For years, High on Life has been a cult favorite on PC and console, celebrated for its absurdist humor, motor-mouthed alien guns, and tight third-person shooter mechanics. Now the comedy shooter is aiming for a new frontier: virtual reality. Studio Flat2VR is teaming up with Squanch Games to bring the title to the Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets, a move that could signal a broader shift toward premium, larger-scale games on standalone VR hardware. We spoke with High on Life VR game director Emily O’Neal and Eric Masher, co-founder and chief operating officer of Impact Reality and Flat2VR Studios, about the ambitions and obstacles behind the port.
While the project is still in its early stages, the effort represents more than a simple port. As Masher put it, the goal is to grow the VR market by introducing the kind of depth and polish that players already expect from PC and console titles.
A Market That Is Bigger Than It Looks
High on Life has been available on PC and console for several years, but VR has traditionally been viewed as a niche platform. Masher, however, argues the numbers tell a different story. “VR is a smaller market; it doesn’t mean that it’s a small market,” he said. “You know, we’re looking at numbers now of Quest headsets being in the 30-million to 40-million range. Those are not numbers to take lightly. A game like Gorilla Tag—which is a free-to-play game—has done over $100 million in revenue. We do see that audience that has been playing Gorilla Tag starting to grow up. They started when they were younger kids, and now they’re getting older and have disposable income. What are they going to want to play next?”
The answer, according to Flat2VR, is exactly the kind of high-quality experience High on Life offers. “We want to bring them those high-quality games like High on Life, that have more teeth, more depth, and more playability as an actual game. We’re not here just for a short snapshot in time; we’re here to help grow this industry to where it will be in three to five years from now. Our job and our mission at Flat2VR is to bring the immersive, amazing games that you love playing right now on your console and PC, but bring it to another platform that makes a whole bunch of sense and that feels completely different but still the same.”
“We want to bring them those high-quality games like High on Life, that have more teeth, more depth, and more playability as an actual game. We’re not here just for a short snapshot in time; we’re here to help grow this industry to where it will be in three to five years from now.”
Eric Masher, Flat2VR Studios
Optimizing a Massive Game for a Headset
Adapting High on Life to VR is no small undertaking. The original game is enormous, packed with animations and wildly varied worlds, and fitting all of that data onto a standalone headset while maintaining smooth performance is a genuine engineering challenge. “There are a ton of animations and wildly different worlds, so even getting that much data to fit on a standalone platform is a big challenge,” O’Neal explained. “You have to load it all in a decent amount of time and run it in real time, ideally at 72 frames per second. All of that optimization represents a cluster of problems our tech-art teams are chipping away at from many angles. A huge part of our technical challenge has been upgrading the game to a more modern version of Unreal Engine. Modernizing our toolsets allows us to perform the optimizations needed to get these massive, gorgeous, colorful worlds running on Meta Quest.”
For O’Neal, the true centerpiece of the VR adaptation is not the bounty suit or the traversal mechanics, but the Gatlian firearms players collect throughout the game. Their expressive faces and complex skeletons make them ideal candidates for the kind of physical interaction VR enables. “The Gatlians are without a doubt my favorite part of the game. When defining the mission statement for the VR adaptation, they are 100% the centerpiece. The core question we continually return to with every feature is: Do you feel like you’re holding a living creature in your hand, and when they speak to you, do you feel like you’re truly interacting with them?”
Knifey Takes Center Stage
Of the entire cast, Knifey has emerged as the breakout star of the High on Life arsenal—a sentient blade driven by an insatiable bloodlust. O’Neal confirmed that the murder-happy melee tool is receiving special treatment in the VR port. “Yes, Knifey is 100% getting the most treatment out of the whole cast,” she said. “There’s a huge gap between pressing a button to trigger a knife slash versus making that motion yourself, so some of the biggest new systems we’re building are specifically for Knifey.”
The studio is developing VR-specific systems to capture the visceral sensation of stabbing Knifey into flesh, all while preserving the game’s signature comedy. “His whole personality revolves around pure bloodlust—he’s constantly begging you to use him and stab things—so we’re leaning hard into that. We’re building new VR-specific systems to capture that visceral feeling of stabbing Knifey into flesh. It’s not a gory game and won’t feel like one; we’re maintaining the same comedy and humor with all of Knifey’s interactions, but leaning into mechanics you can only achieve with a knife in VR. Most importantly, we want a Knifey-first strategy to be a genuinely viable way to play the entire game, so we’re spending a lot of time with him.”
Fighting Motion Sickness and Looking Ahead
One of the perennial hurdles for VR shooters is motion sickness, a problem that can derail even the most polished experience. Flat2VR is addressing it through performance and a full suite of accessibility options. “We take comfort super seriously. The real power fantasy lies in the traversal abilities you get with the bounty suit, so we don’t want to sacrifice or remove any of that from the game, but we do want it to be approachable to anyone who wants to play,” Masher explained. “The first piece of that is performance: It has to be stable, responsive, and hit its target frame rate. Beyond that, we’re going all out on options…from snap turn and smooth turn to custom smooth turning speeds—so players can tune the experience to whatever feels comfortable for their body.”
Masher also expressed optimism that motion sickness will fade as a generation of players grows up immersed in VR. “What’s nice about motion sickness is that we’re starting to see it become less prominent, especially with younger players. Kids are growing up in VR headsets now, with games like Gorilla Tag introducing kids as young as 10 or 11 to the platform. They know nothing but gaming inside a VR headset, so by the time they grow up, it’s completely normal for them. It’s almost like we’re breeding motion sickness out of the audience.”
High on Life VR does not yet have a release date, but the title is available for preorder now through the Meta Horizon Store. For now, the project stands as a promising signal that standalone VR hardware may be ready for bigger, more ambitious games.
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