Sometimes dumb is OK. Even juvenile dumb. MMORPGs take themselves too seriously, and they require lots of money and weird client-side software to play.
The Kingdom of Loathing is dumb and juvenile and awesome and absolutely free and you play it on your web browser. What's not to like?…
When I say you play KoL on your web browser, by the way, I don't mean one of these fancy AJAX/SOAP/REST interface nightmares. I don't even mean highly-rendered static graphics. You could play this game easily on circa 2000 Netscape Navigator. You can't quite play KoL in a text browser like lynx because it uses frames a bit and not all the graphical icons have alt tags—I tried. But it's darn close.
About those graphics: One of the two characters I'm currently playing is shown above. All the graphics are like this. You have been warned.
But the writing is great and the player community is large and seems helpful and the site owners are putting up new content all the time. Right now, it's Crimbo, which is to say Christmas in the Kingdom, and Father Crimbo has come and set up Crimbo Town for a month. Sounds sweet, huh? Uh, not so much. Think Terry Pratchett, only way more lowbrow and silly. The good news is that there are massive powerups associated with Crimbo; it's a Crimbo miracle!
There's a lot of nice quests in the game, and you get them from early on. The game seems to scale well. The clicking gets a bit tedious at times, but not so much so that it spoils the fun. There's enough random-looking content that it doesn't get too repetitive, and continues to be entertaining.
One unusual mechanic is that small adventuring tasks generally require an adventure point to complete---each character receives 40 adventure points each evening. There are ways to augment adventure points a bit, but basically this mechanic puts a limit on daily play. It's an odd plan, and the one thing in the game I've found frustrating so far---I keep having to quit and wait a day, while I'm having fun!
The game is definitely not suitable for small children or the easily-offended; there's enough mild crudity of various kinds to be off-putting to the sensitive, and the chat space has some real, uh, colorful players in it. That said, none of it is bothering me, and most of it is just amusing silliness.
There's a definite style to the whole thing, from the "potion of un-un-unpoisoning" (the description explains that it is useful if you've been un-unpoisoned) to the "zmobies" (just like zombies, but spelled badly) to the "Gourd Tower" (not just a misspelling, actually). It grows on you after a while.
I think I'll be playing KoL as much as my adventure points allow for a while. Recommended. (B)