Review: High on Life

Sometimes games come along where your enjoyment of them will be highly dependent on if you like another form of media. This goes beyond just, “I like Game of Thrones, so I like fantasy games”, this is enjoying one specific thing because you enjoy a different specific thing. 

It’s this exact scenario that High on Life exists in. Enjoyment of it will stem, in a very significant way, from if you like the animated comedy Rick and Morty. This is because that show's co-creator, Justin Roiland, was heavily involved in the development of it, including coming up with the original concept and writing a lot of the script, as well as playing a major character. 

The concept is that aliens have invaded earth because humans, as it turns out, can be turned into psychedelic drugs for them. So a cartel called the G3 corner this lucrative market and it's up to you to save the day. From there you and your sister are teleported to an alien city, you pick up a talking alien gun and set off on your mission to save the world. 

You set off on this planet hopping adventure as a bounty hunter with the help of Gene, a foul mouthed former bounty hunter who acts as mission giver and lore dump and takes over your house. Gene is an arsehole, he really is, but has a nice little character arc overall. Him being such a dick is indicative of the type of characters and humor you will encounter throughout the entire game, so you will probably decide if it's for you within the first thirty or so minutes of the game. 

This will be compounded by the fact that the first gun you pick up, a Gatlian named Kenny, is literally just Morty from Rick and Morty, voice and all. For me, this wasn’t a bad thing, I like the show so having him as my first gun was kinda cool and the very fact that your guns are sentient beings is a cool concept. 

I cannot stress enough though the smartest two things the game does. First, it gives you the option in the settings to turn down the amount of talking the guns do and second, it gives you more than one. If progress meant a new attachment for Kenny to change how he fired, but you still ended up with the same voice for the entire game, that would end up very annoying by the end, especially with the little vocal prompts about the secondary fire modes. 

As such, you encounter more Gatlians with different voices, and while they are the standard FPS arsenal - shotgun, SMG, etc, due to those voices it provides some much needed audio variety, though it was still just on the edge of annoying by the time I got to the end of campaign. Your mileage on that may vary, as it's probably gonna be the most subjective thing about the entire game. 

The actual gameplay is pretty solid, with the Gatlians having a decent punch behind them and each having an alternate fire mode that provides additional combat options, such as Kenny’s Glob shot that fires a large ball of slime that has AOE effect and allows you to juggle enemies who have been launched, which is a lot of fun but not actually necessary for the majority of encounters. These alt fire modes also open up new routes for getting around the levels and find the strange box like creatures that form the majority of the collectibles.

The encounters themselves throw a lot of enemies at you that require different strategies. It’s all very Halo to be honest, with the smaller enemies running up and requiring one well placed headshot to finish off, while the next one up will use cover and try to flank you. Larger enemies barrel in and try to melee you, taking more shots to take down. No one enemy feels like a bullet sponge, and taking the ‘combat puzzle’ approach will result in swift victory. 

Boss battles are entertaining, requiring you to use all of your unlocked equipment and skills at that point to take them down, and when they hit back they hit hard. The penultimate boss is probably my favorite and a real highlight of the game overall, with some cool effects that make it stick in your mind. 

Unfortunately, the game does have problems. I encountered audio bugs a lot when in combat encounters, with the sound suddenly changing like the speaker had been submerged in water. I had to uninstall and reinstall the game from game pass after my first play as it just wouldn’t launch for no reason at all. The frame can dip quite a lot, surprisingly not too bad during fights but more just running around the world, it's not insane but is noticeable. 

The character models for Gene and your sister, and her especially, when talking to you back at the house often don’t seem to be looking at you when talking to you. Now, this might be that your sister just did an epic amount of coke before everything kicked off and is supposed to be looking off into space, but it's just weird. Gene has three eyes, one of which doesn’t work, but still sometimes isn’t looking in your direction when talking right at you. It's a weird little thing that breaks immersion a bit, it's not a deal breaker by any stretch, just very distracting. 

