Pìxação, Cigarros, Cogumelos e Música, isso é Sludge Life 2

A primeira vista é isso, e realmente é, mas Sludge Life 2 é muito mais.
Sludge Life 2 é uma obra surrealista em formato de videogame, é a síntese das artes de Terri Vellman e as musicas e Doseone, é uma crítica todo o sistema capitalista, é uma forma de enxergar o mundo.

Com um humor ácido e visual incrível, esse é sem dúvida uma das melhores experiencias que eu já tive com videogame.

SLUDGE LIFE 2 É ARTE
JOGUE SLUDGE LIFE

What happens when you already have a perfect game and then you decide to include the option to double jump? You get a masterpiece, that's what.

All the little secrets, interesting characters, funny dialogues, world-building, environmental puzzles (like, how am I going to reach that rooftop to give the people of this fucked toxic swamp a bit or art?), make for a very nice experience immersed in this chaotic yet beautiful world that looks so much like our own.

The characters poses and compositions look so thoghful that inspired me of drawing again. Couldnt stop taking pictures of the scenes I would bump into.

Thanks to the devs for this fun game with such a interesting use of humor to reflect our own misery/hope as society.

Just Wrapped on Sludge Life 2, 100%ing it along the way. Another top-tier release from Terri Vellman and Doseone which carries the terminally online streetpunk aesthetic forward from the original. It's one of the few games that peddles in that "online" discourse that I don't find repellant, I think because of how authentic and earnest it feels. The writing here is consistently standout, with the world full of bite-sized morsels of interesting or funny dialog, and room-after room of sight-gag or just-cool-art (TM).

One of my favorite user reviews for the first game reads: "It's so relaxing, not just in a gameplay way, but in a weird cultural way. This is utopia, not the clean 1950s space program utopia, but it's a DIY slacker utopia where everyone just hangs out, ignores their job responsibilities, and listens to beats." It's the sort of atmosphere that you wish your adolescence took place in, while still being way-too-cool for that. Highly highly recommend scooping it up, especially if you're a fan of the original.

Sludge Life 2 is absolutely a more-of-the-same sequel but I just love what they're doing with these games and I can't wait to see what's next for that duo.

Sludge Life 2 is very much in the 'the same, but more' camp of sequels (which is not necessarily a bad thing by the way), so most if not all of the points from my previous review for Sludge Life still stand. Sludge Life 2, like its predecessor, oozes character, and has a fantastically grungy aesthetic in both its overall art and sound design, and it takes place in a weird as fuck world that I greatly enjoyed my time in.

To compare it with its prequel, I'd say that Sludge Life 2 feels like a more complete package than Sludge Life, and fixes a fair few of the (minor) issues I had with the first game. Unlike Sludge Life 1, Sludge Life 2 actually has a story... kind of... or at least a clear goal and motivation for the player character. The world is larger, more ambitious and much more varied in tone and setting, and the way its structured makes it much easier to navigate than in Sludge Life 1. And some of the characters feel just a tiny bit more fleshed out, but that tiny amount makes all the difference in my opinion.

I do wonder if perhaps Sludge Life 2 sacrificed a little authenticity in return, though. Don't get me wrong, it's still an unapologetic vibe of a game, but it just feels somehow a little less organic than the original. A fair proportion of the best moments in Sludge Life 2 are callbacks or references to Sludge Life 1, and a lot of the new jokes are a bit... well, there's a lot of poo in the game. There was a lot of toilet humour in Sludge Life 1, but it all felt like it was there to increase the Sludginess of the world, whereas the toilet humour in Sludge Life 2 feels a little more gratuitous. I dunno, I maybe reading into things that aren't there, but that's just the vibe I got while playing this.

But yeah, I think on balance this comes out as a slight improvement on the original. I don't know if the devs plan to continue the series but I hope they do, because there's nothing else out there that really captures the vibe these games are going for, and I still feel like the world has more that it would like to say.

To be as reductive as possible for a second, in this game you just walk around and click on stuff. The game is in the setting, presentation and writing your only challenge is ambling around to find all the "content".

But really, it is a very intricately crafted ugly little world. the humour layers on itself, building on self references littered around the game, most gags are singular but the best ones require making connections between events miles apart in the game world, trusting the player to pay attention and find the punchlines themselves.

