TRANS-SCRIBE: The Art of Hight on Life by Paul Davies

'Explore the hilarious, surreal, anarchic alien worlds of High on Life in this stunning compendium of concept art, final designs, storyboards, and exclusive commentary.

'High on Life is a hilarious, surreal adventure set in a world where alien invaders have enslaved Earth … so they can use us as recreational drugs. Armed with a pre-loved bounty hunter suit and a bizarre arsenal of talking weaponry, it’s your mission to bring down an intergalactic cartel and free humanity from its clutches – and maybe make a little money on the side. With stunning full-colour illustrations throughout, The Art of High on Life showcases the crazy creatures, weird worlds and grotesque gunplay of the game, featuring expert commentary from its creators, Squanch Games.'

Video games are an incredibly collaborative medium, and as technology has progressed and more and more advanced games have become the standard it's become less common to find games made by small teams; and the 'triple A' games will sometimes consist of teams of hundreds of people. This means that there is often no one person who has direct input, and you'll have a lot of people bringing their own ideas, concepts, and designs to the table. High on Life, the fourth and latest game from Squanch Studios, is very much an example of this.

Released in December 2022, High on Life was presented as a comedy first person shooter game that put players in control of a young teen who, along with their sister, is transported off Earth when the planet comes under attack from an evil alien overlord who's looking to make humans into drugs. Arriving on a strange alien world, the player character has to find a way of stopping the aliens and saving humanity, all with the help of their talking gun.

Developed by the minds behind the television series Rick and Morty, it's a game that puts odd humour at the forefront, and engages in some weird character designs that wouldn't feel out of place in the show. One of the main reasons I picked up The Art of High on Life, despite not thinking too much of the game after trying it out, was that I was interested in seeing the creation of the game. I wanted to look at the designs that the team who made it went through, the ideas that were rejected, the trial and error that got them to the finished version. However, this was something that the book doesn't really deliver on in huge ways.

The book is written by Paul Davies, who does a great job at providing the reader with a lot of extra information and behind the scenes tales; as much as he's able to. It seems to be a book where 'tell, don't show' was the main instruction, as Davies talks the readers through the main story of the game, the characters that you encounter, and some of the reasons why certain designs were used for the characters. Whilst this is decent information in itself, it never really goes beyond a surface level. For example, when discussing the main villain of the game, Garmantuous is talked about in context to his role in the game and the way he looks, but there's no real discussion on how that look came about or if there were other designs before that one.

This is also, unfortunately, reflected in the art used throughout the book. The book is filled with behind the scenes art for characters, locations, and items, but only ever the designs used in the game. There's no development stage shown, and whilst that isn't always something that is guaranteed in an art book it often proves to be the most interesting part, and all of my favourite art books include those segments. The lack of inclusion of that here does leave it feeling a bit less impressive.

Sadly, the presentation of the art that is used does on occasion detract from the overall quality of the book too. I had to get someone else to come and have a look at several pages for me, because I assumed there was a problem with my eyes at one point, and thought that perhaps I was tired and not seeing things properly. Unfortunately, it wasn't just an issue with my eyes, and there are multiple pages within the book where the art seems to have been blown up in size and has lost focus. There are parts of the book that look incredibly blurry, often on full page splash pieces that should be highlights, but come across looking out of place. There are also some places where a part of an image seems to have been cut out from its background and pasted onto the page in a rush, with blocky, almost pixelated edges.

I was incredibly disappointed at these issues, as it seems like somewhere along the line there was a mistake in quality control. With the amount of research and writing that Paul Davies seems to have put into the accompanying text it's a shame that opening a page and seeing large pieces of art looking blurry and out of focus will be the first thing that draws your eye, rather than the information that the book is trying to convey.

Art books are big, expensive pieces, and The Art of High on Life is no exception to this. It's a pricey book that fans are going to want to have, and to see what I can only describe as low, almost shoddy quality within the book feels like something that's doing a disservice to those fans; and some of the people who worked on the project. I was enjoying the book for the most part, and was happy to give it a higher score, but the image quality issues brought my enjoyment down a lot, and means that I cannot score the book higher, nor recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore, diehard fans who need it no matter what. For those who might be interested in it but are unsure if they want to spend that much on an art book I'd advise perhaps holding off and looking at some of the other art books Titan has on offer instead.