High on Life is a new first-person shooter from the team behind Rick and Morty, and it looks a bit like Psychonauts from the eyes of a very, very stoned person.
At first glance, the game looks like a classic alien blaster, albeit with some unique enemies and kill animations. In one scene, you see the player character whip out a big knife and plunge it into the white top of an alien, which turns out to be a big white organic sphere the player character rips out from the alien's dome chanting "More stabbing!"
As the trailer goes on though, you really start to see Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland's trademark nihilistic humor and creativity come into play. The game tasks you with disrupting a sophisticated alien drug operation that somehow uses humans to get aliens high. There's a highly disturbing poster marketing a "hyperbong" that allows "the intense high of humanity" to be felt by everyone. There's a cutscene later in the trailer that looks like a mighty convincing trailer for some sort of trippy Rick and Morty spinoff series.
High on Life comes from Roiland's studio Squanch Games, which is known for gross-out platformer Trover Saves the Universe and "nightmare adventure" VR comedy Accounting+.
"I wanted to make games that I wanted to play, and that was the spark that sort of lit the fire of Squanch Games." Roiland said in a press release, "Then we shipped Trover, we shipped Accounting+, and now we’re on this absolute dream game that we were kind of building towards this whole time."
High on Life launches exclusively on Xbox One and Xbox Series X in October. It'll also be a day one Game Pass release.
Fall 2022: High on Life: Squanch Games details how it's bringing one of the most anticipated upcoming Xbox Series X games of 2022 to life.