Immersing yourself into this egregiously suckass place, really wallowing in the counterculture, is what makes the experience worth it. I really felt this game speak a rebuttal to the irony-poisoned nihilism you see in similar works. This isn't just depression porn, beneath all the obscenity and societal rot are sincerely resisting the sub-orbital trajectory of their shitty lives.

my laptop is literally so dinky that I had to play this in the lowest resolution available which tbh w the wavy and v colorful graphics and vhs filter improved on the games aesthetic and overall feel. felt like how it was supposed to be played.

feel like the artist most comparable to doseone and vellman’s vibe and worldview is late career korine. like his work post spring breakers, dior commercials and all. undeniably corporate and clean while still holding on to some form of street cred/punk outlook. more or less a parodies of the modern world and all of its problems but one that treats all of its characters and their problems w love and affection, totally sincere and serious despite the playful tone. everything is so heightened, james franco playing everytime by britney on the piano while teenage girls holding guns surround him and a projectionist saying the state of cinema is a repeating violent gif of a doberman w a gun is the exact same vibe and outlook on the world. good shit, looking forward to the next doseone/vellman game and also aggro drift !!

Game #16 of 2024 finished!

Sometimes stumbling onto a game from just surfing around Steam is the best. It brings back those feelings of browsing the shelves at Game Stop and finding something totally out there that doesn’t even seem real. Sludge Life 2 was that for me.

Trippy, gross, rough around the edges, sludge for days. All of these words just begin to describe what this weird exploratory game is. I gave cigarettes to people in need, tagged anything that was a flat surface, and helped someone shoot a music video. I haven’t played anything quite like this and am really excited to check out the first release in the future.

Sludge Life 2 surprised me more than I could imagine.

After being surprised by the first game, I thought it would be very difficult to have something better or different in this sequel. In the first one, I started with no expectations, knowing nothing about the world, who I was, its problems, or its characters. In this sequel, I expected to see the old characters, graffiti, hear 'GHOST', explore places, familiarize myself with the confusing yet familiar map, hunt for random things in pursuit of the platinum, and see various different endings.

And Sludge Life 2 delivers all that in a way that, while it seems very similar to the first game, it adds things and changes objectives that make everything not necessarily new but different.

Unlike the first game, you wake up already having an objective. It's explicitly stated what you should do, but they don't tell you the place, they don't inform you where you are, they don't tell you where you ended up after the end of the last game, and that's magical.

I confess that in the first few minutes, I was a bit disappointed. I looked around and saw some kind of dome, a barrier, and I was upset, thinking they had just made the map vertical and limited the game to floors, until I saw there was something beyond the edge, and that blew my mind...

The game not only tells you what happened after Sludge Life but also explains what happened to some friends, to you, the reason why you're there, and everything is very satisfying. It's crazy how everything in the game comes together.

Some mechanics remain, like the glider, the eye that shows the nearest graffiti location (and I loved how they introduced this right at the beginning, unlike the last game where it was something you had to solve as a side mission or something, which shows that GHOST kept things from the last game), and teleportation, and everything flows very smoothly.

The achievements here are a bit different; you don't need to finish a particular game or hunt for slugs. Just take photos, open some safes, give out some cigarettes, and see the endings. It's much more dynamic and as fun as the achievements in the previous game.

Overall, the destroyed map, the society in a limbo that mixes utopia and dystopia in some aspects, the bizarrely modified animals, fungi, graffiti, dialogues, everything has a unique aesthetic that only Sludge Life can provide. It's an experience I always wanted without even knowing, something unique that made me love these games in a unique way. Everything is so singular, everything is so bizarrely good.

KID CIGGY
CIGS ARE FOR KIDS.

Uma dose dupla do primeiro, se gostou do anterior só vai. Continua muito bem humorado e com críticas sócias foda™. Única coisa que achei ruim foi o mini game.

Já quero o 3.

I’m trying to make as concerted an effort as I can to playing games that are coming out or have come out in 2023, at least for the rest of 2023, so as to ideally engender an understanding less of the history of problems and proposed solutions to problems which have come and gone in the medium, which was a component part of my desire to go back and play historically, and instead try to see what problems are cropping up and which are being solved in modern games. Sometimes these problems are very ‘discourse-y’ things which have think-pieces written about them quarterly - skinner box design, representational and misrepresentational games casts, monetisation villainy - and sometimes the issues are personally developed, cropped, and curated by individual writers and designers. Think something like Bennett Foddy’s monologue in Getting Over It on the idea of art and asset design coinciding with how they interact with both aesthetic and mechanical purposes, or often cross purposes:

“For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.”

