, or is the update honing in on the wrong issues? 

What developers think

The developers we spoke with were most excited about Unity 2018.1’s Scriptable Render Pipeline and the new job system. The pipeline gives players a lot more control over their graphics and rendering. Ethan Redd, who is currently working on mech schmup Blazing Legion: Ignition feels it will better enable artists to explore their individual styles. "I'm a huge proponent for heavy stylization, and more explicit control over rendering is always welcome," he says. "The 'Unity Look' many gamers lament may become a thing of the past, but who knows."

The new job system is going to have a big impact on performance, especially for consoles. As it stands now, Unity relies on single-core performance, which is bad news for our console neighbors who have it pretty lousy when it comes to single-threading. The new job system instead embraces multi-threading, which will grant a huge boost in performance across all platforms.

The greatest impact will likely be seen by smaller developers, who will now be able to attempt projects that embrace a much wider scope. "Assuming the backwards compatibility is solid this time around, it'd be a huge boon for games like mine with hundreds or even thousands of active entities on screen at a time," Redd says. 

However, immediately jumping over to a freshly baked version of Unity is often not worth the headache. Many of these developers are in mid-development on existing projects, and the change could prove risky. Inkle’s Joseph Humfrey, whose team is working on sci-fi narrative adventure Heaven’s Vault, notes that many developers only switch to newer versions of Unity out of absolute necessity. "Each version brings new features, but also new surprises," Humfrey says. "While the geek in me looks forward to the opportunity to try out new toys, my pragmatic side dictates that updating immediately could cause problems."

Most of the developers we spoke with cited backwards compatibility issues with different versions of Unity. New bugs and changing features can drastically set back projects already operating on a tight deadline. "When you’re working towards a deadline such as a demo for a publisher or for the public, you need a rock-solid foundation to build on," Humfrey adds. 

Redd seems to agree. "All of these new features are incredible, but as someone midway through the lifecycle of their current project, I doubt I'll be leveraging them. Unity is notorious for their lack of backwards compatibility even between minor version updates, with major version updates being more or less a roll of the dice. I just recently upgraded from 5.x to 2017.x and some techniques I was using for my core gameplay had to be re-implemented because certain under-the-hood things simply didn't work how they used to anymore."

Bennett Foddy, creator of QWOP and Getting Over It, says developers commonly advise others not to upgrade to newer versions because bugs are a such huge issue. "To be blunt, making games in Unity is wonderful right now but shipping them is a bit of a nightmare because of bugs in the systems (particularly in iOS rendering and the 2D physics systems). A ridiculous amount of the development time on Getting Over It was spent trying to fix things that turned out to be bugs in Unity, some of which were regressions," Foddy says. "Being close to bug-free should be the number one priority, and I would like to see Unity spend a whole release cycle (or two) on stability and unit testing. I know that’s boring, but it would make a huge, huge difference." 

Backwards compatibility is just one item on the list these developers want Unity to work on. The team at Inkle are masters when it comes to interactive storytelling, but their games aren’t incredibly demanding in terms of performance. Still, they have suffered from stability problems, and they aren't alone. Unity has struggled with maintaining a steady stream of new bells and whistles while ensuring the engine is stable. Humfrey says simple stability is the one thing he’d like to see from Unity in the future.

Redd is on the same page, going so far as to call for Unity to put a hold on new features and simply focus on streamlining the engine. "Unity has this tendency to announce so many wonderful new and shiny features you didn't know you wanted, while certain quirks, inconsistencies, and quality of life fixes fall by the wayside," he says.

Viktor Thompson of Asymmetric Games, whose stick figure RPG West of Loathing was our pick for Best Comedy Game of 2017, hopes that Unity will continue to expand in the future. In fact, he feels that many developers may not even need to move beyond Unity to other technology if the engine continues on its current trajectory. "As the engine becomes more customizable, the desire to move to other technology—to 'graduate' from Unity—may be pushed farther down the road or eliminated," he posits. "At the same time, the Unity system can become a more appealing choice for experienced developers who want control, but don't have the time or the money to spend developing their engine from scratch."

The future of Unity

Unity is still the great equalizer when it comes to indie game development. It remains accessible to newer developers working on a budget, but provides the tools more experienced studios need. Humfrey thinks we’re heading in the right direction. "Despite the bugs we see, it's an excellent tool that genuinely democratizes game development for smaller developers."

