Kingdom of Loathing

Overall score:

www.kingdomofloathing.com

With its massively substandard graphics and completely tongue in cheek sense of humor The Kingdom of Loathing is a great place to while away the hours fighting the Naughty Sorceress and making mounds of Spaghetti with Skullheads, all while searching for the elusive torso tattoo that will transform your stick figure avatar to a stick figure with a shirt!

A free browser played game Kingdom of Loathing is a game with appeal to both novice and veteran gamers. Once you’ve established your account everything starts easily enough. Like any good RPG your first choice is your gender, followed by your class: Seal Clubber, Turtle Tamer, Pastamancer, Sauceror, Disco Bandit or Accordion Thief. Each of the six classes emphasizes one of the three base stats which are: Muscle, Mysticality and Moxie. Other important stats are your HP, the ever popular hit points…run out of these and you’re out of the game until you take a few rounds to heal up and charge back in. Your MP stat is reflective of your Muscularity, Mana or Mojo points all depending on which class you started out with. MPs are consumed when you use particular skills and can be regenerated through the game. Inebriety is a reflection of how much your character has had to drink. Drink too much and you’ll be out of the game in a drunk stupor. It looks complex at first, but it doesn’t take long before the terminology becomes second nature.

Character created you log in to the main map and are directed to Mount Noob and the Toot Oriole which is where your adventures really begin. From this point forward the interface helps to teach you how to manipulate your inventory and quest through the various areas of the Kingdom. Each encounter brings opportunity for increases in stats, dropped items and meat, which is the currency of the kingdom. As you increase your stats your level will continue to progress and further quests and areas will open at the various levels until you face the Naughty Sorceress and ascend to the higher levels of the game.

The game is controlled by a number of turns per day, this number increasing based on the things that you eat and drink, but maxing out around 120 adventures per day. Once adventures are gone you can still learn to make food and drink from the items you’ve gathered in your adventures, or go visit the mall in order to acquire some of the items in the game or to sell your own.

The Kingdom of Loathing is unique as it is a game with many levels of complexity, but is still enjoyable for the casual player that just wants to adventure in locations they’ve already been and build up their stock of Knob Goblin Chow Mein in their store. The creators of this game very obviously have an eye on geek and gamer culture and make no excuses for puns in abundance and tongue in cheek humor. Some of the humor is a bit on the adult side, as well as the fact you can drink yourself into a stumbling stupor, so designed to be a game for the twenty plus crowd. Definitely a very enjoyable way to spend an afternoon… Now where did I put my linoleum sword? I’ve a goth giant to thwap!

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Written by JenaRey on February 22nd, 2006