Or something like Anthony Zonaga and Marcus Carter’s observation that architecture and opportunity, devoid of implicit character interaction when antiseptically viewed, will shape how the idea of character interaction should be approached. On Dishonored’s use of this, they say:

“Where world-building is successful, game architecture will be an embodiment of the morals and values of the fictional people who inhabit it…Architecture in Dishonored works to shape the player’s ethical agency through their interactions and observations in Dunwall by providing motivation (or deterrence, depending on their moral code) to redeem the city and save the lives of the citizens of Dunwall.”

When looking at these miniature brands of concern, these observational ideas and objects which players (and designers, to a certain extent) can blankly transmute into wireframe without consciously sanding a game’s texture in the process, we can attempt to surmise what the gestating seeds of future problems in our modern environment may become in 10 years (such as how precise landing has remained a problem in 3D platformers since Mario 64 became the template for the genre instead of Jumping Flash, when, at the time, the focus was on level design and transmuted iconography) or bloom out seedlings that will ensnarl a cult like progression path that is commercially poison but which flowers into entire streams of indie design that in their turn and mulling find the next important step in the medium’s evolution.

To narrow the scope to Sludge Life, I think Terri Vellman is a game designer who is highly engaged with Foddy’s perception of what does and does not transmute component elements of games into trash as well as Dishonored’s morality in play by way of rooftops, windows, and apartment sizes. In Sludge Life and Sludge Life 2, there are no sites on the maps which are transitory or refutational to the central theses at work in the series, but there are also no boxes of immense and concentric meaning, no rooms or corridors which reveal the premise of the game - no Andrew Ryan’s Office or Virmire or Mountain Top Mom Phone Call. The use of the space is thematically pregnant, which in the eyes of the game is an ironic nullity because of the intense sense of refuse that pervades both games, and by cohering and relating to each other in intense ways that refuse to be backdropped (a refusal which is aided by how relatively mechanics light both SL games are - the tagging really is just a way of putting objective markers to locomote to without creating the overwhelming sense of gaminess that those things appear as in Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3.) Vellman creates an atmosphere about garbage that never becomes garbage. Relating all these things together with an intercommunal expression of the mood Sludge Life presents uncompromisingly I found that I felt less like I was playing a walking sim, or comedy game or whatever it might more on its face look like, and more like I was playing an immersive sim; for all we attribute our Deus Exes and Thiefs the slate name of ImSim because of the mechanical communication that exists between their systems, the real flag for me is how the world interacts and encounters the player. Of course being able to mine hop to the top of the Statue of Liberty is a great sign of what the game is as well, Deus Ex felt like an immersive sim to me not because of how you variably ascend its world and more because the world had incidence upon every route from its areas that all had interesting intercommunal expressions about the transcended nodes taken or not. Sludge Life similarly will express to the player, architecturally, the idea of being and having been just the same, if on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.

The ethos of Vellman’s aesthetic has not always been as sharpened as it is in Sludge Life and particularly Sludge Life 2. Heavy Bullets and High Hell both have the vibrancy and tone, but lack the intensity and pointedness with which the punk reference moves beyond the cool factor and reflexive cropping up. Sludge Life is the steering of Terri V’s irreverent scatalogy away from how Sade’s perverse anti-morality concerning the bodily transgression has predominated anything higher brow than Farrelly since the French Revolution, instead seeing shit, piss, vomit, and broken bones transform into a visible mass ego death born from succumbing to the sensuous distance we place between the giving into being containers of waste of human byproduct and our self conceptions of humans apart from our evacuating such. Sludge Life baulks at the idea of society as one beating heart, instead looking at the upper class as a massive set of lungs chain smoking, and the lower class as a irascible set of bowels endlessly being turned out. Humour and commentary are interweaved not by threads intricately gathered but by pugilistic transferences of sweat and blood - the refuse of Glug and Ciggy City push the marginalised into the titular sludge, which in turn manifests itself as a cult’s centre of adoration that is coaxed into rendering a Neo-Ciggy City a la Akira with a hyper-poisonous psilocybin mushroom. The gravity of this world of utter slime and filth is interspersed with every joke about the composite elements that would go into the making of that filth possible, including the best line of accidental poetry about a huge shit I’ve ever seen. The swings of subject matter and how Vellman handles the depths and heights can only play out so wonderfully in the architecture that houses it so well, and in spaces which allow that sort of communication in the proper aesthetic housing.

The music is great too!