It took me a long time to realise thatSludge Life 2is a diorama.
So was the first game!
The only thing that really moves inside these worlds is the player.
It’s a place, but it’s often also an instant in time.
We’re just jumping around and tagging walls inside it.
But there’s also that fisheye viewpoint that frames everything, complete with videotape artifacting and strobing noise.
It makes your surroundings seem fidgety, liquid and mobile.
You shift a millimetre and the world squirms to show you the new perspective.
The walls are alive.
It all feels weirdly intestinal, the first-person game camera as a form of peristalsis.
How are we headed into this halted world?
We’re riding an endoscope.
Sludge Life 2 is very similar to the first game in this, and almost all, respects.
And that’s a good thing.
These are compact worlds, but also worlds I never feel I can get absolutely everything out of.
There’s that glint of paradox throughout.
These are angry games, but they never let the anger define the experience.
There’s tons of craft and storytelling, but you are free to make of it what you will.
Sludge Life 2 begins in an empty hotel bathtub, as all post-hangover narratives should.
You run and jump and climb.
When there are graffiti spots you tag them.
When there are people, you hear what they have to say.
Various bellhops are scattered around the place, trapped under luggage or caught in elevator doors.
Cleaners mutter as they send antique vacuum cleaners wheezing over antique carpet.
The hotel’s wonderfully complex, absolutely teetering with things to find and narrative threads to follow.
How do I get onto Floor Five, which seems otherwise inaccessible?
Why’s the lift broken and what lies at the very top of the space?
What, for that matter, lies at the very bottom?
The moment-to-moment missions are what you want them to be, then.
It’s narrative hide-and-seek.
Someone’s fallen out with their boss and is willing to give away a secret.
Someone’s growing something they don’t want anybody to know about.
Sludge Life 2 is like this wherever you look.
Everything can be subverted, can’t it?
Leading you through all this is some of the best and cleanest post-Ubi open-world stuff I have ever seen.
Hit all the graffiti tags.
Collect all the gadgets.
The joy of movement, mantling and dropping through gaps.
The joy of working things out, of making progress, and of not making progress.
They’re things I wished I was cool enough, smart enough, to be a part of.
But these games, the more I play, also form meaningful, illuminating links with other games.
Ubi open-worlders, sure, although they walk the line between expert distillation and open parody really well.
Sludge Life 2 accessibility options
Button and controller remapping.
Ability to turn off various visual effects: desktop twirl, VHS filter, screen shake, camera roll.
Ability to turn off fall damage, crosshair.
Ability to change game speed.
Here was a man asleep on a bed, snoring as the radio played.
Here was a dog watching television by themselves.
Here was a mountain of kitty litter in a bathtub.
Here was a person sat glumly on a chair with one of those Venetian pet collars around their head.
Here was…
That’s it, isn’t it?
The diorama spills out of the windows and off into the distance.
Who knows where, in the mist and murk, it finally draws a boundary.
