Squanch Games's High on Life 2, launching next month, is one of the first big games of the year. But when did the team behind 2022’s comedy sci-fi shooter High on Life first start thinking about a sequel?
“ Pretty much immediately,” we were told by executive producer Matty Studivan at the Gamescom conference last summer.
During our chat, which you can also enjoy as a podcast or a YouTube video, Studivan dove into a number of the new features and surprising additions that fans can expect from High on Life.
On the origins of this sequel, Studivan explained that, “ Mikey Spano, our CCO and art director, he's basically had the franchise in his head a really, really long time.
“And so, the DLC was kind of our in-between, and we were already thinking about, ‘Where are we going in the second one?’.
“And actually, we used the power-slide a lot more in the DLC, and that was an early iteration basically of our skateboard tech.”
Indeed, eagle-eyed fans will have noticed that the player-character is skateboarding a lot in the trailers for the new game. Where did that idea come from?
“ I think Mikey was a skateboarder,” Studivan said. “We have a lot of animators that are skateboarders. You know, it's such a fluid movement and it really fits with the aesthetic and the feeling of our game.
“And, you know, our designers are really focused on the traversal. Our design director Erich Meyr, he worked on Sunset Overdrive, so like, very flowy, flow state, combat and traversal. And so he's been doing a lot of work on the skateboard in order to do that as well.”
Touching on the development process behind skateboarding, Studivan added, “We've made a ton of different iterations, and I would say in the last six months, the team was like, 'What if it just replaces sprint?' And as soon as that happened, it all unlocked.”
Skateboarding isn’t the only fresh addition, either, with the Gamescom demo also introducing a new gun called Sheath (voiced by Ralph Ineson and inspired by Halo battle rifles) and a new adversary (a slimy senator played by comedy legend Richard Kind). We get into both of those casting stories in the full interview!
View oEmbed on the source websiteYou also may have already seen that, of all things, the Bible Adventures video game from 1991 has been added into High on Life 2. What happened there?
Studivan summed it up like so: “In the first game, we had all the [watchable] movies. And that was such a big hit that we thought, ‘Okay, well, we're gonna bring more movies back, but what can we do to top that?’
“And we're like, ‘Well, we're a game studio. Let's license some old games and see if we can get them in the game. And Mikey was like, ‘First choice - Bible Adventures.
“And you know, our first choice, we're always like, ‘There's no way we're gonna get it’. And then Ben Moore, our business dev director, within a week, he was like, ‘Hey guys, I got the license to Bible Adventures’.
“We were like, ‘Yeah! Come on, man’. And as the evolution in the level happened, it actually got integrated into a boss fight. But you can collect these Jamba boards throughout the game, and then play them on arcade cabinets in your headquarters.”
Sounds like this is shaping up to be quite a bold follow-up! In the full interview, we also delve into the new locations and the story itself. Download the podcast now to hear the whole thing.
High on Life 2 launches on 13th February for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. You can order your copy now.
Check out more of our Gaming coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
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