West of Loathing

Tongue-in-cheek stick figure RPG. Got it super cheap on sale for Switch, started playing it about the same time I started work at Google in September 2020. It's funny! There's a lot more reading than I expected.

The fact that your health and AP resets after every battle is very player-friendly and makes the game more casual. It means there's a lot less long-term strategy to think about, but that lends itself to shorter sessions.

Most interesting mechanic seems to be the “stat buff for the rest of the day” system. Days only advance when you want them to - you manually go back to town and sleep, which clears out all your stat buffs. But there's a limit on how many buffs you can apply, and from what types of items: Buffs come from food and drinks, and you'll get “you are too drunk” or “you are too full” messages if you try to apply too many of them. Apparently you get the ability to apply more later in the game as your constitution increases. That means you might carry a whole lot of supplies but you have to choose which ones to apply during a particular dungeon dive because you can't undo them until you get back to town.

Finished the main quest within a couple of weeks, along with finding and defeating the necromancer. Went back and read a walkthrough for the rest of the content - seemed like I was locked out of a lot of options, or just couldn't find some obscure stuff needed to make progress on other quest lines. Alleson observed that this was very Monkey Island-ish, which seems right. I enjoyed it but won't go back to it.