Artwork of the Joke: How High On Life 2 Turns ‘Funny’ Into ‘Fun to Play’

“Bible Adventures was the big one we got – I think that might have been the very first one we even tried to get. We’re big fans of it here – there’s a book by Gabe Durham that’s all about the history of that game and its developer, Wisdom Tree, and how they skirted the law to sell bootleg NES carts. It’s such a crazy story, and it’s an honor to feature the game here. I won’t spoil the other ones, but Bible Adventures does get featured hugely in the game during [a boss fight]. I’m really proud of that part – it took a lot of work and we did it just because it made us laugh and seemed like an insane thing to commit to.”

But alongside the jokes that include large quantities of planning, there are additionally ones that sprung up by likelihood – recreation improvement’s “improv”, maybe. Throughout a inventive course of there’ll little question be surprises alongside the best way, components you had not anticipated, or possibilities to take that simply occur to work out. In the case of High On Life 2, that got here within the type of the tutorial to assist get you on the brand new skateboard for the primary time.

“It’s very early on in the game, and to teach the player how to use their new skateboard we have Gene look up a video online, and he shows it to you,” Robbins tells me. “The video is just something I shot with my friend Jon Millstein, a skater and comedian, with my phone in a parking lot near the Los Angeles Zoo. I wrote this long monologue for Jon to read, full of specific game controls and instructions, and he memorized it nearly on the spot in an alien mask. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game and it came together quickly on the cheap, at the last minute. We shot it in an hour, I went home and edited it that night, and by the next day it was already in the game. That’s the Squanch magic!”

This “magic” is what holds the ambitiously hilarious High On Life 2 collectively, by means of crisp writing, inventive gameplay (skateboards!), and an extremely immersive world for us to discover. It’s developed with a swagger, assured that their humorousness will resonate with sufficient of us to take even larger swings at turning “fun to play” into “funny.” High On Life 2 is about to indicate us what can occur when a bunch of inventive recreation builders craft one thing that’s centered round a singular objective: To make us snigger our asses off.