High on Life

[Waggo]

I am thoroughly enjoying myself with this game.

 

Spent far too long in the movie theatre last night, just listening to the 3 Alien critics.  

[NecroMorrius]

Those three alien critics are RedLetterMedia, fantastic cream of the crop (or should that be best of the worst) Youtube critics. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/RedLetterMedia

 

There's a fair few in-jokes to navigate but it's all great. 

[K]

The jokes in this are absolutely moronic. I was playing during my lunchbreak, and came across a character called Ole Wet Grundy. You can ask him why he's called that, the reply is something like "well, son, they call me Ole Wet because I piss myself the whole time. Yup, I just love pissin'. Doing one right now. Oh, that's a good 'un."

 

It's not even a joke, it's just someone doing a wee. The actual game seems OK-ish, and the visuals are surprisingly good - I'm not 100% sold on the aesthetic, but I quite like the Jim Henson / Oddworld vibe, and it's technically pretty accomplished. The humour is just abysmal though. There's one joke - aliens that swear - and every dialogue exchange goes on for fucking ever. Rick & Morty was funny and edgy, but it was very clever too; is the edginess of that programme without the cleverness. It's like the fanbase of Rick & Morty made a game, rather than the actual people who make the television series. This is not for me, unfortunately.

[Boothjan]

3 minutes ago, K said:

The jokes in this are absolutely moronic

 

Yep 

 

YMMV but it was one of the best things about the game IMO!

[feltmonkey]

I tried out High On Life for about an hour or so. It's interesting that the game polarises opinion, because for me it's a solid 7/10. It gave me nostalgia for the raft of 7/10 shooters on the Xbox 360. The game it reminded me most of was The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, a game I had forgotten about the second I finished it. I have no idea why I bothered to finish it. Relentlessly average, utterly forgettable, with a gimmick that must have kept me playing, even though the gimmick itself is a bit "meh." However there is something nice about a solid 7/10 shooter. You follow the corridors and do the gameplay and the story happens and then you get on with your life. They're just unstressful. I quite liked going down HOL's colourful corridors and shooting the generic enemies, and exploring the little game hub. There are some powers - a hook thing that you use to swing from one place to another, and I just got a warp thing. Some of the enemies seem to parody Halo enemy behaviour.

 

Obviously, the thing people are bouncing off is the humour. Other posters have pointed out the phenomenon of people claiming to have never heard of Rick and Morty or saying they've watched two minutes of the show and could tell instantly that it was beneath them. I'm not one of those guys. I've watched all of the first four series' and I really like it. It's funny, and sometimes unexpectedly deep. The moment in the first series when R&M have to bury their own mangled corpses from an alternative dimension and assume their identities while Mazzy Star's Look On Down From The Bridge plays is pretty powerful. However, High On Life is not prime Rick and Morty. I'm not going into Justin Roiland's recent domestic violence charges. He's not been convicted yet, so I'll wait before branding him a piece of shit just yet. However, HOL makes me think that perhaps Roiland is better with his full writing team. Dan Harmon isn't involved. I haven't seen any of the post-Harmon R&M episodes yet, so I can't compare HOL to them. HOL does contain some of the flavour of R&M, particularly in the voice acting and style of dialogue. The talking guns. The people claiming they don't ever shut up aren't quite right, but they do go on a bit.

 

"Oh God you just shot that guy oh wow is this what we're- oh I guess we are I guess we're doing this okay I guess this is what we're doing this is what's happening oh you shot them all even that guy oh man oh wow"

 

It's not funny in and of itself. It's the kind of thing that might sound funny in a pitch - "Hey, what if we put talking guns in this and they - get this - they never shut up!" Big laugh in the room. A funny idea, but if that was actually in the game it wouldn't be much fun to play unless the dialogue was genuinely funny. Most of the time, it's not funny. Sometimes it is. You can see the kernal of that writing room idea and the sheer audacity is kind of amusing. Like, later there's this character that pops up - a flying yellow guy who floats around in front of you and talks and talks and talks. I think it's a parody of Navi or Tingle or the thing from Destiny. Only this guy complains about his mother and his exes then starts getting creepy about the protagonist. Quite a funny idea. In practice it makes that 15-minute or so section really irritating. You can't shoot him.

