Kingdom of Loathing: The Home Game

To promote their browser game Kingdom of Loathing, some of its developers put together a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure 'zine to distribute at the San Diego Comic Convention July 20-23rd 2006 and give its patrons a taste of the game's whimsical stickman artwork and distinctly bent sense of humour, what with the absurd character classes (disco bandit?) and the economy based on (sculptable) meat products. Obsessive fans being what they are, not long after the convention the real-world version of the game found itself converted back to an electronic format with the blessing and authorization of its creators.

This game's slight but effective story deposits the player in a back alley, suffering from amnesia (and hence requiring helpful exposition from all NPCs met), allowing him or her to wander around in-town locations from the browser game before being issued a quest (quite literally the retrieval of a Plot Device... for cartographic purposes, plotting out charts on maps of course.) The quest takes the player through several wilderness locations and simulates combat depending on which class (if any) the player has chosen. It is possible to hit upon the correct location of the Plot Device through dumb luck, but full completion of the game is only possible after every location (~75 paragraphs) has been visited.