Bertie: Sludge Life is such a mood. I can't think of another way to describe it. I mean, I could robotically say it's an open-city game about spray-painting walls but that doesn't seem to get even half-way to really describing what it is. What makes Sludge Life different is the mood it pulls you into.
Sludge Life emits this feeling of lazy rebellion, or maybe stoned anarchy (given some of the bizarre characters in the game, this might be a better description). The people who are on strike, against whatever authority runs the city, don't seem to be so much angry as ground down. It's like this was always the way and so a kind of malaise has settled in. A perpetual disgruntlement. And what has sprouted in that is a kind of ragtag resistance: a gradual picking at the authority's seams, one spray-painted mural at a time.
It's a game steeped in a kind of graffiti culture, a fingers up to the powers that be. It's there when you pee all over the bathroom floor of whatever building you broke into, and it's there when you press F to fart, or when you smoke, or when you drink a can, scrunch it, then chuck it. You don't care. No one does. And the more you tag, the wider your Ghost name spreads, and the more you meet people like you, spray cans nearby. And it's when this happens, you begin to appreciate there's something deeper and richer to Sludge Life, and that crude first impression begins to fade away.