High Hell dev's next game is a vandalism-and-photography sim on a world of sludge

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The first trailer for Devolver Digital's upcoming vandalism-and-photography simulator Sludge Life immediately reminded me of the visual style of High Hell, the door-kicking, drug-burning FPS from 2017. Not a coincidence, as it turns out, because it's being made by the same people, Terri Vellmann and Adam "Doseone" Drucker, and also appears to share quite a bit of the weirdness that ran through its predecessor.

As an "up-and-coming tagger" named Ghost, your job is to explore a small, "corporately branded" island on a sludge-covered planet, establishing yourself as an elite street artist. Alternatively, you can take up the anti-corporate cause and tear it all down if that's your thing. You'll carry a laptop which will serve various purposes (you can download and play other in-game games, for instance, in case the game you're actually playing gets boring I guess), smoke cigarettes, "take photos of exotic fauna and ambivalent NPCs," and eventually work your way to one of three separate endings.

It's not much to go on, but High Hell and its predecessor Heavy Bullets (Vellman and Drucker's first collaboration) are interesting enough to make Sludge Life worth paying attention to. It's set to come out sometime this spring on the Epic Games Store, and until that happens there's a website with more information (and merchandise to buy, which I suspect is part of the game's apparently corporate-critical theme, but it looks like you can actually purchase at least some of the stuff so exercise whatever caution you feel is appropriate as you wave around your credit card) at shopsludgelife.com.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.