Shadows Over Loathing

Shadows Over Loathing is the follow-up to West of Loathing, set in the same stick-figure black-and-white aesthetic but transplanted from the Wild West to the prohibition era. Your Uncle Murray runs an antique shop in Ocean City and has just summoned you for help; by the time you arrive he's vanished, and the trail leads through shadowy syndicates, cursed antiques and an undercurrent of eldritch tentacles preparing to bring about the end of the world.

Three classes anchor the role-playing surface, each a pun the game refuses to walk back. The Pig Skinner is a brawler-athlete who specialises in stuffing alarming numbers of enemies into phone booths; the Cheese Wizard manipulates the curds and whey of the cosmos as a magic system; the Jazz Agent dances to a rhythm only the protagonist seems to hear. Combat is strategic and turn-based when you want it to be, and quietly optional in many situations where the writing offers a non-combat solution.

The scope is much larger than the previous entry. More locations, items, friends, foes and familiars, deeper stick-figure customisation, and what the developers count as thousands of jokes, gags and goofs strung across the campaign. The supporting content covers a time-travel side-quest given to you by your future self, an infinitely tall building, sentient mathematics, talking frogs, pettable cats, inappropriate fishing, and a corrupt government you can topple at your own pace — none of it as out of place as it should be, given the consistency of the tone holding everything together.