Foddy certainly sees accessibility as the engine's great strength, but is worried that Unity 2018's emphasis on performance features could leave beginner developers behind. "From Unity's point of view, gamers associate [Unity] with ugly or low-performance games, so I guess that's why they’re focusing so heavily on performance right now," Foddy observes. "Having said that, I'm worried that some of the changes they’re making in pursuit of performance will make the engine less beginner-friendly, and less prototype-friendly, just by adding a lot of complexity. If that happens, the engine will ultimately become less relevant to beginners and indies and it’ll be battling for the same market niche as Unreal and CryEngine."

Unity has been pivotal in the indie games boom. Now we're starting to see the path it might be headed toward in the future. Will Unity continue to be welcoming to new developers while still appealing to creators looking for more performance-heavy tools? Ethan Redd is hopeful for the future of indie development on Unity. "Much like Twine and GameMaker, Unity has done well to embrace the DIY culture flourishing in the modern indie games sphere," he reflects. "As long as they remember their roots, I believe they will prosper as a pillar in the community."  

The 2018 Independent Games Festival—the 20th one, as it happens—will be held on March 21 ahead of the 2018 Game Developers Conference. Nearly 600 indie games were evaluated this year, but as the festival's organizers announced today, only 35 made the cut for the annual awards ceremony. Here's a full rundown of the nominees and categories:   

Excellence in visual art

•  Night in the Woods  
•  Cuphead  
•  Echo  
•  Luna  
•  The Gardens Between  
•  Chuchel  

Excellence in audio

•  Tormentor X Punisher 
•  Cuphead  
•  Vignettes  
•  Rain World  
•  Uurnog Uurnlimited 
•  Celeste 

Excellence in design

•  Into the Breach  
•  Shenzhen I/O 
•  Wilmot's Warehouse  
•  Baba Is You  
•  Uurnog Uurnlimited 
•  Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy  

Excellence in narrative

•  Tacoma 
•  Attentat 1942  
•  Where the Water Tastes Like Wine 
•  Night in the Woods 
•  Butterfly Soup  
•  Tooth and Tail  

Best student game

•  IO Interloper 
•  Don't Make Love  
•  Penny Blue Finds a Clue 
•  We Were Here  
•  Baba Is You  
•  Guardian of the Gears  

Nuovo award

•  Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy  
•  Tarotica Voo Doo 
•  10 Mississippi  
•  A Mortician's Tale  
•  Cosmic Top Secret  
•  Everything Is Going to Be OK  
•  Baba Is You 
•  Kids  

Seumas McNally grand prize

•  Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy 
•  Night in the Woods 
•  West of Loathing 
•  Into the Breach 
•  Heat Signature 
•  Baba is You  

While most categories are self-explanatory, it's worth noting that the Nuovo award is for "thinking differently about games as a medium," in case the nominees didn't give that away. You can find more details and the honorable mentions in the official IGF listing. 

Our Best Comedy Game 2017 is West of Loathing, as voted for by the PC Gamer global team. Below, the writers who enjoyed it this year share their thoughts. Check out the rest of our GOTY awards and personal picks.

Chris Livingston: Some worlds you explore for loot or collectibles, some for secrets or bits of story, some for beautiful scenery. Open world stick figure RPG West of Loathing will have your scouring the world for jokes (there's plenty of loot, too). Even with the main and side quests complete, it's a world to linger in until you feel certain you've uncovered every last scrap of humor, read every last item description, absorbed every last line of dialogue. The writing is clever and fun, packed with both referential humor and big, broad laughs—even the options menu has a few jokes in it. Truly funny games are exceedingly rare and hard to come by, and West of Loathing is the best comedy I've played in years.

Jody Macgregor: West of Loathing is such a well-written game, and those are so rare, that it's easy to underestimate how funny its stick figure wild west can look. Dynamite Dan is surrounded by craters and covered in soot, but has a huge grin on his smiley-button face. My crazy horse, named Crazy Horse, has ridiculous googly eyes, and having unlocked the Stupid Walking skill I get around by doing the worm, imitating John Cleese, and dragging my butt like a dog. There are dopey gags squeezed into the RPG systems too—my Beanslinger has a collection of campfire cookout abilities like setting enemies on fire or summoning a Bean Golem to be my friend, and every now and then I get a powerful, and powerfully dumb-looking, new hat. Other games throw in some funny banter, West of Loathing is a riot from top to bottom.

