Sludge Life - an empty world full of life

On the far end of my street there’s an old rugged apartment building, with a rusty sign saying “sex shop.” The building is being renovated now. From what I’ve heard this whole street used to be a place for drug dealers and sex workers 10 or 20 years ago. The only living trace of that time is a nearby bar with red neon signs lighting up a strangely desolate street corner. It’s strange, because it’s so far from where people would normally go for a night out. After a lot of speculation with my partner about what this place really is we did a background check on google. It’s a swingers club, and it seems to be pretty active. We never really see anyone come in or out of that place so it was surprising to find out that they had quite a lot of reviews on google maps.

I’ve lived in a lot of places, small towns and capital cities. And there’s always some place nearby that holds a secret which I usually can never get an answer to. This was an unusual case where we discovered something that was obscure enough to be mysterious and still public enough for us to easily find out the secret.

Common sense and laws keep me from looking in through the windows of my neighbors and from sneaking into restricted areas. But as walk down long, gray and empty city streets I can’t help but wonder what’s going on inside these buildings.

In Sludge Life I don’t need to worry about any of that. I can enter any apartment and step right into somebody’s embarrassing mess.

I don’t wanna give too much away about what there is to find in this game, because the whole point of the game is to find out for yourself.

- So stop reading here if you wanna go in as blank as possible! -

It’s hard to talk about my love for this game without telling you about a bunch of stuff from it, it would just spoil the experience and it wouldn’t do the game any justice either. I went in pretty blind myself, not sure about the objective, mechanics or format. The games description didn’t help much either.

“SLUDGE LIFE is a first-person / open-world / vandalism-centric stroll through a polluted island full of cranky idiots and a vibe so thick you can taste it.”

My feeling when I started playing was that this game was not meant for me, not even for this world. Few people seem to know or talk about it. Just starting the game for the first time and discovering what it’s really like was very much like finding out about that swingers club in my neighborhood. The game is full of secrets, jokes and crude stuff that made it feel like I was being flushed down a toilet of restricted-area-mysteries. Compulsively exploring like a mouse who smells cheese.

A key to this working so well is that the game is so fucking trashy and dirty. It looks very simple on the surface, clean lines, flat colors, simple shapes. But everything is drenched in Nickelodeon nausea. The colors are tinted like mustard, brownies and old bananas. The few details and objects that are there are usually beverage cans or other junk that add to the sense of mess. Just like real life.

An apple I found on the street, or I mean, in a wall.

Sludge Life has a complete lack of fear when it comes to showing this stuff that bothers me in real life. Like toilets with piss on the seat. My partner says that when you write you should try to make the reader use all their five senses, Sludge Life sure does that.

It’s been maybe a year or two since I played it, I’m still thinking about it and I only now realized that it’s nearly or basically a walking simulator. Calling it that doesn’t do it any justice though. It’s so damn quick paced. Most walking sims make me feel as if I’m on rails and focus mostly on storytelling. Which is fine, it’s just different. For me though, that tends to make it hard to get to the end, it forces me to be patient and to focus as the story is deliberately served to me. Meanwhile, Sludge Life satisfies my monkey brain, it lets me jump around and crawl through vents without being slowed down by the story. Everything was within my own control and my own curiosity was always the motivation. It made this one of a handful of games where I wanted to see everything and take my time with it. Instead of making decisions based on “I’ll never finish if I keep side tracking.”

You know when you see something in the distance in a normal video game (I don’t mean in an open world game) and you wonder whether you can go there? To me Sludge Life is that, it feels like a game completely set out of bounds of the map. I wasn’t meant to be there. Part of it is because of the trashiness and crudeness, but another reason for it is the

e m p t i n e s s.

Even the emptiness makes it feel more real, in real life I walk a lot of long, dull streets with nothing going on, it makes sense to have it there.

The emptiness isn’t technically nothingness, it’s usually some light platforming. It only feels like emptiness because there are large areas with few or no characters to find and the art style is so dang simple. There are lots of flat, untextured surfaces. But it’s perfectly fine. At first when I traveled these distances my head was full of questions. Where am I? What’s this place? What’s over there? As I played those questions got answers and these quiet moments became the parts where I pieced the world together and it all felt more and more vivid. A lot of the actual game happens there, in my head. No matter how detailed and big games get they will never be as vivid as our imaginations. Triple A games suffer from that fact, but Sludge Life benefits from it.

That emptiness wouldn’t do much though if it wasn’t for what you find hidden in that emptiness.

Sludge Life is one of the most human games I’ve ever played. It’s a folky game, it’s for real people, it’s like a friend with nasty humor. It doesn’t have those rounded edges that most video game dialogue and progression seems to have. And at the same time, it feels very thoughtfully designed.

After completing it I felt a refreshed sense of wonder for video games and for the world. Even these gray, seemingly empty city streets have become more interesting.

Give Sludge Life a shot and please let me know if you know any similar games.