One Trait Danger’s “Lombardi’s World” Release

Whatever I was expecting when I logged into Lombardi’s World, the game was decidedly not that. One Trait Danger is an experimental pop group helmed by Andrew Katz of Car Seat Headrest featuring other members of CSH. They’ve always held an ironic (at least I’m assuming ironic) disdain for major musical publications and a lot of the pretension of the industry, and their second foray into video games continues that trend.

I was able to catch a beta gameplay live stream on the 17th of November. At its core, it feels like World of Warcraft with a healthy dose of the band’s signature tongue-in-cheek version of internet humor, and is much more polished and overall better than their previous release, Cossett’s World, a bonus with the USB stick that they released their most recent album on. The game tasks you with fighting the boss of the record label that CSH is signed to, Matador. How you reach him, or even defeat him wasn’t revealed to us, but from the peek at the fight we got, it looks to be extremely difficult.

The spawn area, a Wild-West themed town.

In our short time with the game, however, we were able to explore some of what the map has to offer. The spawn zone, a wild west-themed town was where we spent most of our time, exploring the Dadaist world that the group had given us. There were NPC townspeople, seemingly un-interactable, repeating meaningless voice lines, a very hard jumping puzzle with a hilarious ending and an even harder one with an ending none of us could reach. As well, on the far side of the map, there appeared to be a PvP-enabled arena, but I couldn’t get anyone else to join me for a fight. The other worlds, what appeared to be a jungle and an ice world, we didn’t manage to explore as fully in our time, but I’m sure they’re just as full of strange jokes and weird encounters.

The area where dead characters await respawning.

There are three playable characters, all with an assortment of different abilities and roles. I chose Trait, a ranged-damage dealer with the ability to warp to different portals across the map. We were given the entire tool-kit of each character at the start, as we didn’t have enough time with the game to learn how to unlock them.

The three playable characters, Tommy, Stoney, and Trait (from left to right)

The music was, as always, hilarious, and great, I would’ve liked to see more of it, but there was a lot of the game we didn’t make it to that could very well fix that. As well, the progression seemed rather nebulous, there weren’t really any objectives as far as we could see, just minigames and exploration, but again our limited time is certainly a large part of why this seemed to be the case.

More than anything, this game has potential. What we saw was funny, enjoyable, and much more ambitious than Cossett’s World. I’m sure I’ll spend countless hours with my friends exploring every nook and cranny of this world and having a blast doing so.

Lombardi’s World was released December 7th on Steam so go download it to your library now! Want to hear more from One Trait Danger? Visit their Bandcamp at https://1traitdanger.bandcamp.com/ 

All screenshots are from this livestream of our session https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIqUgk2LPbw