Sludge Life Review (PC)

Swim through pitch-black water, looking for walls that seem like they can support a tag. Use my improbably capable jump to get on a half-finished building, platform my way to the top. My disposable yet digital camera quickly shows a few spaces where I can spray. On the way to the closest one talk to a weird human-animal hybrid about clipboards. Smoke a quick cigarette before drinking a soda just to see where the crushed can ends up. Try to discover another teleporter pad and maybe a simpler way to know which areas of the island you have already tagged.

Sludge Life is a video game created by Terri Vellmann and Doseone and published by Devolver Digital. The title is offered for free on the Epic Games store for one year, with a Steam option also offered on the PC and the Nintendo Switch. The title offers an innovative take on the walking simulator concept.

The main character is Ghost, defined by his love of art that can be expressed on the medium of walls. The closest thing to a plan he has is to explore his small, polluted, ultra-capitalist island, and make as many of its surfaces beautiful as he can. On his way, he can have short and mostly unimportant conversations with a panoply of mostly weird characters. Everyone is on strike, no one opposes the tagging. This weird concrete island in the middle of polluted waters is the only place where Ghost can have an impact and, even here, he won’t impress too many people.

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There are a few lines in Sludge Life that have minimalist wisdom to them. But there are also plenty of jokes that don’t land. It’s never clear (which is probably what the developers want) whether the game aims to be a critique of modern life, especially capitalism and its effects, or if it simply wants to create a weird setting and let players discover all nooks and crannies.

The gameplay is built around platforming and tagging. Ghost can jump abnormally high and squeeze through tight spots, allowing him to reach the walls on which he can put his mark. No one tries to stop him directly but there are some very complex routes that the game challenges him with. It’s cool to see a tag mark through the camera and then test out ideas on how to get there. Players don’t need to actually tag and can simply move around the island, talking to other characters and seeing the sights.

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Sludge Life also allows gamers to eat, drink sodas and automatically throw the cans around, smoke cigarettes, and fart. All of these have no impact on the actual game but they add to the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the game does not allow players to control the tags Ghost creates in any way, making even the act of spraying walls feel empty, lacking the very cool factor on which the act of tagging is built.

I became disenchanted with the world in around 2 hours. I wanted a reason to explore. I wanted the characters to have something interesting to offer. The world has little to offer other than weirdness and style. I saw no reason to try out the more complex exploration or platforming sections knowing that the same face would end up on the wall once I reached it.

Sludge Life has a unique art style that works well for the world it presents. It’s genuinely exciting to see how the island looks, the burger place with its tagged walls or the half-built structures surrounded by sea-crocodiles. The in-game computer interface is also a weird hallucination of how ‘90s computers looked. The soundtrack, which comes out from even older-looking radios, is another cool presentation element, the kind you keep listening to even after all interest in the actual game has faded.

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The Good

The Bad

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