High on Life: There’s a Lot More to This Shooter Than We Saw at Opening Night Live
We’ve already seen quite a lot of High on Life, the expectedly bizarre, exceptionally gross new single-player shooter. The big pitch is that Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and his team at Squanch Games have built a first-person shooter that sees you bounty hunting for aliens, and taking them down with talking guns. But it was the little details that impressed when I got to try out the game for myself.
Opening Night Live included a boss fight from High on Life’s early sections, but my 25 minute hands-on (which you can watch below) included the full mission that leads up to that battle. The demo begins in your player-character’s house (populated by their exceptionally confused big sister and their new alien bounty hunter handler, Gene), then has you heading out into the technicolor alien city of Blim, and finally down into its sewer slums for a series of battles. In terms of regular gameplay, it’s a relatively short section - but I managed to fill that 25 minutes simply because of how much incidental detail there was to see.
That attention to detail begins right away - your character’s house is a literal home base, equipped with a Bounty 5,000 computer, which will assign missions and (when it’s repaired by Gene) allow you to take portals to different locations. But more immediately fixating was the house’s TV, which airs animated shorts (some made by Roiland himself) and even four licensed feature length movies. It’s an early sign not just of the game’s relentless approach to telling jokes, but the amount of effort that’s gone into adding fun detail for those who stop to look around.
Blim itself is something like Blade Runner’s Los Angeles if it had been designed by the cast of Sesame Street, a vomit of primary
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