TIME EXTEND

Peer through the haze to discover a game that makes you ask some surprisingly sharp questions

By Christian Donlan

Developer Terri Vellmann, Doseone

Publisher Devolver Digital

Format PC, Switch

Release 2020

Your stomping ground in Sludge Life could best be described as ‘capitalism’s armpit’. As Ghost, you spawn into this used-up world on a dirty mattress in a makeshift bedroom formed from one half of an old shipping container. Outside its thin metal walls lie toxic swamps and a sun-bleached, crumbling landscape whose distant reaches are largely hidden by gritty clouds of smog, all of it seen from the kind of glitching, fish-eye viewpoint you would otherwise expect from a convenience-store security camera. Try looking up and about the only monuments that await are sun-faded advertising hoardings and statues of dictators – and, really, is there much of a distinction between the two?

It’s no surprise to learn that corporations love it here: there are chemical companies and refineries and all manner of industrial pipework, often reaching across the landscape on an inhuman scale. When it comes to entertainment and relaxation for the exhausted workforce, there are greasy burger chains and hotdog joints, tatty basketball courts and even a swimming pool drained of water, its hollow interior littered with trash. Everything, ultimately, rests upon that endless swamp.

There is, at least, some wildlife to be found. At the farthest expanses of the world, stooping, long-legged birds are gummed up, caught while pecking for scraps in pools of tar. Closer to home, fat banana slugs can be found clinging to walls and windows and ceilings – even in the vents if you go looking for them – while flies form buzzing clouds in the many out-of-order toilets you’ll come across. Only the cats seem truly content, pretzelled into various shapes inside apartment bedrooms and dirty kitchens and draughty warehouses, lean bodies twisted back on themselves so they can lick their various extremities.