When High On Life took the stage at this year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live show, I was reminded that not enough shooters are trying to make us laugh. They’re so serious, and not even just the competitive multiplayer! Whether it’s over-the-top demon slaying or “grounded” tactical military assassination, you rarely see a game playing with the inherent absurdity of dropping bodies by the dozen.
Justin Roiland and the folks at Squanch Games craft a rare comedic FPS that is undeniably the work of the creator of Rick and Morty: your weapons are aliens who talk incessantly about their neurotic worries and violent fantasies, often breaking through the fourth wall to bluntly a point.
I think that’s a great idea for a game, but I understand why some people cringe. A lot of people got a little worn out by the whole Rick Sanchez shtick around season 3 of Rick and Morty (the Pickle Rick season), and after the whole Szechuan Sauce incident (opens in new tab) showed how annoying the show’s fanbase could be, it became fashionable to dislike Rick and Morty. I still love the show, but it’s lost some of its charm, and Roiland’s whole thing hasn’t changed much in High On Life, though we’ve yet to see a character fill the narcissistic nihilistic role of Rick Sanchez.
High On Life is enough like Rick and Morty that I noticed an immediate negative reaction to the Gamescom trailer (opens in new tab) on my social feed. Some said it was “painful” to watch. I think that trailer was too much. Three minutes of the Morty gun ignoring the boss you’re fighting was empty, even if he got some funny jabs like “come on, admit it, we’re hurting you!” I wasn’t convinced until I saw this 25 minute gameplay demo (opens in new tab) shared by IGN a few days later.
The longer video shows a shortened version of an early mission. It sounds like the meat of the game is on the hunt for bounty targets, finding new weapon-foreign companions along the way. Doom-esque arena battles and platforming challenges are punctuated by choice-driven dialogue moments in which, for some reason, the Morty gun does the talking (perhaps translating into alien speaking?).
This was the first time I could really appreciate how beautiful High On Life looks. The alien designs are wonderfully funky and gross – when you shoot the Morty pistol’s secondary grenade out of its “trick hole”, the whole gun briefly flies around like a wet noodle. Not to mention that every line that comes out of your gun’s mouth is believably animated and lip-synced. This is not a budget game.
Like Rick and Morty, not every High On Life joke ended up for me, but the ones that did still make me laugh a day later. I had a good laugh at the boy who dares you to shoot them. The Morty gun refuses to fire when you pull the trigger first, but eventually admits, “Wow, I didn’t think we’d be allowed to kill them. Normally you’re not allowed to kill kids in games. Are you? happy now? A child is dead. There goes our E for all rating.” Even when it pokes fun at the unkillable children of video games, High On Life holds back in a way that’s reassuring rather than going for full-blown shock humor, and pulls back even later to soften the tone: the self-described” child” sounds more like an adult doing a child’s voice, and when you talk to his mother a little later, she confirms that he was actually 30 (which is still an adolescent for their kind, but “not as bad as killing a 5 year old”).
A few other smaller lines have done me pretty good too. When you suddenly shoot one of the two alien bug guards who tell you to beat him, the other reacts in shock with, “Hey, you just killed Jason!” While mowing down virtual bad guys in video games, I sometimes think about the implications that these are people with names, careers, and loving families. I appreciate that High On Life hits this note in an absurd, dark, comedic way rather than, say, Last of Us 2’s heavy-handed NPCs that almost at realistic.
And then of course there’s the knife that’s only interested in cutting things (opens in new tab) and eat their assholes. Knifey probably opens his piehole one too many times during the mission, but I still chuckled at one of his introductory lines countering the bug guards in the room. “I’m going to cut out your asshole. I’m going to make it three times bigger. Your shit just falls out of there.”
If this demo turns out to be all High On Life – getting a bounty, talking to aliens, shooting other aliens, and fighting a boss – I think I’ll be pleased. The footage looks slick and there’s just enough Doom 2016 going on with Knifey’s glory kill executions and the grapple hook mode, which I’m convinced Squanch wants to make a good shooter in addition to all the jokes. And unlike so many Gamescom games shown this week, High On Life is coming out this year. It’s coming to consoles and PC on December 13.
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