Kingdom of Loathing

Game: Kingdom of Loathing

Ted Puffer's characters: Sandow

Short review: I highly recommend this game, without being quite sure why.

Long review: This is going to be a bit tricky to describe, so hang with me here. Kingdom of Loathing (kol, for short) is a browser based MMORPG that allows people to create characters and send them out into the world to fight monsters, gather experience points and gold. Pretty simple, right? What makes this game ingenious, and I don't use that term lightly, is the execution. The layout of the kol interface screens and the world which the characters explore are so bizarre that it's little wonder kol is a cult favorite. To put it simply, it's very tongue-in-cheek, but beyond a limit that is unimaginable.
     Let me explain it this way. You know how trends start out cool, get popular, get trendy and then get sad? Think about Spongebob Squarepants. Bizarre little cartoon. Starts out innocently enough. Here's Spongebob, he has some clever inside humor and inhabits a weird little world. Time goes on and he gets popular. His likeness appears on bath towels, toothbrushes and shaving cream. A little later he gets a full length movie and before you know it he's being quoted on C-Span. Very quickly he goes from inside cultural reference touchstone to someone thinking "oh God, is that show still on?" when encountering the new Spongebob cereal at the grocery story.
     If Spongebob were created by kol, he'd appear on the cover of the latest Cannibal Corpse album while advertising "all natural male enhancement" on a late night infomercials.
     KOL uses stick figures to represent not only the players character, but the world as well. Gold is ditched in favor of meat as the coin of the realm. DPS and tanks are replaced by pastamancers and saucerors. Battle equipment is less likely to be axes and plate armor, and more likely to rubber clown noses and grass skirts. I'm not making this up. Part of the draw to explore the kol world is to see how far out the programmers are willing to go for cheap laughs and bizarre sitations. As it turns out, they're willing to go further than anyone would think possible. The amount of loot items is staggering, as well as the list of possible items your character can create with meatsmithing (don't ask) or drink making (more on that later). The world is huge. The humor is at turns juvenile, pithy, bitingly sarcastic and hilarious.
     Each player is granted 40 turns per day to interact with the environment. Extra turns can be gained by eating food with more turns given for special creations your character combines from loot drops. You can also get turns by mixing drinks. You see, loot drops can also be bottles of tequila, rum and vodka with the occasional lemon, orange and lime. So even if you don't get much entertainment out of kol, you'll be armed with a bartenders arsenal of drink concoctions when you're done. But my money is on having fun, which kol provides in spades.
     Guilds are possible, but actual interactions with other players are limited. KOL has streaming radio and an active forum, so for the budding adventurer who wants to immerse themselves in a weird world, kol delivers the goods.