Progress Quest
In what some might dub the logical conclusion of the statbuilding RPG genre,
Progress Quest is a game that plays itself. Stripping away the flashy and
distracting bells and whistles of things like graphics and sound, automated
gameplay consists of three simple phases, stock components of any game in its
genre: 1) going into the killing fields to slay monsters; 2) returning to town
to sell plunder looted from the monsters’ corpses; and 3) using the resultant
lucre to upgrade one’s equipment, so as to more effectively facilitate the
efficient slaughter of further monsters. Abstracting things away from even a
nominal Nethackian 2D textmode depiction, Progress Quest instead represents
all these goings-on as a series of progress bars, gradually but irrevocably
filling up until they tick over and place checkmarks in task boxes.
Effectively a monotonous, game-themed screen saver with all the excitement of
watching your hard drive defragment, developer Grumdrig has nonetheless
instilled a great deal of subtle complexity into this title, it randomly
generating enough missions of common types (Deliver, Seek, Exterminate,
Placate) to keep the avatar diligently questing while the player eats, sleeps,
or works, occasionally checking in to monitor the “fire-and-forget” game’s
progress. An impressive array of creative spell, treasure and equipment types
await the stalwart player willing to invest the CPU cycles needed for the long
haul — as with Kingdom of Loathing, the pseudofantasy proceedings are
tempered with a certain quantity of whimsy (available races, for instance,
including the Panda Man, Land Squid and Enchanted Motorcycle, while class
types include Puma Burgular, Tickle-Mimic and Tongueblade).
Progress Quest