Comedy and video games go hand in hand. Put a controller in the hands of a gamer, and something funny is bound to happen. It’s surprising how most games take themselves too seriously and how rare it is when any game leans harder into the inherent humour of the medium. Squanch Games recognised the potential for comedy in video games in Trover Saves the Universe, not just with surreal and crass jokes, but by pushing players to do absurd things within the game itself. While that title was a modest action-adventure game, their next project would be something more ambitious: an epic first-person shooter. How many gags can be packed into a single game? What if they all fail to land? Time to find out!
High on Life follows a deadbeat slacker, a silent protagonist who’s just graduated high school and is drifting through life in a rundown suburban trailer on Earth. In a hilariously abrupt inciting incident, the universe’s most notorious bounty hunter is assassinated by the ruthless alien cartel lord Garmantuous, sparking a galactic bounty rush. However, it is also turning Earth into ground zero for the cartel’s harvesting operation, with humans being turned into a trendy recreational drug called “Warp”. Thrust into this chaos, the protagonist stumbles upon a talking alien gun named Kenny, who recruits them as his new “host”. Together, they become an unlikely intergalactic bounty hunter, teaming up with more sentient “Gatlian” guns to dismantle the 9-Torg cartel, rescue humanity, and uncover deeper conspiracies in a psychedelic sci-fi cosmos.
The narrative is structured around hunting down the cartel’s five main bosses, blending bounty-hunting quests with side stories of redemption, absurdity, and absurdist banter. It’s framed as a road trip-meets-buddy cop adventure across alien worlds, with heavy Rick and Morty-esque satire on consumerism, fame, and interdimensional bureaucracy. A slacker-turned-bounty hunter dismantling an alien cartel story seemed like it would be straightforward, but it unfolds in a nonlinear, episodic structure that feels like a string of loosely connected vignettes rather than a cohesive arc. Acts are divided by boss hunts across vibrant worlds, which is fun for exploration, but transitions between them are abrupt and dense with filler.
High on Life is almost a 15-hour game that should have been under ten. A typical side quest might start as a quick favour for an NPC, but balloon into a 20-30 minute chain of fetch tasks, mini-bosses, and escalating gags, like negotiating with a sentient vending machine or infiltrating a bizarre alien festival. These moments rarely influence the protagonist’s growth and have no bearing on the plot, and deliberately have unrewarding pay-off for the sake of a joke. The first time, it’s kind of funny, but these types of gags wear thin quickly when they’re done in succession.
Most of the improvisational banter becomes grating, and the repetitiousness of the same few voice actors being recast as everyone is exhausting. The endless rapid-fire jabbering and pop culture references lead to a feeling never thought possible: comedy fatigue. It’s a sensation when the body becomes numb to the constant stimuli of gags and jokes. The barrages of quips are constant during combat, exploration, and downtime, with some scenes stretching into full-blown stand-up routines that sometimes halt progress. The only gags that don’t interfere with the game or become obnoxious are the fact that players can watch entire full-length films on the TV in the protagonist’s living room. That’s right: Blood Harvest, Demon Wind, Tammy and the T-Rex, and Vampire Hookers are real films in the game, and the fact that gamers can waste time watching them in their entirety if they choose to is genuinely hilarious.
The most impressive aspect of High on Life is its art direction and striking visual design. There isn’t any shooter out there that looks anything like this. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s like childish cartoon scribbles made into flesh and blood characters. The graphics are intensely lurid and blur the line between cartoony and realism with their use of convincing and tangible camera effects. Even the materials look persuasive, and animations move with believable weight.
At its core, High on Life is a single-player first-person shooter with strong adventure and exploration elements, blending fast-paced gunplay from games like Doom or Borderlands with Metroidvania-style progression via a hub. The combat is arena-like, with locations festooned with cartel goons, mutants, and bosses in enclosed battles. Controls are standard: aim/shoot, dodge-roll for evasion, and interact for environmental kills, which have satisfying kinesthetic feedback and appropriate crunch. Gameplay shines in short bursts with its frenetic fights, and once in a while, a joke lands while in combat. It’s forgiving on resources, focusing on fun over grinding and keeping combat moving at a steady pace.
As a shooter, High on Life is competent and even imaginative at times. It won’t supplant its contemporaries due to how standard it is. The main draw is the humour and draw of Justin Roiland’s style. Anyone who isn’t a fan of his brand of comedy that leans on gross-out or crass gags while lampooning game design won’t care much for the merely adequate first-person action. For anyone who is already a fan of Rick and Morty or the other Squanch titles, High on Life still may be a bit too much with its endless comedy assault on the senses. A little restraint would have been appreciated, but instead, this game just comes off as desperate.
