SQUANCH

HIGH ON LIFE 2 is a creative, funny and chill adventure with nagging problems

- By Morgan Park

I'm sorry Squanch Games, I wasn’t familiar with your game.

No, literally. Despite first-person shooters filling my lungs with oxygen on a daily basis, I gave up on High on Life in 2022 because I burnt out on the Justin Roiland schtick. Rick and Morty was the perfectly messy nihilistic comedy for 18-year-old me, but daily life is drenched in enough ego madness these days that I no longer see the fun in observing something true and then beating it to death with a flipping massive sledgehammer. High on Life was never so unrelenting in its cynicism, but it was grafting Roiland’s voice to my hip in the form of a pistol that got us off on the wrong foot. It’s a relationship I never bothered to mend after the disgraced Squanch co-founder resigned in 2023. High on Life 2 instantly feels different without him. It’s nicer, calmer - still very much violent and referential and fourth-wall demolitionist in its humour, but not entertained by cruelty or allergic to being genuine.

An early moment in the first game, wherein a child blocks your path and the joke is that you can kill a kid and isn’t that messed up, would feel out of place in High on Life 2. It’s a game that’s unabashedly a fan of gross stuff - of squishy bits and “trick holes” of body horror and buckets of blood, and of the occasional fart joke - but doesn’t believe that’s a pretence to be insufferable. It leaves behind the apparent embarrassment at being commercial art that permeated Roiland’s past works and is largely comfortable being a fun shooter and serviceable send-up of big pharma.

OUTLAW KING