The idea is great. Build your own arcade at the back of a laundromat and have the ability to play on all the machines you buy for your arcade. As you progress, you get more machines to buy and play on as you expand your arcade.

The laundromat management part of the game is designed to be a side hustle to the arcade and to be monotonous on purpose. It ties into the theme of the story in many ways, but even so, you still spend so much time on it that you end up wishing it was more fleshed out. Unless you ignore it completely, which is possible to do, and only play arcade games.

You are at the mercy of the arcade machines, if you don't enjoy them, there is not that much else to do. I liked 5-6 of them, but the rest I had to force myself to play on. The thing is, the more you play on them, the more money they bring in, so if you don't play on them a lot, you are gonna earn slowly, something that comes close to killing the game towards the end where you have some of the bigger expenses.

It's bad Kero Kero Kerorin.

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Oh, you're still reading? Okay. In theory, the traversal game with wholesome aesthetics works the same as the GBA cult classic. In practice, however, the game's low budget cuts corners where it cannot afford to, leading to lacking pathing, but most of all, lacking hitboxes. These issues make a run impossible without tool assistance, in the most literal sense. Even with a modifier, the end game is nigh undoable.

I don't like doing this, but I had to abandon the game in a later level, where it doesn't recognize a restart, which forces manual resets in a 30-40 second process each time. For stages that only take 2 minutes each, it grinded any patience I had to a nub. I just can't go through it any more.

I can only assume that Spinfrog, at best, only had playtesting done by the developers themselves or their friends that were too shy about addressing these glaring faults, because there is no way that this should've been made for sale in the state it is in.

At the €4 I paid, it's good enough to be reminiscent of its actual inspiration for a dozen or so routes. Anything beyond that is pure agony, which is a horrible shame.

EDIT: I have since forced myself to finish the last few stages. There is no improvement in the above statements.

First game completed in 2023, what a way to start the year. High On Life is painfully just ok. When this game was announced a few years back i was beyond excited, “a fps made by the rick and morty creator? sign me up!” I said, unknowing that this would be one of the games that i’d have the hardest time finishing just due to the horrible writing. As an honest fan of the earlier seasons of Rick and Morty, i was expecting the humor to be right up my alley, but instead the jokes were just painful, similar to the most recent seasons of Rick and Morty, which i haven’t liked nearly as much. My favorite thing about High On Life however has got to be the gameplay. The gunplay is extremely fun and each gun (or gatlian, as they’re called in this game.) has its own special type of fire rate and special abilities which adds a lot of fun to the game. As mentioned before though, the writing is absolutely dreadful, even though i thought it got better toward the end of the game, the first half of the game was genuinely one of the most painful experiences i’ve ever had, with the jokes just being “haha poop” and a shit ton of stuttering (Will someone please tell Justin Roiland that stuttering 50 times in one sentence and making references all the time isn’t nearly as funny as he thinks it is?). The story was pretty alright, i wasn’t too invested in it but it was pretty interesting. I also thought the boss battles were pretty neat, i always love seeing boss battles in fps, i think it’s something more fps devs should try doing in their campaigns.

In short, My anticipation for High On Life may not have paid off, but i did find some enjoyment in the game due to its gameplay and some of its voice cast. Maybe if the humor is more up your alley than it is mine then this game is worth playing, especially if you have Xbox Game Pass like me. (Extra points for having Zach Hadel just about everywhere in this game, the Jack Black cameo, and LEZDUIT)

Rarely do I ever have the honor of calling AAA titles "art house," but I believe that Saints Row IV deserves this title. Yes, it doesn't look that much different from the previous game graphics-wise. Yes, it's a massive departure from the beginnings of the series.

But that's missing the point. The reason they were able to make such an incredible video game is BECAUSE they didn't focus on graphics. The reason this game is such a proper art house gem is BECAUSE it's a departure from the series and the genre as a whole.

-- SPOILERS BELOW --

You start as the president of the United States. Within a few hours, the planet fucking explodes and you're one of the last humans alive on an alien space ship. You have to enter a Matrix simulation to try and take down the aliens from the inside of their network.

Already you can see just how different this game is from anything else in the genre. As you drive (or fly) around, everything is glitched out. Walls, cars, and people will "digitalize" before your eyes. Most of the people you see in the simulation aren't real, they're just generated by the system. The sky is always dark.

At first, it's all very lonely. But as you progress through the game, you discover contacts in the form of people from the previous games in the series. I feel like a lot of the enjoyment from this game can be extracted from playing the previous games first, it's unfortunate that a lot of people had this one as their one and only introduction to the series.

All of these elements combine to create a really unique atmosphere. The reason I call this an "art house AAA title" is because of the risks they took and the sheer audacity of it. It's all over the place and in a good way. Underrated masterpiece.