It took me a long time to realize that Life in Sludge 2 is a diorama. And, wait! Same goes for the first game! These sun-faded, intricate, and often nauseating worlds you’ll crawl through are part puzzle-solving, part gymnasium, part treasure hunting, and they’ll see you jumping, climbing, Leaving a spray-painted sheen behind? The only thing that actually moves in these worlds is the player. Yes, there are some very slight exceptions, but they’re rare and spoiler, you’ll need to find out for yourself. To a large extent, “Life in Sludge 2”, like the previous “Life in Sludge”, is a moment that captures the complexity of human nature. It is a place, but it is also often a moment. We just hop around inside and mark the walls.
I think it’s hard to see this at first, because while the Sludge Life game is static, it’s defined by a frantic sense of movement at the same time. Apparently, it’s stripped-down first-person parkour at its core, which turns each building into a climbing frame of ledges, pipes, and mini-roofs. But there’s also a fisheye perspective to capture everything, complete with videotape artifacts and strobe noise. It makes your surroundings appear restless, fluid and mobile. You move a millimeter and the world squirms to show you new perspectives. Walls are alive. It all feels weird, and the first-person game camera is a creepy form. How do we enter this stagnant world? We are using an endoscope. Open! Say it!
Life in Sludge 2 is very similar to the first game in this and almost every other way. This is a good thing. These are tight worlds, but also worlds that I never felt like I could get everything out of them. The whole thing is full of paradoxes. You load these games through a beautifully implemented operating system, and from the start it feels like there are secrets everywhere. While in some ways these games involve the classic ideas of exploration, storytelling, traversal, puzzle solving, and collecting, there’s a sense of rules being broken. These are rage games, but they never let rage define the experience. There’s a ton of crafting and storytelling, but you’re free to create as you wish.
Anyway! Like all hangover tales, Life in Sludge 2 begins in an empty hotel bathtub. Your mission is to find friend and co-worker “Big Mud”, who went missing on the eve of the big break after a real orgy. As with the first game, this stalking involves exploring a tight open world filled with suspiciously fast food joints, gantries, faded public spaces, and shipping container buildings, all suspended over a toxic swamp, The horizon is shaken by the horizon in the distance. Terrible smoke. You run, jump, climb. When there are graffiti spots, you can mark them. When there are people, you hear what they have to say.
As with the sequel, it’s spatially larger and more complex than the first game, but confidence and tone have never been an issue with the series, so Sludge Life 2 can build on its existing strengths without having to Too many remodels. The absolute splendor of this new playground to help you unwind, unfolding from a multi-story hotel where superficial luxury has long since given way to austerity and toil. Various waiters were scattered everywhere, some were trapped under luggage, and some were trapped in the elevator door. The cleaners muttered as they swept the antique rugs with an antique vacuum cleaner. Other employees often smoke cigarettes or gaze into space in the informal breakout space behind their technical workplaces. Every job here is ultimately pointless or impossible, and what dignity comes from the way you fight it.
The hotel is incredibly complex, full of things to find and narrative threads to follow. Sure, there’s the big mud, but what happened to those cats who were sentry in their hotel suites? How can I get to the fifth floor, which seems impossible otherwise? Why is the elevator broken? What’s on top of the space? For that matter, what is the bottom layer?
Then Instant Tasks is what you’re looking for. The hotel is just one of many locations, all simultaneously colorful and faded, full of misfits, disappointments and moments of beauty – human vignettes – to be discovered. It’s a narrative hide-and-seek. Someone has a falling out with the boss and is willing to spill the beans. Someone is planting something they don’t want anyone to know about. In one restaurant, sad burgers burn on a flat top, while around the corner, two chefs make out in a quiet place. No matter where you look, “Life in Sludge 2” is like this. It’s full of little incidents that make me feel like I’m a 19-year-old dishwasher again, scrubbing pots with £2.40 and sitting on plastic lawn furniture playing an endless game of cards. It’s honest about what life is like, but it also finds moments that make you want to cheer. Everything can be subverted can’t it? is it not OK?
Leading you through it all is some of the best, cleanest post-Ubisoft open world stuff I’ve seen. There are plenty of clear paths in the game, marked only by the pull of grabbing things from the landscape you’re jumping around, but it never feels empty-handed. Hit all graffiti tags. Collect all gadgets. Unwrapping — and it’s a great place to start — all the fast-travel locations, which itself becomes a series of puzzles when you draw a purposefully uninformative map on top of your own landscape experience. And: find all the other graffiti artists, collect tapes, take a series of meaningful photos.
This is enough. With a quest to find the Big Mud, that’s enough to guide you through a land of wits and distractions, grim and cigarette mascots, disillusioned movie theater workers and talking pigeons, but also a lot of glee. The fun of locomotion, cloaking, and falling through the cracks. The joy of solving problems, making progress and not making progress. The joy of finding the perfect resting spot and briefly being part of the dioramas artfully scattered around you.
I suspect that the Sludge Life game has its own identity, like a cocktail with different ingredients depending on your own background. For me, they were hip-hop mixtapes passed from friend to friend, mixed with gangland comics and stickers and those weird late-night shows that TV channels used to run. I wish I was cool enough and smart enough to be a part of it.
But the more I played, the games also formed meaningful, illuminating connections to other games. Of course, Ubisoft is an open world game, although they do a good job of walking the line between expert refinement and open emulation. And there’s something like Gravity Bones, which gives you a glimpse of an aspect of a personal landscape that feels entirely imaginative and coherent. And there are games like Umurangi Generation, whose developers are thanked in the end credits: Another game about motion and stillness that generously offers an experiential world for players to explore.
Last night, I reloaded Life in Sludge 2 to take some screenshots, witness the game’s two endings, and some items that are still out of reach. Go through the OS with pop-ups and scattered folders, into the game, and blast across the map with those bright, sharp, momentary atomizer blasts of the fast-travel transporter. Back at the hotel it all started and I now find that each room has its own little diorama waiting behind the door.
A man fell asleep in bed, snoring on the radio. This is a dog watching TV alone. The bathtub was full of cat litter. One sullenly sits in a chair with a Venetian pet collar on his head. here it is…
That’s it, isn’t it? Stepping out of the corridor, I realized that, as far as the eye could see, the door stretched to the end, then the stairs, more floors, more doors, more glimpses of this fascinating and interesting place. Dioramas overflow from the windows, stretching into the distance. Who knows, in the mist and darkness, where it will end up drawing the line.
iGamesNews
