High on Life Review: laughter and bullets from the writers of Rick and Morty

The easiest way to describe High on Life is to compare it to a long-running interactive Rick and Morty spin-off the cult series to which Justin Roiland owes a large part of its success and which represents to all intents and purposes the videogame production matrix of squanch games, the team founded in 2016 by the volcanic Californian author. It is certainly no coincidence that the name of the studio, initially called Squanchtendo (we imagine that someone in Kyoto didn’t like it), is an explicit homage to the equivalent of “smurf” used in the multiverse of the dynamic duo, mostly in reference to articulated practices of autoerotic rubbing.

The game’s adherence to Roiland’s canons of humor therefore represents one of its main strengths, within the framework of an industry where it is increasingly difficult to deal with the sensitivity of the public, especially overseas. Although it is a courageous title all in all, however, High on Life he failed to fully conquer usboth on the narrative and on the playful side.

High on life

Much like its television progenitor, High on Life is a product imbued with a humor as cynical as it is foul-mouthed, supported by a writing that – armed with a proton backpack and wit – chases the zeitgeist without caring about the criteria of “politically correct”, reinterpreting Camusian absurdism in sitcom material. Starting from these assumptions, it is clear that the fundamental requirement to appreciate the work of Squanch Games is just a good degree of harmony with Roiland’s humour, which saturates every playful situation with a hail of jokes full of intergalactic nihilismpop satire and laughing triviality.

Just to give an example, at a certain point you will find yourself in your inventory a keg full of alien seed, obtained as a free sample after dialogue that pushes the imagination to some decidedly awkward places. While it is true that moments like this, sometimes associated with brutal fourth wall fractures, end up punctuating the adventure with a “de panza” concento of laughter, the length of the campaign and the frequency of the interludes orchestrated by the team highlight the main limit of a comedy which works best in small doses, perhaps in the frame of a more concentrated plot and with some dissonant nuances, such as the dramatic notes that sometimes overshadow the script of the Rick and Morty episodes. Speaking of the plot of High on Life, this immediately presents itself as a simple pretext for the player’s deeds: in the role of a reckless teenager, we will therefore be called to oppose the aims of the G3, a criminal consortium intent on turning humanity into a sustainable source of psychotropic high.

We will find to support us in the enterprise former bounty hunter Gene and a handful of sentient weapons, which in addition to providing us with the necessary firepower to survive the cartel’s threats, will take care of filling the void left by the protagonist’s silence with the sound of chatter. It is a brilliant intuition, which works above all by virtue of good characterization of each of the weapons available to the user, to be recovered by completing the missions which, size by size, will see us thinning the ranks of the G3, up to the final battle with the fearsome Garmantuous.

Along the way, as anticipated, we will run into an endless sequence of situations bordering on the absurd which, between highs (some inventions are nothing less than brilliant) and lows, manage to make up for the script’s inconsistencies quite well, backed by colorful and thought-provoking sci-fi imagery. Unfortunately, however, the gameplay also shows some significant declines, which undermines the potential of the recipe developed by Squanch Games.

Fun yes, but with reservations

The playful roots of High on Life sink into the tradition of arcade shooters to give life to a simple but generally functional gunplay, which entrusts the peculiarities of the arsenal with the task of amplifying the variety of shootings that mark the progression.

To our first adventure companion, the slime shooter Kenny (basically a paperback version of Morty), the spingarda Gusclosely followed by Sweezy needle gun and from the massif Creaturea prolific family father and mother capable of projecting an infinite amount of lethal little monsters onto the field.

The excellent diversification of these chatty instruments of death, each endowed with at least one secondary fire mode, is in fact the backbone of a gameplay that in the first instance encourages the user to fully exploit the capabilities of his war kit, only to then collide with a basic repetitiveness which, along the way, will become increasingly marked. The small assortment of enemy hosts (supported by an undoubtedly weak AI), combined with the lack of situational variety of the clashes, in fact tends to reduce the effectiveness of the combative flow, which at the end of each mission culminates in boss fights that are not always exciting.

Although these failures do not compromise the overall enjoyment of the title, there is still the feeling that the development team failed to fully exploit its concept. The possibility of buying mods to alter the behavior of weapons, for example, appears a bit underutilized, and the same goes for the elements from metroidvania inserted in the formula, mostly related to the special abilities of the Gatlians. Except for Tello’s grappling hook, a dagger with evident homicidal tendencies, the contribution of the other sentient guns on this specific front does not shine as it should, even more so considering how exploration – especially in the “backtracking” phase – offers rather modest prizes, generally limited to a few extra coins to spend at the pawnshop in Blim City, the main hub of the campaign. If the number and diversity of the settings is not in itself a problem, the gaps on the playful side can therefore increase the sense of “déjà vu” aroused by the space travels of the protagonist, as far as the crazy interlayers offered by the writing often help to resolve the situation.

However, we would like to reiterate that, net of its excesses and its defects, High on Life remains a worthy and in its own way unique product, more than capable of offering the public about ten hours overloaded with hilarious jokes and digressions on the theme of intergalactic extermination. It is one of those cases in which the distinctive qualities of a playful work manage to diminish the impact of its most significant shortcomings, giving the audience a valuable experience.

One dimension away from Rick and Morty

Even from a graphic point of view, High on Life shows quite evident limits: every aspect of the title, from the polygonal modeling to the animations (especially the facial ones), in fact shows more or less wide margins for improvement, within the framework of a proposal that in any case draws force from an artistic direction in great shape daughter of Roiland’s creative flair and therefore very close to the aesthetics of his most famous work.

The good work done on the level design front, which intelligently manages the play spaces, contributes to the value of the overall performance, sometimes effectively concealing the aforementioned limitations. Precisely by virtue of its particular stylistic code, the Squanch Games adventure makes it very easy to overlook most of its technical asperities, even more so considering that the latest patch of the game seems to have definitively resolved the frame rate problems present at the launch on Xbox Series X (now the title remains solidly anchored to 60 fps).

On PC High on Life doesn’t prove particularly taxing on the hardware, though the absence of support for technologies such as DLSS and FSR could make life more difficult for owners of configurations with a few years behind them. More generally, the list of available options guarantees the game a good scalability, although the range of settings is not exceptionally large.

For when the latest version of the title still includes some bugs, to which the occasional imprecision of the hitboxes is added (especially when holding the powerful Gus), the overall balance of the technical sector closes with substantially positive values, in line with those that characterize a certainly not perfect production, but certainly more than worth the time it takes to reach the credits.