YMMV / West of Loathing

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The clowns paint their faces on and hatch from eggs so that no two clowns have identical patterns. This may seem like it was made up to make the Clowns even creepier, but this is an actual practice among professional clowns — minus the hatching, obviously.
• Anticlimax Boss: Emperor Norton, despite ostensibly being the game's final boss, is pretty easy, even despite not having your Pardner with you. Even if you don't do any of the puzzles to avoid combat with him, he only has one attack and unimpressive stats, so a decently-leveled player can beat him in one attack.
• Awesome Music: Now has its own page!
• Disc-One Nuke: Haymaker—a Cow Puncher combat skill which deals damage and stuns enemies—is available from a book that you can buy from the Dirtwater shop. The book can be purchased for your starting meat, meaning you can be guaranteed to have it before your first random encounter.
• Game-Breaker: The combat system is very varied and rewards multiple different buildpaths for every character, but there are some things that just snap the combat system in half.
  • Fan Hammer is easily the strongest of the Snake Oiler's combat skills, despite its Boring, but Practical description. You simply attack one enemy three times, but since it's with your gun, aka your main source of damage, it's the equivalent of attacking three times in one turn, as well as making the individual shots stronger at higher levels. This attack can turn everything outside of multi-enemy encounters into a complete cakewalk, and will obliterate even the most powerful of bosses. Combine it with Good Medicine, and nothing will survive the torrent of death you will hit people with. It was bumped from an early skill to a later skill after an update.
    • If you're facing a line of enemies, and you target Fan Hammer on one of the enemies in the back, if the front-most enemy dies, any extra shots will instead hit the next target in line. If you're strong enough, you can take out an entire row with a single use of Fan Hammer.
    • Have the Expert Poisonin' Perk (which multiplies the poison effect by 3), the Toilet Pistol (which has low damage but applies poison for each shot), then Fan Hammer. Everything except undead enemies will fall very quickly.
    • Also, since leveling up Fan Hammer only adds a little bit of damage ramp-up with successive shots, it scales without soaking up XP, leaving you free to spend it on other perks. On the other hand, if you do get it to max rank, it adds a fourth shot.
  • The Beanslinger's Great Northern Blizzard spell hits all enemies and has a base of 25 Cold damage, with increases from Mysticality and Spell Damage modifiers. While it has an AP cost of 4, it doesn't take much to turn it into a high-two digits nuke, and by layering on +AP gear and item effects, you can cast it several times per combat. Combined with Bean Wall, you can become nearly immune to damage while taking out hordes of high-level enemies in two turns.
  • Doc Alice levels up by fighting skeletons, and can One-Hit Kill a skeleton once she hits level three. This makes her good well into the late game, especially if you're grinding for gold teeth anyway, and also invaluable in a Hardest Hat run, where fights often boil down to "One-Hit Kill the enemy before the enemy One Hit Kills you, or abort the run."
  • Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Bill requires you to complete a difficult (and easy to permanently screw up) sidequest in order to obtain, and the solution for allowing him to come to life is a major Guide Dang It!. Persevere, and you're rewarded with a third ally that will deal half of a target's health as damage. The limitations are that he can only kill someone in a very select few instances and you can't pick what he'll shoot at, but otherwise he's a devastatingly powerful companion that will trivialize every encounter from then on.
  • Gary the Goblin breaks the game extremely hard—not only will you avoid all conflict with Goblins and get discounts when they're selling things, but Gary also has three useful combat abilities — a basic melee attack that hits up to six times, a once-per-battle summon that makes a decent meat shield against certain enemies, and a stacking debuff that hits every enemy. As if that weren't enough, the first two Bags of Shroom Grow (Gary's level up item) can be found in the very first region of the game, without needing random encounters, grinding, or any skills or stats. Unlike the other examples, Gary's brokenness is acknowledged by the game in that he's not available in Hard Mode.
  • Damaging and stunning combat items trivialize every encounter if you have enough, because there's no limit to how many you can use per turn.
• Nausea Fuel: If you're brave enough to reach into the spittoons you come across, you can get some very useful equipment. The game will try to discourage you from getting them, however, by giving you stomach-churning descriptions of what the spittoon's contents look, smell, and feel like, and forcing you to click on the correct option several times to confirm that yes, you want to stick your hand in that.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Grace, a talking doll (in a setting where talking dolls haven't been invented yet) that actively responds to you when spoken to. She had wanted to have a tea party with her former owner Mary in exchange for protecting the ranch from the cows, but they "didn't get to finish before [Mary] went away". Investigation reveals that the "tea party" was a sacrificial ritual that Mary had already given her siblings to, and was threatened to give her parents or herself next. You finish this detour by either destroying the goblet on the ritual's altar, or going along with it and feeding the blood in the goblet to Grace. The former results in Grace ominously saying you'll live to regret your decision before effectively shutting down, while the latter causes Grace to spring to life and run out of the house. As much as the game lampshades the creepiness, it's not quite Nightmare Retardant and is still incredibly unnerving.
