Xbox Podcast: Justin Roiland says high-on-life players will discover new details ‘for months’

In the latest episode of the Xbox Podcast, Larry Hryb, Xbox Major Nelson, spoke to Justin Roiland about his new first-person comedy shooter. high in lifeand he made it clear that fans have a lot of work to do to find everything the game hides.

In discussing the game’s non-linear approach – the way players can choose which paths they want to take through the game and have their choices reflected back to them both narratively and mechanically – Roiland made it clear just how much work went into making sure A really deep level of detail has been put into the game. He also made it clear that this means there are deeply buried details and secrets:

“There’s so much – oh my god – there’s so much off the beaten path things in this game that people are going to discover for months, which isn’t the norm, you know? Usually it’s like, “OK, we really need to focus on the primary golden path.” And we have so much stuff, it’s like – we could have cut a lot of it. The fact that everyone made it is simply down to the passion of the team.”

Roiland didn’t go into detail as to what exactly those more hidden elements might be, but he was keenly aware of how much his developer Squanch had invested in making players feel like the game was responsive to the choices they made met the way:

“We tried to squeeze a lot of that into this game, from the bigger things like the order of the weapons you get and some of the bigger story elements, to the small, tiny, funny, comedic things.”

Small decisions – like telling one of a bunch of slum-guarding aliens which is hotter – bubble up throughout the game, something Squanch prioritized even with the extra voices, animations and more it needed. But the decision to include all that extra content (and do all the extra work for it) was driven by Roiland’s own gaming interests:

“I’m the kind of player that if I’m instantly bought into a game; like, would be a good example Fallout 3… I’m taking my time, I’m poking around, I’m kind of walking around the edges of the map. I want to see everything and see, ‘What did they think the players could do and what kind of response did they build in? … It’s just fun stuff that I love about games.”

When you feel the urge to start exploring high in life‘s very strange world for these mysteries, you can play the game now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S and Windows, and it’s part of Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass. Happy hunting!