Indie titles do not display the magnificent frills of triple-A production, but they still compensate with an endearing, humble art design with some unique mechanics to boot. In gaming, it’s usually indicative of a smaller or non-existent budget made by a one-man developer or a modest coalition of people. Still, West of Loathing is still bogged down with a myriad of flaws.Īs the adage goes, minimalism is a legitimate art form. Okay, perhaps that’s too harsh a word in an effort to express my feelings on the game while attempting to reference the game’s title cleverly. In fact, West of Loathing grated so hard on me that I loathed it. As I expressed in my review of Earthbound, this directive often tends to be grating, and I found this to also be the case for West of Loathing as well. West of Loathing’s intent is to have the player grinning from ear to ear with jaunty absurdism. Judging from the preconceived notions one might have while looking at West of Loathing, we can infer that the game borrows more than a spoonful of Earthbound’s essence. Earthbound lacked the polished RPG mechanics compared to its more orthodox JRPG contemporaries like Final Fantasy, but its quirky, absurd sense of humor and irreverent mechanics separated it as something unique to the genre. I’ve always admired games that verged in the direction of a tongue-in-cheek borderline parody of popular video game genres. One can immediately tell from the game’s minimalistic presentation that West of Loathing’s initiative is not to compete with the likes of Red Dead Redemption or any of its ilk, but to subvert the tropes of the western epic with lo-fi silliness. West of Loathing is yet another western odyssey in the gaming medium, but Red Dead Redemption, it ain’t. What’s an irreverent, ironic way of saying “yeehaw!” because West of Loathing, a game developed by indie studio Asymmetric, is attempting to scream it from the mountain tops.
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