West of Loathing's Downloadable Content

While add-ons like Downloadable Content are generally associated (usually negatively) with the mainstream video game industry, it’s not impossible to find such additions within the Indie gaming scene. While certainly not what typically comes to mind when one thinks of an Indie game, given that it’s got more polish than a hell of a lot of (so-called) AAA titles, Pathfinder: Kingmaker was Owlcat Games’s first work (and crowd-funded, to boot), so I reckon it counts as an Indie RPG, and it had a couple DLCs. Celestian Tales 1 had its own add-on, for that matter, and there’s little debate about whether that one’s an Indie work. And today we’re going to look at the DLC available for another Indie RPG: the incredibly fun and funny West of Loathing.*



Reckonin’ at Gun Manor: You know how I tend to get way too carried away with these DLC rants and go on and on for pages, sometimes saying more about the add-on than I’ve ever said about the game itself? This will not be 1 of those times. Reckonin’ at Gun Manor is as fun and hilariously clever as the rest of West of Loathing, and if you own the game, you should own the DLC.

The premise of the DLC is exploring the mansion of the inventor of the gun, because you’re helping a parody ghostbuster with her job to exterminate a bunch of phantasms that have all invaded the premises. Along with the many paranormal jokes one might expect (through which Asymmetric proves that a female ghostbuster can be quite entertaining, contrary to what the 2016 flop compels you to believe) is a whole host of the usual random, well-written absurdity at which Loathing is so uniquely masterful, including hedge wizards, mannequin greeting practice, and a heated argument over whether or not the process of poaching an egg involves bullets, to name just a few. Oh, and of course, a spittoon, possibly the funniest so far. As a whole, it’s silly and a bucket of fun, as one expects.

But I would like to also appreciate Reckonin’ at Gun Manor for the fact that it doesn’t just deliver what you’d expect from West of Loathing: it goes a step further than the main game itself does by including a light, but nonetheless distinctly present story. West of Loathing’s overall plot can be equated with the simplicity and barely-there nature of most NES games--which isn’t really a strike against it, because WoL is all about the hilarity of the journey rather than the destination itself (even if its main story is actually just about a destination). In a humor RPG, being consistently funny is the key criteria for success, and a gripping plot and/or cast is icing on the cake--very nice when you can get it, like Okage: Shadow King or Undertale, but you can still have a great time without it as long as the laughs are plentiful, and West of Loathing keeps the chortles coming nicely. But this DLC takes WoL’s formula a step forward and does form itself around a gradual narrative, and that’s neat.

And not only does Reckonin’ at Gun Manor take the game a step forward by telling a real story, it’s also a pretty good story at that! It’s nothing fancy, but the twist to this add-on is clever, and the conclusion (if you went to the trouble to resolve each ghost the patient way, that is) is a pretty satisfying one that makes good on the DLC’s name and ties itself to the Old West theme with a little frontier justice.

Lastly, it’s a bit of a relief to me to have finally found, after so many other games have failed to do so, an offering which provides no debate over its worth from a money-to-time perspective. I got well over 5 hours of enjoyment out of Reckonin’ at Gun Manor, so its price tag of $5 is more than fair. It’s good enough that it’d still be worth purchasing even at a ratio lower than $1/hour, but Asymmetric is good enough to give you your full money’s worth.



...Alright, maybe that wasn’t as short as I thought it would be, but it’s still smaller than most of the other add-on rants I’ve done, right? At any rate, thank you, West of Loathing, for a little light through the dark tunnel of RPG DLCs. I’m sure I’ll need these unusually pleasant add-on memories when next I play a so-called AAA game’s additional content.















* At least, I think you can count it as an Indie title? Asymmetric’s run Kingdom of Loathing for like 20 years by this point, but I daresay there’s a substantial difference between a mostly-text browser RPG and a more standard game. I guess the company’s made a couple other tiny little educational games, too? The line of what is and isn’t an Indie title is sometimes as hard to define as the line of what is and isn’t an RPG, honestly.