Dear Reader:
West of Loathing dev talks about the game's best joke
A portion of a CampoSanto interview with West of Loathing dev, Zack Johnson...
CS: What’s the best joke in West of Loathing?
ZJ: My favourite joke, at least of the ones I wrote, is in the opening. It’s kind of a non-joke. In your family’s living room on the farm, you walk up to the hat rack and it says, ‘Nothing on the hat rack today.’
I don’t know. I feel the only reason, if there is any reason, that that is funny, is that it insinuates a situation where that that hat rack might represent some kind of to-do list. It’s not the stuff that caught on broadly, like the spittoons, those are so outrageous that they became a thing that everyone talked a lot about. [Including the fact checker from the New Yorker: ‘At one point, the game tries to warn Ms. Rees’ avatar not to explore a spittoon, explaining to her avatar, at length, that it’s disgusting: “it smells like someone ran over a skunk, waited a week, and then set it on fire.” Is this accurate?’]