Cast your mind back ten years. Done? Good, you survived the hideous form of time travel known as long-term memory. Now, do you see a horrendous first-person shooter anywhere back there, full of memes and intentionally terrible font choices? Congratulations, you may have remembered 420BlazeIt, a freakish eyesore of a game developed during a 7-day game jam by one of the people behind Crossy Road, of all things. It briefly did the YouTuber rounds, back when YouTube was not yet the anxiety-inducing ad factory it is today.
Now I’m going to ask you to come back to the present. But prepare for a bit of a shock – there’s a sequel coming to that bong huffing shooter. 420BlazeIt 2 has been announced for some months, but now there’s a demo you can play too.
It is the “long awaited sequel to the FPS hit”, according to the game’s irony-soaked Steam page. If I was to follow the stylization of the name with complete accuracy, I would have to call it by its full title: 420BLAZEIT 2: GAME OF THE YEAR -=Dank Dreams and Goated Memes=- [#wow/11 Like and Subscribe] Poggerz Edition.
“The illuminati have stolen all the world’s memes!” we’re told. “You’re an ex secret-service agent turned to a peaceful life of painting, but now you’re needed one more time to fight back.”
The first thing you do is kick a piano to pieces. There is a sign nearby that says “Live, Laugh, Illuminati”. As you boot down doors and blast dudes in suits with shotgun shells and AK rounds, you will endure some pounding dubstep in your ears, and the appearance of much comic sans. An arguably sorrowful moment comes when you defeat the bargain bucket swamp ogre “Sherk” while in the clutches of an ocularly punishing multicolour trance. Sherk lays bleeding, pained, dying. The sadness of this moment is undercut somewhat by the continuous vuvuzela horns bellowing over the ogre’s dying words.
So yes, an atrocity upon the optic and aural nerves. The thing is… it actually handles really good? The guns are slickly animated and have a nice sense of recoil, the forceful kick upon a door is suitably hefty, and enemy bodies react to a spray of buckshot in the right sort of way, whether that’s by stumbling backwards in pain and firing in the wrong direction, or by ragdolling across the floor with fierce spasms of mortality. Make no mistake, this game is a hideous crime against the ears, eyes, and brain. But it is unusually smooth to the touch. Hmmm.
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Andrew Sum, game designer and head of studio Normal Wholesome Games, has previously said he’s a big fan of shooters. He also seems very aware that this is a far cry from the other game he is known for, the popular Frogger-like phone game Crossy Road. “If players are surprised, confused, or feeling strong emotions,” says his studio website, “then the team can call that a success.”
420BlazeIt 2 will also feature a meme slider, letting you presumably adjust just how dank your playthrough can get. The original game did something similar, featuring a “dubstep controller” that worked in the background to detect how many enemies were dying and placed the “drop” accordingly. If you like the sound of that, you can still play the original 420BlazeIt today.
Or better yet, grab that demo of the sequel, which we have harvested along with all the other demos from Steam Next Fest. It’s a bumper crop, my friends. A bumper crop.