Honestly the biggest problem, and this goes back to your enjoyment of Rick and Morty, is how much you can stomach the voice acting. It is an extremely voice heavy game, even by most FPS standards, and by extension of the fact it is a comedy action game that doesn't always hit and can get repetitive in spots. As I stated previously, it was just on the verge of getting annoying by the time I completed the game and while you can go back after the campaign to search for any collectibles you missed, you might not want to and then have the voice acting go over that edge. 

If you are looking for a solid FPS with a cool premise and some genuinely funny moments then you would be hard pushed to beat High on Life. If you hate Rick and Morty, this won’t change your mind, and could potentially increase it, but if you turn the voice acting down and take it as a decent but not spectacular FPS you might well have a good time for the around ten hours it will take to finish it. Considering it is free on gamepass, there is no reason not to give it a try.

Review: The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe

First all, a disclaimer: I never played the original version of The Stanley Parable. I wanted to, but life got in the way, as well as a deluge of other cool games in its original release, so it just never materialized. As such, Ultra Deluxe is my first play of the game at all, so be aware that no nostalgia is present here. 

The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe is an updated version of the original game from 2013. It is classified by developers Crows Crows Crows and Galactic Cafe say it is a remake and pseudo sequel to the original game. Honestly, I feel that is stretching things a bit, but what makes me feel that way is also kinda of the point. 

You play as Stanley, an office worker who likes to sit at his desk and push buttons. Loves nothing better in fact. There is a narrator who explains what Stanley is doing, and gives hints as to what to do next. You can walk and look around and, shockingly, push some buttons. That's about it. Now, do not let this lack of interaction fool you, the game is intensely clever and well written with genuinely funny laugh out loud moments throughout, but mechanics heavy it aint. 

The genius is the way the game reacts to what you are doing. Follow the Narrator’s instructions and things happen one way, but change just one thing on that path, and new possibilities open up, and the game and, more specifically the Narrator, reacts to that change. He can try to get you back on track, or just roll with what you are doing and the levels change to reflect your actions too, at least in some cases. 

The point of the game is to find all the different ‘endings’. I put that in inverted commas cause it feels more like a reset than an ending, you don’t see credits for example, but in each case you reach some kind of conclusion to Stanley’s story, and some are fairly mundane, while others are pretty wild and surreal. If you think you have a bead on what  the actual story is about, I can assure you, you don’t. 

The game is more like a meta-narrative on game design and interaction than anything more traditional and it excels in that, with knowing prods at tropes and design ideas any gamer has experienced a hundred times over, with some laugh out loud comments from the narrator who does a fantastic job at conveying everything. 

Ultra Deluxe’s only real downside is that, as per the developers, it is a pseudo-sequel. What this means in broad terms is that at some point you walk past a door marked ‘new content’ which has, as you might infer, the new content in it. Some other bits have changed in the main game, but without being hyper familiar with the original release you probably won’t even notice. Honestly though, it feels more like it could be a patch rather than any kind of meaningful sequel, though given how meta the game is overall, feels exactly in line with what The Stanley Parable is about. 

I really enjoyed my time with the game and if you haven’t played the original definitely give this a go, it is super fun, has some knowing winks and nods for those who know and is genuinely funny to boot. The voice acting is fantastic and will provide more than enough entertainment to justify the cost. A great, different game all round.

Review: Creature in the Well

Picture this: A lone robot wakes up in a windswept desert. Nothing but sand as far as its optics can see. How it got there? Unknown. Why a desert? Unknown. A short walk and it finds a small town, with no one around, a well at one end and an opening in a mountain at the other. 

This is the premise of Creature In the Well, and it is a very effective one. The game combines atmospheric story telling, a quality art style and some interesting gameplay into a game ultimately let down by level design and imprecision. 