Phil Savage: If you're not into Kingdom of Loathing-style irreverence, I imagine this sounds interminable. It clicked for me, though, mostly because the writing feels so earnestly good natured. West of Loathing invites you into its surreal, silly world, and does everything it can to make you feel like your its best friend—welcome, entertained and, at times, imaginatively mocked.

It's reminiscent of classic adventure games, where every click promises a new joke. But adventure games used comedy to mask the frustration of being stuck—a carrot to make arbitrary puzzle design less of a chore. West of Loathing's jokes are the very point of the game. It's an RPG, yes, but one light enough that combat never feels like a challenge, and the puzzles are open ended enough that even failure leads to a valid and funny outcome.

It's the best comedy game not because it's a funny RPG, but because it's an RPG that's designed around comedy. The rewards for success are jokes. The punishments for failure are other, different jokes. The sidequests are jokes. The NPCs are jokes. Random bits of scenery... you get the point. If you stripped away the funny out of most comedy games, you'd be left with a functional but bland game. But the comedy is so integral to West of Loathing that I'm not sure it would even work without it.

For more West of Loathing words, check out Chris Livingston's review. 

I was confused, and strangely kind of relieved, to find my family alive and well when I started West of Loathing earlier today. Turns out I got West of Loathing mixed up with Westerado—or combined, really, so that I thought West of Loathing was a comedy western where you're searching for the man who murdered your family. Glad they're OK.

After briefly alt-tabbing to google 'that other western game where you're trying to find the guy who killed your family,' I continued on confident that I didn't actually know what West of Loathing was about. Very quickly I unlocked the 'silly walks' option, and was certain that I would never turn it off and will definitely continue west for whatever reason I selected (fortune, I think). I'm enjoying playing something that isn't about serious people doing serious war stuff.

But what are you playing this weekend, or whenever you have some time off? If it's Battlefront 2, which I reviewed this week, let me know how you're feeling about it. Some think I liked it too much, some think it's brilliant and I just don't get it, while others think I am wonderful and perfect and always right. I'm just assuming.

An update on West of Loathing before I go: I opened it just now to grab a screenshot, and my dog is currently tilting her head every time my character steps in horse poop and it makes a squish sound, so it looks like we're both fans. Check out Chris' review if that isn't enough of a recommendation. And speaking of Chris, I highly recommend his story about pumpkin farming and extreme duck ownership.

At PAX Australia the indie section is dominated by games that aren't out yet, playable demos hosted by the games' own developers—many of them Australians. We saw some great ones, but incongruously placed between those stalls was an indie game that was already out and an American one too, in the most American of genres: the western.

West of Loathing is a single-player RPG about stick-figure cow punchers who fight bandits, skeletons, and demonic cattle while also digging around in spittoons for magic items, investigating a necromancer who practices "Nex Mex" fusion spellcraft, and trying to decide whether to buy a crazy horse, a pale horse, or a dark horse.

I chose the crazy horse, of course (of course).

West of Loathing is genuinely funny in a way too few games are. Whether it's sight gags like the silly walking skill my character has picked up or references like the miniature piano belonging to a 12-inch pianist, West of Loathing is so full of gags I can't imagine any more being squeezed in—even if they were wafer-thin. I've found it consistently funnier than Asymmetric's previous game, the stick-figure MMO Kingdom of Loathing. In fact it's one of the funniest games I've played all year.

It's also a well-structured and replayable RPG, with a first hour that shows its cards and proves it to be full of decisions worth thinking about. That first hour of prologue was the demo being shown at PAX, and it did a pretty great job convincing people this is an open-world game that won't waste your time.

Zack Johnson, designer, artist, and writer on West of Loathing talked about making an open-world RPG that is also an adventure game and a comedy.

PC Gamer: I haven't finished West of Loathing yet. I've been doing a lot of sidequests, taking my time.

Zack Johnson: That's what it's all about. That's where the soul of the game lives.

