Terri Vellmann & Doseone, creators of High Hell and Heavy Bullet, team up once again to deliver a chill game to vibe to while sticking it to your corporate overlord.
Sludge Life
Developer: Terri Vellmann & Doseone
Price: $14.99
Platform: PC and Switch
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Sludge Life is the type of game that’s hard to describe without sitting someone down to actually play it. The basic crux of the game is that you play as an up and coming tagger named Ghost who’s trying to make a name for themselves. To do this you have to explore the (somewhat small) world of Sludge Life to find spots to tag with your graffiti art a la Jet Set Radio, albeit without the need for any unnecessary quick-time events. While scoping out locations for potential tag spots, you’ll come across one of the dozens of inhabitants of this world you can speak with to gain a bit more context of what’s going on around you. Now what’s going on around you is a massive strike against the Glug corporation that owns pretty much everything on your small island; from the burger joint to the cigarettes you smoke, Glug owns it all. You’ll meet distressed citizens, irate workers, and fellow taggers who you’ll need to earn the respect of by becoming the new king of the island.
Now what makes this game hard to describe to someone is the aspect of selling them on what you do in the game. You’ll explore the island to find spots to tag, which is done by simply walking up to predetermined tag spots and clicking them, and that’s literally it. There are characters to talk to that add flavor to the world and a few endings you can unlock by solving their requisite puzzles, but for the most part you just kind of hang out in this world and soak in the atmosphere; and boy is it oozing it. The world feels lived in and fully realized, to the point where there’s a rapper (Big Mud) whose music you can find and listen to along with the rest of the game’s soundtrack being music from in-fiction artists blasting out of radios scattered throughout. Even though what I was doing wasn’t particularly “engaging” in an active way, it was just a chill time.
Part of the game’s world building is getting to play around with a computer have access to that can have new pieces of software installed on it. There are pretty basic things like a satellite camera and glorified interactive screensaver, to a full-blown game that’s actually not half bad. This element of the game inspires some Hypnospace Outlaw vibes, but I wish it did a bit more with it; there are a lot of fun possibilities when you do a fake computer within a game but Sludge Life doesn’t quite realize its potential.
As you explore the world you’ll find countless goofs to uncover from a giant sleeping baby to a drunk who’s getting trashed in the gym shower cause they shut the pool down. It’s all humorous enough and adds to the world, but nothing is exactly “laugh at loud” funny. When I played the game at PAX earlier this year I was expecting a fully interactable world to play in, and while you can do some things like play basketball or hallucinate on shrooms, there just isn’t that much else to really do besides walking around finding spots to tag or take pictures. All in all, it took me a little less than three hours to find all the tags, two of the endings, and complete almost every task in the “to-do” file on your computer. While I don’t regret my time with the game, I just wish it gave me a reason to spend more time with it.
The Final Word
Caked in a heavy VHS filter with grimy beats emanating from every corner, Sludge Life is the anti-capitalist game to vibe to we need right now.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
