And we begin on a personal note.

The very first review I ever gave was for five stars. It was immediately critiqued for being a five star review. So now when I give a five star review, a part of me flinches. In liking something that much, I've opened myself up to criticism.

And when I play a game like this, I find that I don't care.

Weird and Unfortunate Things is a gonzo modern-world RPG flavored heavily with a vast and formless spice-rack of weird fiction. It feels more Amanda Downum or Robert Bloch than HP Lovecraft, but the general trappings of his cosmic horror are all there in the fringes of the game. impossible forces are editing the reality around your characters. Without making a pact with similar powers, it is impossible to stop them.

Mechanics-wise, this means you and your buddies stand in a line facing some eldritch shug-beasties and play very violent Red Rover at each other until one side is very tired and has to all lie down for a while.

It's standard turn-based RPG fare with a few minor deviations from the formula, but those places where WaUT diverges are welcome ones. There are level-ups and skill acquisition, but powers are purchased using collectable currency off of a grid. There are battles with monsters, some of which are random, but each game area has a gauge to determine the ferocity of its monsters. Whittle the population of shoggoblins down enough and the gauge starts filling more slowly. These little nods to convenience and choice felt like a friendly handshake between the game and I. "We understand that you have things to do," it seemed to say, "so we set the walk-speed to always run. If you want to slow down for some reason, well, that's what God made the shift key for."

And in truth, the turn-based-modern-pastel-horror-rpg is really just a vehicle. It's a format to tell a story in, and that story being told is a good one. The characters are quirky and have a humor to them that melds with the hypnotic game music, but the situations they've been thrown into are often surreal, nightmarish, and deadly serious. The game balances these two extremes on the tip of a razor. Never once did I feel like grimness was entirely out of the question, but at the same time I breezed through the plot. It was fun. The gameworld was immersive and I wanted to be a part of it, even though it would likely eat me, leaving my ghost at this keyboard, unaware that its body had been devoured, composing this review as bait for when the game grew hungry again.

Anyway, there's some broader textual understanding that helps to get the most out of the game. There are some nods to weird fiction like "The Derleth Expanse" or to indie games (the main character has a "Deadly Premonition" at one point) where, if the player is in on the joke, it enriches the experience. However, I think I would recommend this to just about anyone. The Earthbound-esque feel will pull in the nostalgia crowd. The writing will draw the story-fiends. There's even a perfectly balanced Nightmare Mode available at start for the Souls/Darkest Dungeon crowd. For something so genre-specific, this has broad appeal.

And not once during my hour and a half of playtime did I feel like I was anything less than perfectly enraptured.

So: five stars. If you disagree, or if you feel there's an element of the game that this review missed, by all means use the comments section. Or, better yet, write another review.