There can be no doubt that Sludge Life 2 seeks to make players laugh as often as possible, with countless gags and comedic scenarios tucked away around every corner as the player explores Ciggy City Suites hunting down tagging spots to leave their mark. At the core of almost every aspect of this unusual indie game is the developer's desire to amuse players, whether it's by subverting expectations and game design conventions or by including whimsical features like a dedicated "fart button" that offers players a chance to amuse themselves whenever they please.
Game ZXC recently interviewed Sludge Life 2 developer Terri Vellmann and composer Doseone, who both injected their personal brand of humor into every nook and cranny of the game's surreal, lo-fi dystopia. They spoke about how they based much of the game's humor on the often bizarre encounters among strangers in urban settings, and they also weighed in on how they went about populating the game's open world with comedic scenarios and characters.
Sludge Life's Comedy Comes From Real-Life Experiences and The Element of Surprise
There are as many approaches to comedy in video games as there are comedic video games. Some games like Borderlands lean into an over-the-top style of dark comedy, while fellow Revolver Digital title Cult of the Lamb elicits some laughs due to the juxtaposition of adorable animals and brutal violence. In the case of Sludge Life, the humor is often drawn from the kinds of strange interactions that may occur at a bus stop in a major city.
Vellmann: The surprise - and playing with expectations on what is a thing you do in a video game or not.
Doseone: I think some of the magic in Sludge Life 2 is from the NPCs talking at you, not to you. The way the urban environment works, growing up in Jersey and Philly, people kinda just eject and project information onto you and say things to you that you truly have no response to. The dialogue in Sludge Life tries to walk that line at all times.
Surprise and subverting expectations were also central to Sludge Life's style of humor. Players might find themselves exploring an apartment complex with the usual human inhabitants before opening a door and being greeted by a gigantic baby filling an entire room. The game is packed with strange moments like these, and it ends up being one of the main motivations for players to explore its open world thoroughly.
Sludge Life's Jokes Took a Lot of Trial and Error
With a game so densely packed with comedic encounters, the Sludge Life team had to take an iterative approach when deciding on the placement and delivery of each joke in the game. Humor is obviously subjective, but as long as the game's gags could make the developers laugh, it would hopefully resonate with like-minded players. If not, it might be a case of remaking an asset or rewriting a scenario entirely.
Vellmann: It's very iterative. We’ll start blocking out the spaces and moving around them, seeing what comes to mind and how it could work within the world. It’s really down to feeling - sometimes things just stay empty for some time while we’re doing something else, until down the line an idea comes up and we’ll fill it in.
Doseone: It’s a delightfully layered process, sometimes ideas or humor exists before assets are made and sometimes the humorous aspects occur to us after a room or NPC is plopped into the world. In the end, because of this process, we get a mixture of intentional and situational funny. I think the "doesn't work" aspect rears its head when neither of us laughs - quite a few circumstances had to be reinvented using new assets or refreshed writing.
It's not all fart jokes and potty humor, however, and players of various sensibilities will likely find something that gives them a chuckle whether it's a funny popup in the game's old-school OS-style menu or an unexpected encounter at the end of a hidden location. With plenty of deadly serious games like Elden Ring eating up countless hours of gamers' play time in recent years, a lighthearted trek through Sludge Life's strange world is a welcome change of pace.
Sludge Life 2 is available on PC.