The scene I set out above is the opening of the game, and you soon discover that the residents of the town have taken refuge from ‘The Creature’ a malevolent being living in the mountain. Your character goes inside to discover various parts of a machine and if they are all reactivated then the sandstorm cutting off the town outside will cease. The wrinkle is the titualur creature, for it doesn’t want you to turn the machine back on. 

What proceeds is what would be a fairly standard hack and slash game except for two things: There are no enemies other than the creature, and pinball. Now, the pinball you might be thinking of isn’t quite what the game delivers. This being a hack and slash, your character picks up two sets of weapons, charge tools and strike tools. These range from drain pipes to swords and spiked whips and you use the charge tools to grab the energy balls floating around the environment or that are shot at you and the strike tools to blast them outwards. 

Doing these actions solve environmental puzzles and gets you through the strange boss encounters, but you don’t actually attack enemies since there isn’t any. What you have to strike are pinball table bumpers that get charged up and eventually disappear, clear the room you’re in and a new path will open up. This could be a secret path or the way you need to go to move the game along. A secondary effect of charging these balls is you are provided with ‘power’ the in game currency. 

This currency is used to open sealed doors as well as upgrade your character and activate nodes to teleport you closer to the boss encounters when you die. I say ‘die’ but you don’t really, you run out of health and the creature then rears up out of the shadows, snatches you and tosses your barely functional body out of the well. It’s a good way to handle it, and adds to the dark cartoon feel you get from the visuals and sound design. 

Unfortunately, it's the pinball mechanics that ultimately let the game down. Starting out as an interesting and fun twist on the standard mechanics of the genre, especially when multiple energy balls are bouncing off lots of bumpers with a brilliantly satisfying sound effect, it quickly becomes an exercise in frustration. This is down to the inherently imprecise nature of pinball as well as what some of the rooms in levels ask you to do. 

On more than one occasion, I would walk into a room and it seemed fairly obvious what to do, get the balls to hit two bumpers on the left and right. However, once I did this and they disappeared, five more smaller bumpers appear with a five second count down above them. I have to get the balls to power all five in under five seconds to progress. So I start slashing to catch and charge the one ball in the centre of the room plus the others randomly bouncing around the room, to a maximum of three. This can take way longer than the count down, especially as the balls will bounce in all directions when they hit the bumper, meaning you have to reset and try to capture and charge again and hit all five in the time limit. 

The balls bouncing can help but not always, and all too often I felt it was more luck than any kind of skill that I got through a room as the balls flying about happened to hit the bumpers at the right time. It’s a level of required precision that that game cannot deliver on, and is compounded by extra obstacle in certain rooms, especially explosive towers. 

These towers pop up in certain rooms and are either static or moving. When a charged ball hits them they explode with a large radius, damaging your character. Now you do have a dash move and can move around if you aren’t actively charging a set of balls, but this can prove very tricky to pull off, not to mention that the amount of on screen information can become difficult to keep track of, so you just don’t see when the towers are about to fire. 

All that just occurs in the standard sections, things get even more hectic when you reach the boss rooms. Each level has one of these, and it involves a square platform in the middle of the room and various bumpers and hazards around the edge, clearing all the bumpers moves you onto the next stage of the fight, simple right? No, not as simple as you might think as the creature’s arms will rear up out of the darkness and launch damaging blasts at you. These are slow moving and can be destroyed by firing charged balls at them, but it is one extra thing to keep track of in a room that will combine every element you have encountered so far: explosive towers, timed bumpers, launchers and bumpers that fire beams of damaging energy. All that plus parts might be spinning or moving, blocked off or some other such wrinkle. 

Now, it's not like these are impossible to complete, and they are certainly a challenge, but my previous comments about the imprecision just lead to anger inducing moments that detract from the overall quality of the game, because this isn’t one of those situations where you never feel like it’s your fault. For me, it was always the games fault because the ‘combat’ such as it is simply isn’t tight enough to make what you need to accomplish fun. 