 

However I did laugh out loud a few times, and not many games do that. HOL might be suffering in comparison to Psychonauts 2 which I'm also playing at the moment and is funnier, but when I shot an enemy and as they fell they said, "With my dying breath… I renounce… Jesus" I laughed. We've all seen the bit where the game basically forces you to shoot a child. That's not particularly funny in itself, but the fact that the game gives you an achievement for the murder called "Fallout doesn't let you do that" is pretty good. Then seconds later you meet the kid's mother and she doesn't seem particularly bothered and tells you it's fine. That made me laugh. It's a sly dig at the way some games will have you do something terrible and then absolve you for some convenient reason.

 

Rick and Morty is at it's best when it's humour is clever and when a bit of heart undercuts the nihilism. High On Life's humour a lot of the time is just cruel. I'm no edgelord, but I don't mind when humour has a bit of darkness to it. These days "edgy" humour tends to mean invoking Hitler, mocking people who don't deserve it, or just being an awful human being, but the best black humour is actually very right-on. I'm thinking of the likes of Get Out or Dr Strangelove. There should be a point. It shouldn't just be, "look at this pathetic guy. He's not even got any legs. How disgusting." The general silliness of the game is welcome, the mean-spiritedness is not. I mentioned that this is just Roiland, and perhaps he's missing the rest of his writing team, but this feels like we're getting only half the Rick and Morty experience. The ideas and understanding of the larger universe are missing, and in their place are nastiness, a belief that mentions of drug use and constant swearing are edgy, and frequent attempts to troll the player.

 

Despite these criticisms, I can see myself continuing to play it. I like the gameplay, and I wonder if the reason I am seeing the humour as a bit too mean is because I haven't got to the part where it becomes a bit more human. It's not a bad game. It's colourful and creative, and it certainly has character, unlike a lot of modern games.

 

TLDR - It's a 7/10 shooter with hit and miss humour. If you're the type to skip all my hard work writing all that and go straight to the tldr, that's all you deserve. 

[Nick R]

5 hours ago, feltmonkey said:

However, HOL makes me think that perhaps Roiland is better with his full writing team. Dan Harmon isn't involved. I haven't seen any of the post-Harmon R&M episodes yet, so I can't compare HOL to them.

 

I don't think any R&M episodes could be described as "post-Harmon"; unlike Community, he's stayed involved with R&M throughout its run.

[therearerules]

Gonna be post Roiland now. Or cancelled I guess.

[Gabe]

@feltmonkeyI bounced off it because I thought it was complete rubbish as a game, not because of the humour. I mean, I didn't think it was funny either, but I continued to play for a bit in spite of that. But I think it is one of the ugliest games I've played in a long, long time and the world had no life about it. There's a hub world but there's nothing to do with it, it serves no real purpose that having levels immediately moving to another wouldn't. The guns weren't particularly fun to shoot with, I found the maps all a bit of a gaudy mess and it was really, really boring.

 

I know nothing about R&M aside from it being an adult cartoon, so any association was neither positive or negative - my judgement was based on the game alone. And I suppose I was surprised at how much I really disliked it, because I do play a lot of objectively poor games. I guess I just found it all a bit obnoxious?

[Boothjan]

I've never seen a single minute of Rick and Morty but had a great time with this.  It's puerile nonsense, sure - but personally, I don't think that's a bad thing.

 

And aside from the humour, I certainly would never say it was boring, ugly or anything other than fun.  Totally disagree with it being lifeless too.

 

Clearly YMMV but there's decent, entertaining escapism here.

[RubberJohnny]

I'm completely confused why someone is claiming that the humour is cruel or right-wing, I'm struggling to come up with anything in the whole game that could be called that, let alone the first hour they played, and they don't provide any examples just assert that it's true from nothing.

 

Like the games biggest strain of humour is probably just scatological or jokes about bodily fluids in general, and then the second most prominent is just meta-satire of gaming tropes.

[K]

I thought there were quite a few jokes where the joke is the main character doing something cruel, like killing the annoying child, or accidentally killing the test subjects in the lab, or warping to the cottage and killing the family of treasure chests, or destroying the miniature village of tiny cute creatures.

[RubberJohnny]

Those are all choices you can take though, like you don't have to kill the child, you can just get past him and his mother says something different, same with all the others. There's one there you mentioned that I didn't even encounter.

