High On Life has quickly become a massive success story for both developer Squanch Games and for Xbox Game Pass, with Microsoft announcing that it’s surpassed three huge milestones in the short time following its release.
The game, which comes from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s own studio, has proved incredibly popular thanks to its absurdist humour and genuinely fun Metroid-esque adventure shooter gameplay. Announced in an Xbox Wire blog post, it’s managed to rocket to the top of the Xbox Game Pass charts for 2022, becoming the biggest launch on the service for the year.
That’s a huge achievement in and of itself, but High On Life can also add Biggest 3rd Party Game Pass Launch Of All Time and Biggest Release Of A Single-Player Only Game In Game Pass History to its list of accolades. It’s especially notable that the game is doing as well as it is on Game Pass given it’s a third-party release, but Xbox has certainly been throwing a ton of support at it and it’s going a long way to prove that the service can be especially good for boosting the profile and popularity of games that might not have had the same exposure as a traditional release.
“This was our first time launching a game with Game Pass,” said Mike Fridley, Studio Director and COO of Squanch Games, “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.”
We gave High On Life a 7.5/10 in our review, saying “High On Life is the most video game-like video game to come from the minds of Squanch and Justin Roiland to date, and it shows the studio is capable of more than just lightly-interactive experiences packed with fart and cum jokes. Though it has plenty of those, too.”
