Collecting is Cool. Don't Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise.

Yes, the main story of High On Life is good, amazing actually, but we've added a ton of extra collectibles and content to make your gameplay experience that much cooler. From upgrades to loot and beyond, you'll catch material hidden reeeeeeal deep in there. Shoutout to the completionists, this one is for you ✊.

You know who would know a lot about that stuff? Our Lead Content Designer, Andy Vatter. And guess who's here to answer some questions? Yep, our Lead Content Designer, Andy Vatter.

Are you following High On Life on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook? If you answered, "YES" proceed to the following Q&A. If you answered "NO" ...are you serious right now?

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Your role in making High On Life. GO!

I’m the Lead Content Designer, which in oversimplified terms means that once the physical levels are laid out, my unbelievably cool team (I also am there) creates and populates it with everything the player will be interacting with, e.g. characters, narrative dialogue and its polish, interactables, enemies, puzzles, hazards, minigames, etc.  I also work closely with the writers to make sure that what’s written suits the gameplay and vice versa. I was directly responsible for roughly half of the main missions in the game, but I’ll never tell you which ones. You’ve got a 50-50 shot.

Aside from what a player can aim to collect from the main story, what types of collectibles and extra content can be uncovered?

That’s a really fun question because I’m still finding new surprises at this point in development. On top of good ol’-fashioned cash, upgrades, and that’s just the collectibles. Also: human rescuing. We here at Squanch Games love removing humans from peril and feel that humans being in peril is generally a bad thing.

One of the best parts of High On Life is its replayability. How important is it for players, namely the completionist type, to revisit biomes?

If I’m being honest, they’d better, which is a direct threat from me, at them. We’ve built the game in such a way that you have various options of which bounties to accept in which order, so you’ll regularly pass areas in one mission that you won’t be able to access until you’ve gained abilities from the other one, or in some cases even later missions. You’d better believe there’ll be loot, gags, and other bits of entertainment in those spots.

What types of skills and abilities will players utilize to unlock the heaps of content (seriously, there's a lot of stuff jammed in this thing) within the game?

The guns and their abilities are a huge part of that, for sure; they’ll be used to push objects, clear paths, and create new footing to climb. But what HOL has also focused on from the very beginning is traversal itself, and making it feel great to move around; you’ll be using your suit (and Knifey) to swing, zip, slide, climb, and dodge in ways that even some of my favorite AAA games of the past haven’t quite delivered. Some of the movement even reminds me of Mischief Makers, and I don’t say that lightly.

Playing High On Life, it's impossible to miss the hilarious visuals plastered throughout the game. Is there anything that was particularly amazing to watch come alive?

The hardest I’ve laughed while making this game has been when one of our artists has been given what’s essentially a blank canvas to work with: in dialogue scenes, design and writing set up what should happen in a scene, but when one of our animators gets the green light, they pack in so many flourishes that the entire company meeting is red-faced with laughter; every day, our environment artists take simple geometric blockout shapes and create locations that even the most legendary sci-fi movies could only dream about, and in fact add so many unexpected little spots that the designers say “oh we have to do something with that;” we have some actual voice acting legends playing the oddest little side roles. And that’s all to say nothing of the posters and graffiti around the game; there’s a poster that’s been in there for almost a year and a half that’s still the funniest thing in the game, to me.

High On Life is perhaps our squanchiest title to date. Why?

“Expect the unexpected” is something that comes up in marketing for everything these days, but this game is so beyond full of unexpected elements that it genuinely applies. This is a game where anything can happen, but it’s still bound inextricably to its own set of rules and work logic that, though they may bend and very occasionally break, support the world in which it takes place. There will be the first time that the player sees a character, video, or poster, and they think “wow that’s crazy.” Then they’ll realize that yeah, it’s crazy, but it’s also just what this world is like, and the player is weird for thinking it’s weird.

But then sometimes you have to do the absolute weirdest errand you’ve ever seen in your life and that time you’ll be right about it.

When it comes to discovering additional cool content, is there anything specific a player should keep an eye out for on their first play?

They’ll definitely want to be on the lookout for little nooks that seem interesting or juuuust out of reach; with a world this vibrant, not only do we want you to see all the cool stuff the designers and artists have packed into the world, we’ve definitely made it worth your while to go looking. And if there’s a spot you can’t quite get to now, maybe you’ll find a way to reach it later. Who’s to say? Us, probably.

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HEY! Before you go, please follow Squanch Games on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, ok? We asked nicely.