 

(They also cannot be what feltmonkey is actually talking about because they're all long after the first hour he played, and the one he did see he said was funny and recognised the punchline was really about satirising videogames rather than actually killing a child)

[T Pot]

I couldn't get on with this. I'm a lover of the Rick & Morty, Family Guy, Final Space kind of humour but I just bounced right off this. 

 

I liked the trailers etc before launch, but playing it seems like another semi open world / hub world style shooter. Didn't like the feeling of the controls and the humour was just bleh. 

[LowCostMonkey]

I finished this last night. I really enjoyed it. I liked how the guns made previously inaccessible areas accessible, like Batman's gadgets. I also really liked how the areas in the game changed over time and how little sub stories evolved, like the section of highway, the kid with the drum, the interior of the house etc. It's definitely not going to be everyone though, that's for sure.

 

 

[Unofficial Who]

I didn't like the destruction of Cutie City not because it seemed cruel but because it was almost a carbon copy of a bit from Psychonauts.

 

There's no way I'd describe the humour as right wing. Tasteless in parts. Cruel to the point of pushing through and being funny? Sure.

 

I think that going forward High on Life is going to suffer as much as Rick and Morty moving forwards due to the recent news that @therearerules alluded to involving Roiland.

 

Possibly don't hold your breath waiting for a sequel.

[feltmonkey]

6 hours ago, RubberJohnny said:

I'm completely confused why someone is claiming that the humour is cruel or right-wing, I'm struggling to come up with anything in the whole game that could be called that, let alone the first hour they played, and they don't provide any examples just assert that it's true from nothing.

 

Like the games biggest strain of humour is probably just scatological or jokes about bodily fluids in general, and then the second most prominent is just meta-satire of gaming tropes.

 

Am I the "someone" you're talking about? Weird how you are talking about me as if I'm not here.  😂

 

I don't know where you got right wing from. As for cruelty, there's an awful lot of humour that derives from how pathetic or disgusting one character or another is. When you find the guy who ends up as your mentor, and he's in a terrible state, the game doesn't afford him any sympathy at all. I felt sympathy for him, but it really felt that the game was in opposition to this reaction and actively pulling against it. I was supposed to be disgusted and disappointed by him, not feel sorry for him. The treasure chests are living creatures you kill to get the coins inside. If you don't do this, you can't afford upgrades. The game constantly pokes you into killing creatures you might otherwise not by making the game much more annoying if you resist it. That floating guy I described is designed to be disliked or hated. The generic enemies sometimes react with fear towards you and basically surrender, but you can't progress without killing them. The game expects you to react with glee to the combat, and laugh as you dispatch essentially helpless enemies. Characters comment on how great it is that certain enemies are easy to kill. There are no likable characters - everyone is characterised as stupid or disgusting or both, and every character is dehumanised and considered worthless by the game.

 

That's what someone means by cruel humour. They might also say hateful.

[RubberJohnny]

Like the reason I'm arguing this, is I wrote a fairly positive 8/10 review for the game in the completed thread, and now you've written some nonsense about how the only people who like it are cruel and hateful, and I obviously would not have recommended the game or the humour if that was true! But it's not, and so even though I don't have any fondness for Rick and Morty or Roiland, I feel I have to clear my name and point out that you're talking shit.

 

And y'know, people who haven't played the game and will read your post will believe you, because people don't generally make up nonsense narratives about games they've barely played, as you have, for some reason.

 

Like if this is just you, as a Rick and Morty fan, going "ah not so keen on this Roiland guy now he's got all these accusations" and disowning a thing he's created, that'd be fine, but you seem to have disowned this in a way that is 1) not accurate, and 2) basically insinuates that the devs are bastards and anyone who was positive about the game is a terrible person due to false accusations, which seems to me a way more problematic stance than anything you're criticising.

 

For the benefit of people reading the thread, basically everything he's typed there about the game is wrong, especially about the characters, but also about the gameplay. Enemies don't surrender, the annoying guy actually can't be killed until he does a heel-turn on you and reveals he's an enemy, and everyone else is just reading the wrong things into an hour of experience.

[Benny]

There is a talking knife that gets an almost sexual joy out of you stabbing people.