A lot of open-world games, you get that sense the main story is what they really wanted to tell and the extra stuff is there as padding. But for you it's the other way around?

Yeah, definitely. I think that there are some people for whom that makes the game not work quite as well or feel shorter, but I always felt like the main questline was the least interesting thing about a Bethesda game or a—really just a Bethesda game.

It certainly was in Oblivion.

It sucked! Even in Skyrim I don't remember anything about the main questline. You go to heaven in the end of it, right? But that's not what those are about, that's not people's experience or memory of playing Skyrim. [In West of Loathing] not having the player be the most important person in the world was a real goal. Another thing about those games is you become the archmage and the master thief and the head of the Fighter's Guild. You could be one or zero of those things and it would still be a fun videogame. 

So what's it been like showing your game at PAX and watching other people play it, seeing what they enjoy?

It's been interesting. For a while it was very emotionally taxing to put the game in front of people, but now that it's come out and been successful and there's evidence to allow me to believe we've made a good game it's way easier to just be like, "Of course people are gonna play this and have fun. That's what's been happening for the last year."

It's interesting being in Australia for the first time because there are a lot of people here who this is the first time they're seeing us at a trade show, and so we're getting a lot of that thing where people say, "Oh! Kingdom of Loathing is a thing I remember from 10 years ago. I can't believe that's still around." It happened the first time we went to PAX East. Every once in a while you get a real local crowd of people who, if this is the first time they've seen us out, it's their reminder we still exist.

Which parts do people find funny? Is it interesting to see which jokes people laugh at?

It is. Everybody likes the silly walking. The prologue is the part we've polished most by far because we've gotten to see so many people playing it. There are a couple of things that are broken about this build that I wince every time I see but we've been using the same demo build for a year at this point. 

It's good. Something that I think is a strength of the game is different people are gonna find different things interesting about it. There are gonna be jokes that are obscure and a joke only one out of every 50 people that plays the game is gonna get, but how excited is that person that there's a joke that was just for them? That was part of our philosophy: just put jokes everywhere and don't worry about them not being accessible enough. Don't worry about it being too obscure. Somebody will find it, somebody will appreciate it. To somebody else it'll just look weird or confusing and that's fine.

Do you think of it as a comedy game? If this was being voted for in the games of the year, would you see it in the RPG category or the comedy category?

It makes me wish there was a comedy game category, because that is the only actual category it would belong in. That's weird though, because comedy's not really a genre designator for games. It's a genre of movie or book but games, the genre's about how it plays and this is, I don't know? Adventure game? Uhhhh, narrative, I guess? We were trying to figure out if we were to get an IGF nomination what category would we want it to be in, what would even make sense, and maybe narrative I guess? It makes me sad that there aren't enough comedy games to really be a category.

I do feel like in the last few years maybe there's been more of them. Games like The Stanley Parable and visual novels like Butterfly Soup, which has really funny writing.

Jazzpunk definitely counts as a comedy game. It's more a Zucker brothers Airplane!-style thing where it's really playing with videogame tropes as opposed to, "This is just a videogame with jokes in it". It's more mechanically comical. 

You called [West of Loathing] an adventure game before and I think in the '90s adventure games were comedy games a lot of the time, that's where the humor was.

Yeah, absolutely. We set out to make an RPG because that's what Kingdom of Loathing is and that's the kind of thing we wanted to make but it slowly revealed itself to be an adventure game and we didn't fight it too hard. That's how it turned out. Definitely still has significant RPG elements and I like that. 

I like that there are boxes with random loot in them, your stats get bigger, and you have turn-based battles with skills with different numbers attached to them, and different pieces of gear that you're wearing and optimizing. I enjoy that. We insert it only to the extent that it's fun and doesn't get in the way of the jokes, right? We're not trying to put hard fights in. There is an optional hard mode that you can find if you're interested in getting that achievement but it's not that important.

What's next for you? You've done an MMO, you've done a single-player cowboy RPG, what's the progression from there?

I don't know! We basically do whatever the industry says you're not supposed to be doing any more. We did 'games as a service' before that was a thing, we've switched to single-player now that the industry is moving to games as a service. We'll have to see what everybody else does to figure out what not to do.

