As a tagger called Ghost, your main interaction with the open world of developer Terri Vellman and musician Doseone’s Sludge Life is to spray it with graffiti. The place is a small island overseen by the GLUG corporation, a mess of shipping containers, warehouses, and fences near an apartment block and a single greasy burger joint. All of it is built on concrete atop a vast ocean of sludge that stretches to the horizon, never deep enough for you to sink down into but squelchy and thick enough to slightly hinder your stride.
In this world, which you view through a grainy VHS filter that distorts the otherwise clean lines of Sludge Life’s art style, there’s little to do but make your mark. You parkour in order to tag spots on the game’s open world marked with floating blue spray cans, in the process acquiring enough of a reputation to eventually collaborate with other taggers, like an anthropomorphic fly named Mosca and a guy called Hans who sprays a big white hand all over the place in the image of his own humongous mitts. And they’ve all got their chosen graffiti motifs, including yourself: a bug-eyed green ghost that one tagging duo likens to a pimple.
When you’re not tagging in the game, you’re littering—the next best thing to assert your presence, to feel something by demonstrating that you were there, if only for a moment. Once you drink a can of what’s presumably soda or finish off a cigarette with the dedicated smoking button, you toss them right onto the ground. You even unceremoniously drop equipped items like a camera or a laptop or a glider as soon as you finish using them. And though your cigarette butts and empty cans remain were you left them, necessary items like the laptop teleport back to your hands as soon as you press the button to use them, as if the game were trying to reinforce the futility of your mildly rebellious littering. The graffiti, at least, isn’t so easily wiped away, the only thing close to a permanent trace that you can leave behind.
Jokey sight gags lurk around every corner, many of them accompanied by one-off mechanics like hocking a loogie into a plate of food. Vellman and Doseone get so much mileage out of the off-kilter atmosphere, a tiny world of disaffected misfits enveloped in a haze of ennui and diegetic cloud rap, with little to do beyond smoke, drink, watch TV, and do mushrooms. The island is a graffiti playground because everyone has gone on strike, demanding the attention of the cyclops cops (“clops”) who might otherwise chase taggers away. The cigarette mascot, a red smiley face named Ciggy, has been crushed by a fallen statue; a girl with a big scar stages regular heists to steal a washing machine; a normal dog paints graffiti; and a cat has two buttholes, one side-by-side with the other. This world may be small, but it brims with a weird sense of life reinforced by the simple mechanics that let you tag, platform, and consume.
Collecting everything can be a little tedious, particularly when coupled with the fiddly controls that make falling from narrow platforms a little too easy. But despite the presence of an in-game checklist, the game doesn’t encourage you to compulsively collect and complete as much as you can. Notably, the “bad ending” and “weird ending” both involve tracking down one final, elusive tagging spot, but the “good ending” has no such requirement. With no explicit quests or missions, everything on the island is there for you to explore and experiment with or even totally ignore. Sludge Life is a game to loiter in, for however long you need to grab some momentary respite. Remembering how one tagger got over-invested to the point where he pulled out his eyeballs and stuffed them in a jar, one character summarizes the game’s ethos: “I like life like I like my games: when it stops being fun, you just quit.”
This game was reviewed using a press key provided by Tinsley PR.
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