 

Regardless of whether you find that amusing or not (which I did actually), the whole game is full of that kind of (cruel) humour.

 

When you first get the knife in particular

 

Spoiler

you can try and not kill the enemies in the room where you find it, but you cannot progress until you do. They both try to calm you down so that you don't kill them, and if you kill one of them the other ant type alien will cower in fear and plead for its life while the knife encourages you to kill him in great detail. 

 

The game doesn't progress until you do that.

 

The above is one example. I played the game for probably a dozen or so hours before I finally gave up on it, and I don't see anything wrong with feltmonkey's review. If anything I would be far far harsher about the game as I couldn't stand the actual gameplay parts. The humour will just be subjective, but it's almost certainly on the cruel side.

[feltmonkey]

1 hour ago, RubberJohnny said:

 you've written some nonsense about how the only people who like it are cruel and hateful

 

What??? No I fucking haven't.  I said nothing of the sort.  Why make something like that up?  I said a lot of the humour in the game is cruel.  How you would make the leap from that to what you've just written is beyond me.

 

1 hour ago, RubberJohnny said:

And y'know, people who haven't played the game and will read your post will believe you, because people don't generally make up nonsense narratives about games they've barely played, as you have, for some reason.

 

I posted my opinion.  I was clear that I had only played the first couple of hours.  I stand by my opinion from what I played, I wasn't making up any "nonsense narrative."  I even said that perhaps there is stuff later in the game that undercuts and balances what I percieved as a flavour of cruelty in the humour.  I respect your opinion of the game, but you must realise that other opinions are available.  My having a different opinion to yours doesn't constitute some kind of attack, as you seem to have interpreted it.  Your opinion was one thing, mine was another (literally one point out of ten lower than yours - I said it's a 7/10) neither of us are right because it's impossible to have an objectively right opinion about the quality of a game.  But listen, if you think that my post will put people off here's something for you - 

 

Hey everyone!  I thought High On Life was just alright, but other people such as RubberJohnny think it's better than that!  He's played more of the game than me, so maybe you should trust his opinion more than mine.  Don't let his strange response to my post put you off, I'm sure he knows what he's talking about!

 

1 hour ago, RubberJohnny said:

Like if this is just you, as a Rick and Morty fan, going "ah not so keen on this Roiland guy now he's got all these accusations" and disowning a thing he's created, that'd be fine, but you seem to have disowned this in a way that is 1) not accurate, and 2) basically insinuates that the devs are bastards and anyone who was positive about the game is a terrible person due to false accusations, which seems to me a way more problematic stance than anything you're criticising.

 

 

Nope, I didn't say anything of the sort and I don't think anything of the sort.  Insinuating that the devs and and anyone who likes the game are bastards?  What on Earth... I'm problematic due to this opinion you have made up in your head and assigned to me?  Really???  Seriously, are you okay?

 

By the way, I'm not passing judgement on Roiland's output based on the recent accusations for reasons I mentioned in my post - they're currently just accusations.  I can also separate the art from the artist, although that's always just to a degree.  Unfortunately I think we all have things we enjoy that were made by terrible people, not that we can say that Roiland is a terrible person yet.

 

1 hour ago, RubberJohnny said:

For the benefit of people reading the thread, basically everything he's typed there about the game is wrong, especially about the characters, but also about the gameplay. Enemies don't surrender, the annoying guy actually can't be killed until he does a heel-turn on you and reveals he's an enemy, and everyone else is just reading the wrong things into an hour of experience.

 

Well, as @Benny pointed out, I wasn't making that up about the game forcing you to kill peaceful enemies in order to continue.  That is the specific part I was referencing - I was just avoiding a spoiler.  In the first area, the slums, I'm pretty sure I'm right in saying that some of the enemies stop fighting you.  I remember one guard standing behind a pilar, lowering their weapon, and not shooting me, while sound clips of an enemy terrified by my bloody rampage played.  Perhaps that was just a bug or I'm just making things up and lying for some reason, or maybe it was in the game and actually in character with a lot of the game, who knows?