But the real answer is right now the content side of the team is working on some DLC, the tech side is working on ports—we've got iOS out by the end of this year and then shooting to get out on Switch early next year. We should have learned never to say that in public because it always ends up getting 50 blog posts where it's "Confirmed: West of Loathing on Switch!" It's not confirmed yet but we're going to do it. And then just see what happens after that. It's done well enough that we have some breathing room, so that's nice.

The voting for the Golden Joystick Awards presented with Omen by HP closes in just under three weeks (November 3rd), and before that happens, we want to see our favourites from the last 12 months get the recognition they deserve. Not to manipulate the process because we want all the PC games to win in every category, or anything, but because there are so many amazing projects nominated that we want to celebrate. 

If you vote, too, you get a free digital copy of The Best PC Games Ever, which we published earlier this year. Take a look here for more information on what's inside, but it contains a great making of feature on the All Ghillied Up mission from Call of Duty 4, retrospectives on classics like Red Alert 2, Deus Ex, Max Payne 2 and tons more. All you have to do is vote, enter your email, then you'll receive instructions on claiming this lovely-looking digital book.

There's a bunch of great PC games up for awards at the Golden Joysticks this year. Rock-hard modern classic Cuphead is up for best visual design, for example, and offbeat horror platformer Little Nightmares is deservedly nominated for best audio. The best indie game category is full of great PC titles, of course: Dream Daddy, Everything, Friday the 13th, Night In The Woods, Pyre, Slime Rancher, Stories Untold, Tacoma, Thimbleweed Park and What Remains of Edith Finch. And that's just a few of the categories. There are three eSports categories, and the best PC games category has the likes Total War: Warhammer 2, Endless Space 2, West of Loathing, PUBG, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and a bunch more—check out the voting page and pick your favourites. 

Seems like another ordinary day at your typical Loathing farmstead. You wake up, comb your hair (netting you a single XP), speed-read a manual on the finer points of Stupid Walking (acquiring the corresponding perk in the process), and solve a puzzle.

But then you have to stifle a sob before joining the rest of the family, already gathered outside for your departure. Today is the day you leave home to seek fame and fortune in the scattered pockets of civilization dotting the deadly desert to the West.

It's a fairly ordinary setup, right? For several years almost every JRPG under the sun started more or less the same way. Still, there's something funny about those first minutes of West of Loathing—not in the sense of ha-ha funny, but something ever so slightly different. Something off.

Asymmetric's quasi-sequel to Kingdom of Loathing is frequently hilarious, but for all the praise, it must be just a tiny bit frustrating how everyone seems to concentrate almost exclusively on the jokes. I mean, it's not like a game could be the funniest thing we've played in years and the most brilliant subversion of RPG tropes in recent memory, as well as an astute commentary on contemporary open worlds at the same time. Could it?

Just as impressive as the ways West of Loathing defies tradition is how subtly it attunes players to the demands of its own logic in two brief introductory areas. In order to avoid major spoilers I'll focus mostly on the starting farm and the small settlement of Boring Springs to outline how West of Loathing explodes calcified generic conventions and emerges as not only the funniest game of 2017, but one of the most complex and intelligent, too.

Meaningful repetition

Surely I'm not alone in this: Whenever I see a response repeated, in dialogue with an NPC or as descriptive text after investigating a piece of scenery, I assume that particular interaction has been exhausted. While the infinite books available back at the farm are not identical, with titles like "Calvin Danger and the Mystery of Witch Woods" or "Clara Hardy and the Haunted Lighthouse" it becomes obvious they are randomly generated—as strong an indication that there's nothing to see here as strictly defined repetition.

Yet, if you persist for several clicks (six, just enough so that the similarities will have registered, but maybe not to the degree of putting you off) you're rewarded with the manual on Walking Stupid.

It's hard to overestimate the importance of this formative, early experience in shaping your attitude for the rest of the game. An unspoken rule that has dictated player behavior for decades is rendered null and void, and interactions that would be considered meaningless elsewhere now seem pregnant with possibilities.

After exchanging your farewells, you have the option to repeatedly hug your mom. Will this have a practical effect—perhaps producing a batch of home-baked cookies she forgot to give you earlier? It doesn't (at least I don't think it does), but the suggestion it might is already stuck in your subconscious.

