The Best (And Worst) Video Games To Play High

With a soundtrack that’s probably still playing at your local headshop and a delightful arcade feel that persists throughout its many iterations, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater seems like it was cooked up in a weed lab. There’s something so wonderfully soothing about burning down a j before nailing a 900 in a drained public school pool while almost imperceptibly bobbing your head to Primus, something so satisfying about the little “pss pss” sound of the spraypaint can while you mess around in the Graffiti game mode.

And again, those soundtracks. It unifies stoners of all cultures, bringing a little audio treat for everyone. You want some ska? We got it. How about a little punk? It’s here. Thrash around to some thrash rock. American Wasteland gave us an entire soundtrack of punk rock covers from punk-adjacent ‘00s bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, while Underground’s massive soundtrack had Deltron 2030, NOFX, Fu Manchu, and more. Shit’s lit.

Aside from Elden Ring, which lets you wander away from perilous foes and explore the hauntingly beautiful Lands Between, any Souls-like game is worth consideration in a worst games to play when baked. But Sekiro is the worst of them all. Widely considered the hardest FromSoftware game, Sekiro is absolutely brutal for stoners. There’s nothing more disheartening than making headway in a difficult section just to get yeeted back to a save point that feels, offensively, far away from your goal, and that feeling is even more dejecting when you’re high and a little morose.

Sekiro doesn’t suffer fools, and pot makes you goofy and spacey. It’s a nightmare combination, but nothing instills more fear in me than imagining the fucking Guardian Ape coming back to life after thinking I’ve defeated him. Hard pass. This shit really harshes my mellow.

My freshman year of college was all about buying stemmy, seedy weed from a guy who graduated from my high school, smoking it out of a makeshift bowl made out of a pill bottle and a pen in the corner of the quad, and retreating to my shared bedroom to play Halo 3 while blitzed out of my gourd.

Though there’s an obvious competitive aspect to Halo, the absurdity of its sandbox makes the stakes feel lower, less dire. Dying in Halo is like temporarily zoning out a bit when you’re blitted—you’ll come back in no time, those neurons will rebuild themselves.

And since Halo offers so many opportunities for genuine, slapstick comedy, it’s a no-brainer for this list. Hopping into a Big Team Battle match with a few friends after making a little fresh salad plucked from your individual dime bags and careening about in a Warthog, trying to pull off ridiculous trick shots with sniper rifles and blowing up in a variety of stupid ways is an unparalleled serotonin boost.

As someone who zones in when stoned gaming (I actually enjoy playing Overwatch comp zooted), I thought Overcooked would be another game for my elevated arsenal. It is very much not that. In fact, it’s a nightmare when stoned.

Overcooked is one of the few solid couch co-op games on modern consoles, so it’s something I regularly trot out when I have friends over who are interested in games but aren’t gamers per se. It’s a favorite of one of my besties, who will come over, microdose mushrooms, and become an absolute menace in the kitchen.

I, however, struggle to be an effective line cook during our play sessions, and get easily stressed out as the game ramps up the chaos and stakes. I repeatedly send out orders missing key ingredients (“girl, that was just a bun”), leave food on the burner for too long and cause fires to break out, put prepped ingredients in the trash instead of on the counter, and just generally fuck everything up. I’m so bad, my friend will parrot anti-drug sayings at me while I struggle: “This is why you can’t hire stoners!”

Let me take you on a little journey. Spark up that joint and boot up The Sims. Spend way too long poring over the Create-A-Sim screen in an attempt to make someone who vaguely looks like the first girl you had a crush on. Did she have shoulder-length ashy brown hair or was it a bit longer, a bit warmer? Was her nose ring on her left or right nostril? Would she wear those boots? After you’ve finally settled on a satisfying avatar of the person you were too scared to come out to, pick a lovely neighborhood for her to move into—she deserves it, as she’s definitely probably married to some fucker named Steve who took over his dad’s plumbing company.

Input the motherlode cheat and give her unlimited funds, then before she can step a combat-booted toe into the mediocre house on the property, swap into build mode and demolish the fucker. She can stay there, frozen in glee at the thought of entering her new home, for as long as you need while you build her a house worthy of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Build its skeleton, get lost in the vision. Snap walls into place just to remove them with a satisfying thud. Rotate furniture this way and that to get the perfect angle. Play with lighting. Make a bathroom inspired by that one you saw in Architectural Digest’s tour of David Harbour’s New York apartment. Meticulously paint cobblestones onto the terrain, dot those cobblestones with wildflowers. Look up a YouTube video on how to make a conversation pit, because you want this space to give The Nice Guys, to offer ‘70s mid-century exceptionalism. Make it feel lived-in with an endless array of tchotchkes: a fruit bowl, a tissue box, shoes near the front door. Renovate half the space because you think it feels too much like a display room at Ikea. Don’t forget to build out the yard, she needs a pool. You have been doing this for four hours.

Your stoner college roommate said it first, and he’s not wrong: Co-op zombie FPS Left 4 Dead is a nightmare when stoned. The terrifying sobs of the dangerous witch, whose location you can’t seem to pinpoint because you’re a bit stupid at the moment and your senses are struggling, will threaten to send you into a fit of hysterics that might mimic her heaving sobs. The long gaps of silence between hordes will keep you on edge, but not enough of an edge that you’re prepared for the dozens of zombies that come streaming down an alleyway—you’re twitchy, but youre reaction speed is ass at the moment, and they mob you before you can figure out where they’re coming from.

The music cues that let you know when a special, big bad zombie is coming will make your palms sweat. All three of your friends screaming at you to open the fucking safe room door doesn’t help, either.

Miss this game entirely when high.

There’s a lot to do in MMO FPS Destiny 2 at any given moment: visit merchants and collect bounties from them, dismantle unwanted items, check your mail with Kadi 55-30 (checking, checking) make number bigger, futz with your shaders until you feel satisfyingly slick, bank those motes, sister, compare your weapons in Destiny Inventory Manager—I could go on.

It’s the kind of game that many people find tedious, but many potheads find provides the perfect, consistent hum of brain activity without sending you over the edge. Sometimes, I’ll take an edible and boot up Destiny 2 with the sole desire of completing bounties, other times I go into it determined to beat people up in PvP, but most of the time I’m squinting at my inventory and comparing it to my vault while some guy doing YouTuber voice tells me how to force good stat rolls on your armor.

Oh, and I don’t care what any of you say, Gambit is a blast when you’re high. It’s the reason why, at random, I’ll blurt out a Drifter quote in the middle of a session and startle my cats. “Enough fooling around!”

I still sense my blood pressure rising when I think about how long it took me to beat Hades, the award-winning roguelike from Supergiant Games—and I never once tried it high. Hades requires too much of your attention, has too many opportunities for a tiny mistake to cascade into chaos, gives you very little wiggle room for anything less than perfection. You have to make educated decisions during every Hades run that are entirely dependent on the weapon you’ve chosen to take into it—the boons and Daedalus hammers you choose, whenever you get a chance to choose them, can make or break you. Going through the wrong boss door could put you in the river Styx.

This game simply has too much room for error, and when you’re high as hell trying to eat Oreos with one hand and navigate Alecto with the other, you’re wasting both your time and the Gods’.

Hades is the gaming equivalent of taking the SAT—and you don’t want to do that stoned.