Which is kind of nuts when you think about how little hype and coverage there was for the game. Review codes were only issued a day before release which, in professional circles, tends to mean something isn't going to deliver on the whole.

And while High On Life is definitely a fairly run-of-the-mill experience lacking in a number of areas, its Rick and Morty alignment has clearly done the heavy lifting for it, helping the game make a huge splash on Xbox Game Pass.



Here's what Xbox had to say about the unexpected success of the sci fi comedy shooter out of its space gates:

Today, we’re happy to announce that High On Life — the comedy-shooter featuring charismatic talking guns from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s Squanch Games — is Xbox Game Pass’ biggest launch of 2022, the biggest 3rd party Game Pass launch of all time, and the biggest release of a single player-only game in the service’s history. Those stats are measured in terms of engagement, based on the number of hours played in the first five days of release.

Our own review is running late because one of us had our wisdom teeth removed at basically the worst time of year, so ah... that's still incoming.

“This was our first time launching a game with Game Pass,” said Mike Fridley, Studio Director and COO of Squanch Games via Xbox Wire. “And we’ve been blown away by the response from the players who have made us the most popular game on Game Pass right now. When Squanch Games was first created, it was to make the games we wanted to play – and Game Pass is helping us reach the players that want to play those games too.” 

“High On Life is an incredibly unique title that we’ve been excited about for a long time,” said Matt Percy, General Manager of Content Planning at Xbox. “It’s fantastic to see so many Game Pass members jump into it at launch to experience Squanch’s story for themselves ahead of the holidays.”

In other High On Life news, the game and its developers Squanch Games have come under the artists vs AI art microscope for having used the new art generation system, which utilises existing artist's artworks in an algorithmic scraping of elements to create bespoke art based on keywords and prompts. It's a hot topic in the art world, which has divided views with some artists lauding the service as a means to help plan and create even better pieces of art, while others feel the whole setup is akin to plagiarism, calling for a submission service separate to what's used now for the algorithm to pull from.

"I don't know what the future holds, but AI is going to be a tool that has the potential to make content creation incredibly accessible," Squanch Games' founder Justin Roiland told Sky News in relation to the studio's use of Midjourney AI. "I don't know how many years away we are, but all you will need to be is somebody with some big ideas."

High On Life is currently available on the Xbox family of devices and through Game Pass.