After implanting the idea in your mind West of Loathing refuses to establish it as a rigid general rule. Some repetitive actions are rewarded, some are not. The small town of Boring Springs is filled with cactuses and horse turds, and after bumping into around 20 cactuses you acquire the Mostly Scabs perk, raising your overall HP.

Which, naturally, means that you'll gleefully keep stomping on horse poo until you realize there's nothing to be gained by it. The point here is not to reward mindless repetition through a norm just as unexciting as the ones West of Loathing is subverting—the point is to create uncertainty, to prevent you from taking anything for granted. And also to make you stomp on some turds.

Hidden causalities

There's no better way to have uncertainty grab players' imaginations, and make every interaction seem potentially meaningful, than obscuring the chains of cause-and-effect begun by those interactions. Most locations in West of Loathing feature some tidbits of information or a seemingly inconsequential action that will trigger a change elsewhere in the world. What's important is that these changes are rarely signposted and, on many occasions, actively concealed.

Susie Cochrane can be found brooding at the Boring Springs saloon. Her whole family's dead, so it's understandable that attempts at idle chat will be unwelcome. Hidden, however, among the various tombstones of the local cemetery are three wooden crosses dedicated to Elizabeth, Silas, and Timothy Cochrane. Crucially, nothing explicitly differentiates those from their neighboring memorials—there's just the name of the deceased and a short epitaph. Only if the player registers the surnames and makes the connection, then attempts to restart a conversation will Susie unlock as a companion—along with a new quest and location that would have otherwise remained unavailable.

Hiding substantial chunks of game behind seemingly inconspicuous interactions charges every trivial incident in West of Loathing with the promise of numerous unseen possibilities. Another example: before leaving the farm you have to decide between keeping your pet crow Russell in his cage or setting him free. How does your choice affect the story?

As of my third playthrough I still don't know what happens to Russell the crow. 

Aggressive misdirection

These hinted possibilities, hidden stories, and unexplored locations are the main reason why West of Loathing is an immensely replayable game. You're prevented from quickly exhausting the game's possibilities through its third core subversion: aggressive misdirection.

A pesky humanoid has occupied the basement of the Boring Springs saloon and the proprietor is predictably furious. His familiar plea (and the game's first proper quest) is to get rid of the invader. A typical course of action would be to immediately descend into the creature's lair (it's just next door, after all), and dispatch it with ease. It's what I did.

Hidden, however, somewhere in the cluttered basement is a bottle of whiskey. After hanging around town a bit longer you learn that the local doctor, whose house you may have previously been refused entry to, will only accept visitors bearing the gift of alcohol. Among the books you can leaf through in her library, one teaches you the basics of goblintongue. Oops.

Notice how sadistically you're prodded in the wrong direction by the hapless goblin being conveniently nearby, and the lost possibility of a non-violent solution being rubbed in your face. Communicating with the goblin would have taken an entirely counter-intuitive response to the bartender's plea (searching the basement without killing the creature, then leaving to explore the town) and now, for all but the most atypical of players, the chance is gone. Meanwhile, a relentless autosave finalizes the effects of this and every other decision.

There are so many other examples. What complicated trajectory do you have to follow to acquire the coveted Silver Pocketwatch? Is it even mathematically possible to amass the necessary dynamite to get to the metal box buried inside a crevice in Orehole mine? Chances are you'll have to search for these answers in a subsequent playthrough, but your first time around they'll remain inaccessible because of some decision you made that, at the time, seemed completely unrelated. 

West of Loathing's tutorial is not about introducing you to its simple combat system and straightforward level progression—it's an organized attempt at eradicating preconceived notions of how to navigate non-linear environments. It's a brilliant commentary on how content we are to sleepwalk through contemporary open worlds, mass-completing meaningless location-based quests, then mechanically proceeding to the nearest map icon.

These experiments with structure, reassuringly concealed behind a humorous, accessible facade, do more than make it of the most original RPGs in recent years. The exclusion from numerous quests, locations, and narrative threads, the knowledge we are already missing out from the get-go, can be a surprisingly liberating thing. That metal box in Orehole mine will remain maddeningly out of reach, the door on the second floor of Boring Springs' saloon inaccessible, and in another town and another series of quests the local jail will still have vacancies even after you've locked up members of every gang in the vicinity.