 

However, me being wrong is a concept I can get behind.  If you'd said I was wrong and the game is great, and the humour is really funny I'd have accepted that happily.  There's nothing as subjective as humour so of course what each person finds funny is personal to them alone.  I don't know why anyone would find one person not finding something funny that they liked an attack on them, as you have.  I can't imagine anyone not finding something funny and accusing anyone who did so of being a monster either*, as you seem to think I am doing. You found it funny, I found it hit and miss.  That's the strange thing - I said I laughed out loud at some of it!  I had one paragraph were I explained which parts of the humour I didn't like, which was roughly the same length as the paragraph where I talked about the parts of the humour I did like.  You've taken this paragraph and out of thin air spun a narrative where I'm accusing people of being terrible people.  I mean, I'd be accusing myself of that, as I've admitted laughing at quite a few of the jokes myself.  

 

Your respose is very strange.  I'm going to assume that we're all trapped in a Rick and Morty plot, and you are getting angry at a completely different review that fell through from an alternative dimension.  There probably could be a R&M episode that takes the piss out of people who consider someone expressing an opinion that is different to their own as a personal attack.  I'd watch that.

 

 

 

* Unless we're talking about Mrs Brown's Boys, in which case I do reserve the right to call you a monster.

 

[ilpostino]

On 19/01/2023 at 14:03, RubberJohnny said:

Enemies don't surrender,

 Snipers do when you get close. You're wrong there.

[NecroMorrius]

Brendan O’Carroll never beat up any women to be fair.

[Strafe]

Adult Swim have cut ties with Roiland. Rick & Morty will continue with voice roles to be recast. I suspect the chances of a High on Life 2 are slim.

[Unofficial Who]

3 hours ago, Strafe said:

Adult Swim have cut ties with Roiland. Rick & Morty will continue with voice roles to be recast. I suspect the chances of a High on Life 2 are slim.

 

Be interesting to see if Microsoft quietly pull the current game from GamePass given the allegations that have come out.

 

edit: High on Life is probably safe although I wouldn't rule out a voice cast redo which might be difficult.

 

https://www.polygon.com/23570027/justin-roiland-rick-and-morty-squanch-games-outed

 

 

Quote

Rick and Morty and Squanch Games co-founder Justin Roiland is out as CEO of the High on Life developer, the company announced Tuesday. The company tweeted from its official Twitter account that Roiland resigned last week, on Jan. 16. The news of Roiland’s resignation comes hours after Adult Swim cut ties with the Rick and Morty creator.

 

 

Quote

“The passionate team at Squanch will keep developing games we know our fans will love while continuing to support and improve High On Life,” Squanch Games tweeted. Squanch Games has not responded to Polygon’s request for additional comment.

 

[footle]

That’s literally the post before yours. Does it not count if it’s not in an embedded Twitter post?

[MidWalian]

8 minutes ago, footle said:

That’s literally the post before yours. Does it not count if it’s not in an embedded Twitter post?

 

I didn't notice so I've deleted it. Not in good health at the moment so a bit clumsy in general.

[Eighthours]

11 hours ago, Strafe said:

Adult Swim have cut ties with Roiland. Rick & Morty will continue with voice roles to be recast. I suspect the chances of a High on Life 2 are slim.

 

Recasting Rick and Morty seems like a wild swing - that show's toast soon, I feel, despite its huge popularity. As is Squanch Games, unfortunately, for the many devs there who aren't (alleged) abusers. I do feel a certain pang of 'wait for the legal process to conclude' about such things, but I guess that public opinion demands a response in this day and age. I have to say, I do assume the guy's guilty! But that's more based on people's reactions than actual known facts, which is never a great way of forming an opinion.

[Strafe]

When people get fired before any court judgement I tend to assume the same (guilty) tbh.

[RubberJohnny]

I’m not really sure why it’d be over for the studio, they’ve clearly got some talented devs and the game is a success.

 

If they’re gonna stick to making comedic games (which is not exactly a busy category) there’s plenty of web comedy guys they’ve already featured in this and different voice actors.

[Eighthours]

1 minute ago, RubberJohnny said:

I’m not really sure why it’d be over for the studio, they’ve clearly got some talented devs and the game is a success.

 

If they’re gonna stick to making comedic games (which is not exactly a busy category) there’s plenty of web comedy guys they’ve already featured in this and different voice actors.

 

How's the Weinstein Company doing these days?

[Gabe]

I think there's a vast difference between a studio very much built around and featuring front and centre a serial sex abuser and this situation.