Sludge Life 2 Is an Unexpected and Not Entirely Needed Return to the Grind
I didn’t know what to expect as I booted up Sludge Life 2, one of the most unexpected sequels of my lifetime. The first title, released some years ago for free for an entire year on the Epic Games Store before making the leap to the Switch, doesn’t really scream “sequel.” Its possible endings are, as I remember them correctly, you either setting off a bomb that wipes your decrepit oil-rig dystopian hellscape off the face of the earth, or hopping in a spaceship that gets you out of there. On top of that, Sludge Life is all about the malaise of existing in said setting, a hard feeling to recapture and iterate upon in a sequel. When we escape or blow up our capitalist hells, where is there left to go?
Sludge Life 2‘s answer is, dismally, right back where you came from. Your player character Ghost is a tagger who evidently made it off the oil rig, canonizing one of the endings, and made it big. He sold out, becoming a manager to Big Mud, a prominent artist featured heavily in the original title and its promotional materials. After coming back to record a new video, you guys go on a bender, because what else is there to do, and you lose track of Big Mud. Re-exploring the place you once called home, which has changed since you left it, in search of Big Mud is the bulk of what Sludge Life 2 wants to be about. What does that actually mean for the game though? It turns out very little.
Structurally and mechanically, Sludge Life 2 is nearly identical to its predecessor. While there’s a concrete goal to attain, the majority of your time is spent walking around town, talking to the odd characters that occupy it and work dead-end jobs, and all the while you’re tagging up surfaces and collecting clues as to what you’re supposed to do. My enjoyment of Sludge Life had little to do with that, though, and instead stemmed from taking pictures of weird shit, like a cat with multiple buttholes, and drinking in the game’s vibes. It also felt as equally angry at the consumption of our culture by corporations as it did resigned to the way it warps our everyday life. Not that a work of art can’t double down and further explore its themes, but I just don’t know after spending some time with Sludge Life 2 that it does it all that much. Instead, it feels like its rehashing talking points Sludge Life already brought up, all the while bringing forward elements that simply feel like they were cut from the original release. But I can take more pictures of weirdo crap than ever, so it’s hard to argue that the essence of what drew me in the first place isn’t there even if it feels hollow this time around.