I do still recommend Creature in the Well though, because the attempt is what is important here. The developers took a tried and tested concept and put their own spin on it, attempting something that has rarely been tried before. Depending on your opinion, that attempt might have ultimately failed, but they took the chance, and everything else about the game is top notch. Gaming won’t change without those chances being taken, so support this game for what it gets right and wrong, because that is how things move forward, and if you have a game pass subscription, its free, so what have you got to lose?

Review: Blair Witch

Games are very different to movies. It’s an obvious statement, but it’s worth mentioning again, because it is this difference that is at the heart of the issues with Blair Witch, the new game from Bloober Team. It is a competently made game, but the deft touch required to transfer the themes of The Blair Witch movies to a video game setting simply isn’t there and it lets the overall game down. 

As I said though, it is a competently made game. You play as Ellis Lynch, former cop and army veteran, as he travels to the Black Hills Forest to search for a missing boy some two years after the events of the very first Blair Witch movie. Ellis brings with him his pet dog Bullet, and off the two go to attempt to find this small boy. What happens next ranges from the genuinely creepy to the downright obvious, but tries to play on the idea of the titular witch in the woods. 

To be fair, the writing isn’t half bad with Ellis feeling like a fully fleshed out character who is desperately trying to get his life back on track. The characters around him and certain events that transpire add to this feeling, with flashbacks to his time in the army showing a man suffering from deep emotional distress. The good news is that this isn’t done in a ham fisted way, as you can never be quite sure if its the evil presence in the woods or Ellis’ issues that cause the incidents. 

This is all helped along by the best thing that the game has: Bullet. The dog follows you around, pointing out dangers or foraging for clues as well as helping direct you into the seemingly directionless forest. Petting Bullet or giving him a treat helps ground Ellis back in reality, again showing the character as something more than just a blank slate FPS protagonist. 

Despite all of this, the game is let down by its name and the cinematic history that comes with it. Should you compare a game and the movie it's based on? That particular debate is still open and yes, as I said at the start of this review they are very different mediums, however games can convey the themes and core tenants of their license while still being their own thing. Blair Witch doesn’t do this. 

The movies are all famous for being ‘found footage’, i.e. the movie you see is actually camcorder footage shot by the protagonists and found at a later date. The game doesn’t do this. It does have a camcorder that allows you to watch tapes you found throughout the world. If you find one with a blue sticker it's just footage you can watch, find one with a red sticker though and you can pause it when something changes and that change is reflected back out in the real world. Its neat, but found footage it is not, and it's also about the closest thing, apart from setting and the strange stick figures you come across, to the Blair Witch license you are going to get. 

Therein lies the problem. The Blair Witch Project and it’s sequels are more about what you don’t see rather than what you do. There isn’t any combat to speak of, and it's more about sinister goings on around the protagonists that mess with their perception of reality rather than anything you overtly see. The game puts the viewpoint in first person and shows enemies you have to fight off with the aid of Bullet and a flashlight, others you have to avoid, making it just not creepy enough to work with the license for me. 

I remember going to the cinema to watch the original film when I was younger and coming out with a distinctive ‘meh’ attitude towards it. I then attempted to go to sleep and that was when the films brilliance dawned on me and I had trouble sleeping for a few nights after. You don’t get that with the game, there are some messed up moments and sequences where images and sound coalesce into something that bamboozles the senses but as soon as you come out of it you are back to a standard FPS thriller, one that could have its own unique and original IP and still be just as effective, the developers wouldn’t even need to change that much about the story and in game assets. 

To be fair, I came around on the game by the time I got to the end, with the story and overall writing enough to provide a satisfying conclusion and the atmosphere doing just enough to make it work. I did not believe, and still do not, that it requires the Blair Witch license and honestly I think it would be better without it as it would have room to just be its own thing without the added pressure of living up to the source material. 

Given that the game is on Game pass, there are certainly worse ways to kill a few hours, but put the notion of this being a licensed game out of your mind, it is a unique horror experience that for some reason was given a name unfitting of its nature.