High on Life doesn’t care if you think it sucks, so why should I waste your time spelling it? It’s a bland action game, and a hollow, shaky irony locked in a defensive crouch that’s indifferent to you and its own existence. It sees being played as a test for all involved: as one shopkeeper tells you when you show up, “the longer you stay here, the more I need to look like I shit”. Taking stock of its downsides is giving High on Life more attention than the game advice deserves, so accept the tip and hit leave. If you want a high-quality, self-aware video game comedy, try Psychonauts or the caustic but compelling Battleblock Theater instead.
You stick to the details – fine. It’s a first-person platform shooter where you play as a Bulbani kid-turned-bounty hunter hunting down alien outlaws who discover they can smoke humans like weed. There’s a hub city, with dimensional portals to a handful of jungle or desert worlds, built around the loop’s main path, with pop-up “kill ’til the music stops” enemy waves and weird hidden collectibles. Your guns are modestly upgradable strangeworld-style creatures that can talk, or at least swear.
Each gun has its own voice actor, and there’s something intriguing about hearing how each gun reacts to the same situation: main hand cannon Kenny, voiced by Squanch Games founder and Rick and Morty creator Justin Roland, Basically a Morty without the anxiety complex. They’ll also yell out in combat to let you know the secondary fire cooldown has elapsed and alert you to your target. But mostly, they’ll tell you why the game sucks in various ways in the game, as if it needs any elaboration.
Enemies are a mix of melee, mid-range, sniper, and midboss styles; as Kenny often observes, they’re hardly worth killing. The platforming part is tolerable, largely thanks to the game’s generosity in letting you respawn on ledges when you fall into an acidic lake or bottomless pit. The sarcastic humor throughout is an exercise in picking taboos, from casual jokes about suicide to a knife called the Knifey, which loves to slash people (you know, in a sexual way). Everything is delivered in the same spirit of vague, toxic irony: NPCs telling you they’re only there to pass on quest information, and there’s a detective mode section that makes the detective mode section boring.
At least on the run-and-gun level, it’s not all bad news. Platforming abilities are varied and unlocked as you find new guns – a grappling hook and jetpack, embeddable razor discs you can stand on, and time bubbles to slow down spinning ventilation duct fans to ensure pass safely. It all adds up to some moderately diverting gated exploration, not that the game’s asteroids hold secrets. Some guns are also fun to use, even if they’re wholesale from better games’ arsenals. There’s a Seth Rogen-esque Pikmin launcher whose eyeless children grab enemies and temporarily change their allegiance.
Every now and then, the game feels like a relatively innocent sandbox shooter in the tradition of Halo or Far Cry, defined by vertical and inventive chains of alt-fires while utilizing terrain elements like pop-up fans, ziplines, or breakables Omni Cage – Hostile Fauna. But overall it’s rickety and forgettable, with enemies sometimes pulling out of the way or getting stuck in geometry, forcing you to search for them to start the next story stage. Every time High on Life finds you on the positive side, it takes a minute to sabotage itself with a bad joke. I’ve never played a game so focused on pointing out and reveling in its own worthlessness.
This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen Rick and Morty — it’s a show of wild reference and self-loathing in which a genius narcissist and his grandson make their way through a story ripped from the sci-fi classic. The scene goes on a bloody adventure. I admit to having a guilty fondness for Rick and Morty, mostly because it puts a notable reprieve from the bloat of a relatively stripped-down sci-fi video game like Callisto Protocol. At its best, the show blends the simple theatrical rules of Looney Tunes with the allusive speed of its various social media feeds.
It’s desperately eager to turn things around on well-worn genre settings, thanks to a wall-breaking fourth by a mad scientist who always finds a way to “save this shit.” The creators and myth-makers of video game worlds can learn from how Rick and Morty builds, plays out, and overthrows a premise—take Mr. Meeseeks’ episode, which reminded me of Philip K. Dick changing little things and Let the world mutate around it.
But with that pace comes an eventual online ennui and a near-serious display of desperation, but often slipping into the cynicism of a fringe lord and the same bland, scathing humor as South Park. It’s this side of Rick and Morty that High on Life draws most frequently. It’s an over-the-top midseason episode, full of handjob jokes, quest givers who get themselves in trouble, and cute critters who either end up getting minced or revealing themselves to be total assholes.
The problem is partly that the game behind the toxic meta-comedy isn’t something to celebrate, and partly that Rick and Morty’s dramatic principles don’t quite work when you wrap them in a bog-standard shooter. Again, this show is all about speed. Put one player in charge, and you create downtime and reversals — backtracking to areas with new platforming abilities, walking to a waypoint instead of summoning a portal or jump cut. Rick and Morty’s bustling 22-minute arc relies on Rick’s ability to essentially edit out anything stale — unless, of course, Rick’s boredom is a joke. High on Life is a 10 to 15 hour thing and he’ll give it up, which is why it hates itself so much.
The game not only solves this problem by judiciously handling repetitive content like Borderl ands, but also by actively designing delays to keep you excited–such as detective mode sketches and improvised annoying caricatures . If there’s anything really interesting about High on Life, it’s seeing this desire to mess you up conflicts with the need for readability and coherence. On the one hand, there are skits about the UI being replaced by spam, and the part about an unkillable flying head blocking your reticle, screaming its mom question. On the other hand, there are simple tutorial windows and HUD prompts that suggest the QA team sneaks in after hours to revise design documents, and for all its apparent nihilism, your gun also tells you about trying to shoot down story characters.
There’s a certain amount of creative commitment in the scenes and levels – hinting at the same experimental, genre-agnostic spirit you’d see in many ’90s first-person games. In between missions, you can settle the feud between your bad sister and the alien squatters — a slight splash of Mass Effect sitcom — and watch a live-action B-movie on your casual TV: I Since The Darkness. Thanks to High on Life, I got to know Denise Richards hamfest Tammy and T-Rex, for what it’s worth. Also thanks to High on Life, I got to see the inside of a (space) Applebees where you can click on the confession scene while ordering food.
Sometimes, revisiting an area is worth more than just the trinkets. In one mission, you teleport to a large, randomized area of the city’s main street to bridge a chasm. On your return, all the stranded drivers have turned their traffic jam into a strange little village. I would have preferred something like that, where the writing briskly unfolds some funny undertones and cuts down on the weak “provocative” jokes about killing kids.
Aside from its botched attempt to repackage Rick and Morty as a first-person shooter, High on Life is a covertly playable manifesto for a game that’s generally grim, explicit, and made of bad choices—in a nutshell. In other words, an incubator for knight idiots. If it’s serious about making a statement on its own, it might present itself as an expression of the worst art form. It doesn’t want to be done, really. Like when you find a bleeding teddy bear split in two in one particular canyon, High on Life just wants to get rid of the pain.