It rains these tiny failures on you, each telling a more compelling story than the automatic triumphs of other open worlds, each offering another reason to dive back in after your first journey is done. Paradoxical as it may seem, West of Loathing's aggressive misdirection, its willingness to let you miss out, and its unyielding autosave all merge into the gentlest of messages: that it's OK if you make a mistake.

Not only did I receive a precious family heirloom—my grandmother's briefcase full of snakes—and not only can I open that briefcase to extract either snake venom or snake-based medicine, but I can use a snake from that briefcase to whip an enemy during combat. In fact, I've done it. Against another snake. I whipped a giant snake with my briefcase snake.

Welcome to the Old West.

West of Loathing is a singleplayer RPG adventure with turn-based combat from Asymmetric, developer of browser-based multiplayer RPG Kingdom of Loathing. You may remember that one: it came out back in 2003. I've been playing a review build of West of Loathing, which is due out August 10, and I've just completed the prologue which consists of a handful of locations, quests, puzzles, and combat. So far, I'm enjoying the absolute hell out of it.

It's precisely the game I need right now, because not only is it fun but it's genuinely funny, and Loathing's humor is everywhere you look: dialogue, quest text, item descriptions, and hell, even in the settings menu. At one point I wanted to stick my hand into a saliva-filled spittoon, and there was a little tussle as the game repeatedly suggested it wasn't a great idea by becoming more and more descriptive about how disgusting the contents of the spittoon were. I kept insisting that yes, I really wanted to go through with it, and the game finally acquiesced. West of Loathing is drenched in amusements, just like my character's hand is now drenched in revolting spittoon slime.

I've only finished the prologue and it was great fun, start to finish. It begins as you prepare to leave the homestead and head west, where you can putter around your house a bit, talk to your family, and gain XP by doing things like combing your hair and solving a Rubik's Cube. Choose your character class: one uses a combination of magic and cooking, another is a good brawler, or, like me, you can use snakes as weapons and to create potions. Then head to Boring Springs, a small town filled with oddball characters who have appropriately oddball quests for you to complete.

The art, obviously, is spare, yet the stick-figures are still cute and enjoyably animated, and just about everything in a scene has a purpose, even if they don't appear to at first. I noticed that while walking through the starter town I'd occasionally step in a pile of manure or brush up painfully against a cactus. These aren't just little art details—both the poop and the cacti can become elements of of gameplay under certain circumstances. This, along with the fact that the reward for nosing around everything you see rewards you with more funny tidbits of text, makes the stick-figure world worth exploring fully.

The choices you make can change your character, as well as your future choices. Early on in my first stroll through the prologue, I made what I considered to be a moral choice when faced with a particular situation, and that unlocked a new attribute that gave me options to continue to be a reasonable and merciful cowpoke further down the line. When I went through the prologue again with a new character, I made a cold-blooded choice instead, which gave me the option of being a real bastard a bit later. (Sorry to be so vague, but I really don't want to spoil anything for anyone.)

Combat is turn-based, and I'm not entirely sold on it as much as the adventuring (though I've never been much of a fan of turn-based combat anyway). Still, it's early in the game and I don't have a lot of combat options at the moment. Die, and you're auto-loaded to the area before the fight, so you can either try again, prepare by using some items (like eating something that gives you a boost to your stats), or mosey away to do something else or get better equipped. One fight, against two gunslingers, proved challenging due to my low HP, but a few tries later (thanks to using snake poison on them and snake healing on myself) I won.

Most of my time in West of Loathing has been spent attempting to fully explore and find every last shred of text in every single location. It's weird, because I bounced off Prey recently, mostly because I quickly got tired of all the time required to peek into every single desk, drawer, bin, and cabinet. Scrounging and peering and inspecting every square inch of game space just hasn't felt appealing to me lately.

In Loathing, though, I'm walking my stick-figure body into every square inch of the world because I simply don't want to miss anything: not a line of dialogue or an item description or an amusing little secret nestled away in a corner of the screen. What I've played so far has simply been too enjoyable to leave a single shred of text unread.

West of Loathing is set to release on August 10 on Steam—though there's no price confirmed yet.