  • The Sideshow Freaks are all some form of Body Horror, in particular Eye-Guy. While Janet and Douglas can talk to the player character which softens the scare factor a bit, Eye-Guy cannot. The most interaction you'll get out of him is clenched fists and a more pronounced twitch.
  • When you try to enter the abandoned pickle factory, you end up getting a colourful description of you getting overworked for eighteen hours, in inhumane and hazardous conditions. The over-the-top nature of it might not do enough to offset the disturbingness of it all.
    Narrator: You don't really miss your sense of smell. Or not coughing all the time. You don't really want anything anymore. Except to die.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Auto-leveling is actually fairly detrimental to your character. In theory, it makes it so that you have a Jack of All Stats character, but in reality it rotates which skill and combat move it levels up rather than picking the strongest and maxing it out first. This ultimately leaves you severely underpowered as well as making several moves completely useless (for example Snake Whip, a fairly strong move if maxed out early on, will be completely useless if you auto-level your Snake Oiler class), though the games generous supply of grinding spots and frequent XP gains make it so that the game is never too hard. Thankfully you can turn it off, and the game in fact encourages you to do so after leaving Boring Springs.
  • Upon reaching Frisco, you encounter Norton. Norton will give you an extremely annoying debuff if you can't placate him with a crown. This debuff is called the Ant-Eye Virus, and it causes the screen to be fractured like a bug's eye. It actually does nothing else aside from this... except for making it so your character can't follow the train tracks to find where Norton's run off to, so you have to remove it before continuing the main quest. The cure turns out to be easily accessible, but it's either expensive to buy outright or complicated to do the sidequests that will drop the price. (Unless you've done the quests beforehand, which is possible. They're in the middle zone, and accessible long before Frisco is)
• That One Level: Ghostwood. It's actually extremely easy once you understand what you're doing, but the quest relating to that area will want you to tear your hair out with just how obstructive the Obstructive Bureaucrats can get. It's not too hard to imagine why everyone died: someone went berserk and burnt the place down rather than fill out one more bloody form. Thankfully, you only need to solve five of the seven problems to get the wood, so you can skip Ghostwood entirely.
  • To a lesser extent, dealing with the House-In-The-Desert gang. You need specific items you may not have (a bone, an oil can, and a lock), and might think you just have to kill them. It's not a hard puzzle if you have the correct items, however.
  • Trying to win all four battle reenactments with the nerds. You have very limited options and overwhelming enemies, so you must try to figure out the (almost exact) combination of moves in order to survive.
• That One Puzzle: True to the tradition of Kingdom of Loathing, there are several (usually very hidden).
  • The "favorite granddaughter" puzzle at Reboot Hill. On paper it is a simple process of elimination, however the clues are so vague that you are still left with several possible candidates even if you follow all of the clues (including the one hidden at Kellogg Ranch). Even worse is that a few players found out (after trial-and-error, which you can only do once a day) that often the correct answer contradicts one or more clues (because the gravestones give the year of birth and death, but not the month, so their age could be off by one). Also, the puzzle is randomized so you can't cheat by looking up a walkthrough.
  • The Military Cemetery grave puzzle is a series of increasingly obtuse ciphers that quickly reaches That One Puzzle status—that is, if you even know there is a puzzle there in the first place! ^note It starts with plot 11, an arc number/running gag from Kingdom of Loathing.
  • The West Pole "whispering to a rock" puzzle, which requires you to pay attention to a series of random encounters where you translate petroglyphs. To complicate things, the petroglyphs can't be translated unless your character has sufficient Mysticality, and each tablet has a higher Mysticality requirement to be solved. The community found the answer^note "fivepiles" first by dissecting the game code, then trying to figure out the meaning of the clues to make sense of it. ^note It requires you to figure out one or two letters from each clue via obscure word-play.
  • The Reckonin' at Gun Manor DLC introduces The Carver, a unique melee weapon acquired by looking up words in an in-game dictionary involving—you guessed it—a complicated cipher. The Carver's description lampshades the obscurity by explaining that it's made from highly compressed dictionary pages.