High on Life's Spooky DLC Has 52 New Characters and Gabourey Sidibe

ign.com:

When Squanch Games announced yesterday High on Life’s first DLC, it revealed a venture into one of comedy’s most popular subgenres: the classic horror-comedy. The new paid DLC, High on Knife, which will be available sometime this October, marks a spookier tone for the game, and the teaser showcased just 40 seconds of darkness and body horror.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, that turn to spook started as, well, kind of a joke.

“We joked a lot about it while we were working on High on Life like, ‘Wouldn't it be funny if we made it a horror game?’ “ Squanch’s Chief Creative Officer Mikey Spano tells IGN. “And we were all like, ‘We should really just do it. We should do it.’ And so when a DLC came up we were like, ‘This is a perfect opportunity to try something totally different.’ “

Spano and Squanch’s Design Director Erich Meyr sat down with IGN just barely an hour after High on Knife was announced at this week’s Xbox Games Showcase Extended. They haven’t gotten a chance to look at much of the fan reaction at this point, but of course, there’s a question floating around of just how actually scary a game about smart-talking weapons can be, even if there are some tense moments in the base High on Life.

“Yeah, the tension's real,” Meyr says. “It's not the whole DLC. We have chunks that are intentionally meant to be scary and chunks that are very funny. What people expect from us.”

Spano adds that it’s about “50/50 funny and scary,” even if a lot of it is a spoof of the horror genre as a whole. And they tease that it’s a pretty sizable DLC too, lasting at about two-three hours. Spano jokes that “we definitely shot ourselves in the foot, scope-wise” with High on Knife, and that scope extends to a whole lot of new characters – even if