Sludge Life 2

Most sequels promise “more.” Sludge Life 2 actually delivers more, and the extra content works because it gives you more places to look, not more chores to finish.

The game comes from Terri Vellmann and Doseone, the duo behind the 2021 cult favorite Sludge Life, and it’s published by Devolver Digital. That label has built its reputation on loud, irreverent and personal games. Like the original, this is a first-person open-world exploration game that refuses to tell you what matters. You play Ghost, a graffiti artist, again. This time the premise is a missing person: Big Mud, a rapping frog and local music star, has vanished. Your search takes you through Ciggy City Suites, a huge corporate hotel complex that replaces the first game’s polluted island.

The new setting is a smart choice. A hotel complex is the cleanest possible symbol of a corporate, consumerist world: branded, stacked, monitored and full of doors marked “staff only.” The first game mocked industry from the outside. The sequel puts you inside the brand itself, and its satire about corporate life lands harder for it.

Sludge Life 2 sits in a narrow but thriving niche: short, dense, authored sandboxes that value texture over systems. Think of it as a cousin to A Short Hike or Untitled Goose Game, but with a filthy mouth and a punk zine for a design document. It’s a deliberately abrasive game, and it makes no apologies for that: it contains crude language and stylized nudity, and it means both.

• Ciggy City Suites: A vertical, open hotel complex that’s much bigger and denser than the first game’s island. It rewards climbing, trespassing and curiosity.
• 100 Graffiti Spots: Hidden tagging locations are the game’s loose goal. Tracking them down is a scavenger hunt that teaches you how the map fits together.
• New Traversal Gadgets: The Double Js improve how you move, and the Portable Launcher throws you into the air. Together they open up rooftops and areas you couldn’t reach before.
• A Much Bigger Cast: The NPC count is far larger than in the original, with each character given absurd dialogue and small stories of their own.
• No Fixed Quest Path: Searching for Big Mud gives you a reason to explore, but the game never forces you down a set route.
• Doseone’s Soundtrack: New compositions sit alongside tracks from the in-game artist Big Mud, so the game’s world and its music feed into each other.

The Loop: Curiosity as the Only Currency

Strip away the jokes and Sludge Life 2 has a simple core loop: see something, wonder how to reach it, reach it, find something stupid and wonderful there. There’s no XP, no loot rarity and no crafting system. You get information, access and the next punchline.

That only works if the world is dense enough to keep paying out, and this one is built to. Ciggy City Suites is layered: lobbies, service corridors, rooftops, restricted floors and the odd pockets between them. The 100 graffiti spots do clever design work here. They’re the closest thing the game has to a completion metric, but they’re mostly a tool for teaching you the map. Chasing a tag you spotted on a far ledge makes you study sightlines, test routes and notice the side doors you walked past earlier. By the time you’ve found a few dozen, you know the hotel the way a night-shift janitor does.

Traversal: The Real Upgrade

The original Sludge Life was fun to explore. The sequel is designed to be fun to move through, and that’s the bigger change. The Double Js and the Portable Launcher turn vertical space from scenery into something you can actually use. The Launcher in particular changes how the map reads. A rooftop that would have been a scenic backdrop in the first game is now somewhere you can get to, if you can find the right angle to launch from.

This is good sandbox design: you get the tools, and your own skill and curiosity handle the rest. Some routes reward precise launches, others reward stubbornness, and a few seem built for players trying to break the level. The new movement options take the most repetitive part of any open-world game, getting from A to B, and make it the most enjoyable part.

Writing and Cast: Quantity With Character

Tripling down on NPCs is risky. Most open-world games fill their streets with interchangeable residents who repeat the same three lines. Sludge Life 2 mostly avoids that. Its characters are strange in specific ways, and many carry small stories that pay off if you come back to them. The humor is crude, juvenile on purpose and frequently very funny. The satire aims at corporate jargon, hospitality-industry fakery and the emptiness of brand culture, and it lands more often than it misses.

Some of it won’t land, and that’s a fair criticism, not snobbery. The humor is sophomoric by design, and if gross-out jokes leave you cold, nothing else here will win you over. The game is cheerfully committed to its style, and that commitment cuts both ways.

Structure: Freedom vs. Drift

Leaving out a fixed quest path is the game’s best idea and its weakest point. If you like wandering, the lack of waypoints is freeing. You’re trusted to set your own goals, and the hunt for Big Mud stays loose enough that you never feel herded. If you need momentum, it can feel aimless. There’s no strong pull from one area to the next, and a session can end without the sense that anything moved forward.

The design has a case, but the drift is real. A light optional tracker, for example something that hinted at which areas still hid tags, would have helped players who stall out without taking anything from those who don’t.

Length

The brevity is the obvious trade-off: most of what the game offers can be seen in a few hours. It’s dense rather than padded, so those hours rarely feel wasted. Still, a game this good at building a sense of place leaves you wanting more of that place, and the credits come sooner than the world seems to deserve. Completionists hunting all 100 tags will get more out of it, but don’t expect a weekend-long sandbox.

The art direction is a deliberate rejection of photorealism. Sludge Life 2 keeps the original’s saturated, low-fi look: chunky geometry, loud colors, grimy textures and a visual noise level that matches the game’s attitude. It looks like a skate video recorded off a broken TV, and that’s a compliment. More importantly, it’s readable. Despite the visual chaos, ledges, doors and points of interest stand out clearly enough to support the climbing-heavy design.

The UI stays mostly out of the way, which suits a game built around noticing things for yourself. As for technical demands, the stylized, low-detail look is light on hardware by design, so a high-end rig shouldn’t be necessary. Treat the Steam store page as the authority on exact specs.

Sludge Life 2 is on Steam, and mouse and keyboard is the natural fit. First-person launching and precise ledge-hopping benefit from mouse aiming, especially when you’re lining up Portable Launcher shots toward distant rooftops. Controller play suits the game’s relaxed wandering, but the traversal-heavy secrets reward the precision of a mouse.

The short, drop-in-and-wander structure also suits handheld PCs on paper. If you plan to play on Steam Deck, check its current compatibility rating on the store page rather than assuming it works. Beyond that, Steam’s ecosystem gives you what you’d expect: cloud saves where supported, achievements, and a community space for comparing notes on secrets.

Sludge Life 2 doesn’t reinvent its formula; it improves it. The move to a vertical corporate hotel sharpens the satire, the new gadgets make moving around genuinely fun, and the bigger cast gives the world a crowded, lived-in strangeness that few studio-made open worlds manage. Its flaws come from its own choices: it’s short because it’s dense, and loose because it trusts you. If you need structure, it will frustrate you. If you’ve ever climbed somewhere in a game just to see whether you could, this is a solid few hours on Steam, and we recommend it to exactly that audience.