Developer/publisher Squanch Games Format PC, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now
Have you heard of Tammy And The T-Rex, the 1994 Denise Richards movie about a teenage girl whose boyfriend’s brain is transplanted into the body of a dinosaur? We hadn’t, before spotting a poster for it hanging in High On Life’s home base, a woodpanelled bungalow that hops through the galaxy like a suburban TARDIS. We dismiss it as a throwaway parody of the kind of shlock produced in the VHS era – before turning around to find the actual live-action film playing on the living-room television. All 82 minutes of it.
This realisation prompts the single biggest laugh over the eight or so hours takes to complete. A quiet chuckle at the audacity of spending, presumably, Microsoft’s Game Pass cheque on the rights, and at the subversion of your understanding of what’s possible – or at least sensible – in a videogame. This warm feeling fades, though, as we duck out halfway through, onto the streets of the alien metropolis, and return to find the film playing again, from the beginning. It does this we step into that living room. Until the game’s halfway mark, at which point it’s replaced by a different movie, one with an even more irritating opening sequence that has us trying to navigate menus while a clown sings a cursed off-key version of Jack And Jill. It’s an idea that’s quite funny at first, and then completely undermined by its execution. And thus, a perfect microcosm of the entire experience.
