I was extremely excited to see this released unceremoniously, free of hype or expectation weighing down ankles to pitfalls of modern game discourse. Given the simplicity of West of Loathing's design, I thought that a genre switch with more of the same seasoning and core ingredients as before would be enough to carry this 'sequel', but unfortunately either the recipe worked despite itself with WoL or the team has lost their sense of taste. Nothing that worked in the first game really works here: the combat is fiddlier with less player expression, forcing builds to be simpler while also demanding more bland item use to simulate 'breadth' of combat; the writing is less cohesive around the Lovecraftian setting, causing both the sincere characterisation of its cast to be weakened (with nary a useful or interesting team member in sight) and the humour to hit weaker because its broadness accentuates less the setting or expectations of genre; the world design feels less like exploration is rewarded (which it wasn't really in WoL either, but the larger map evinced a world to be explored whereas SoL has hubs which must be Mass Effected through for story drips: a pain) and more like you're linearly being pushed from one non-cohesive beat to the next; the puzzle design, which was at times almost a joke itself in how difficult it was in WoL, is simplified to mush here - nothing is rewarding and every time I had to rub my two brain cells together for a fetch quest, it felt like a chore.

I wanted to love it, and I'll definitely be wary to see if WoL is worse in estimation after this has to be considered as where that game goes in hindsight, but the product is so bleh.