420 Blaze It 2 may be a joke, but there's a solid shooter buried beneath the memes

Holding a gun sideways to shoot bad guys with Illuminati symbols for heads in a rainbow-colored room

(Image credit: Normal Wholesome Games)

While I was waiting to try the demo of 420 Blaze It 2 at PAX Australia, a guy passing mentioned he'd played the original Game of the Year: 420 Blaze It on his school laptop, a sentence designed to make people feel old. "You should absolutely not have been playing it on a school laptop," one of the devs told him, and he was right.

420 Blaze It was a parody of shooter killcam montages that enjoyed a viral moment in 2014. A free game designed for the 7 Day FPS Jam, it overlaid every hit with more text than a Korean reality show, shouting RESPECKS and DID U SEE IT, presenting gifs of Sanic and that one dancing cartoon dog, and blasting dubstep. A decade later it's back with an upcoming sequel that has its own Steam page and a demo you can download and try for yourself.

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I will do this game the favor of using its full name once and only once: 420BLAZEIT 2: GAME OF THE YEAR -=Dank Dreams and Goated Memes=- [#wow/11 Like and Subscribe] Poggerz Edition. With that out of the way, the game I will just call 420 Blaze It 2 is more of the same only better. There's a kick activated by pressing F, which it teaches you shortly before putting a door in front of you and saying you can open it by pressing E. I did not press E because I am not a sucker. I kicked that door open instead along with every single one that followed, which I was rewarded for more than once by having a bad guy on the other side of the door be hit by it and sent flying into another guy.

The demo gives you the mission of killing Sherk, an off-model Shrek who lives in a swamp that can be accessed via several corridor shooter corridors full of goons, and which seems to be haunted by a flying blue train called Domas the Dank Engine. As you shoot these goons messages like "rip in kill" and "nice shot m9" badoing around the screen along with Illuminati memes in a way that will make any sufficiently internet-poisoned person cackle like the idiots we are.

Early on I pressed R to reload my gun and expected a joke. Instead, I got a slick and professional Call of Duty-ass reload animation, because some jokes are funnier when they're painted over a layer of seriousness. Fighting my way through the rooms of 420 Blaze It 2 I switched from the machine gun to the shotgun as I closed distance, threw grenades at enemies in clumps, and timed my reloads to coincide with the moments I was temporarily behind one of the big rocks in Sherk's swamp. Even with my gun held sideways and the words "2012-rekt" and "losers say wat" accompanying every headshot, 420 Blaze It 2 is an upsettingly competent first-person shooter.

It's just one that doesn't expect you to take it seriously, that doesn't come drenched in tacticool modern warfare nonsense, and that knows it exists because our lizard brains have been subject to digital brain rot for so long that a well-timed "420 noscope" in purple Comic Sans is what it takes to bring us joy.

Put us in the bin already. It's garbage day, after all. 420 Blaze It 2 will be out on Steam in November.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.