High On Life Trophy Guide: The Actual Path to Platinum
Most trophy guides for High On Life will tell you to go mode clear twice. That is technically correct and also wildly inefficient. I spent six hours on my first run through the campaign and missed two story choices I didn't even realize were missable. Second playthrough cost me another four hours for nothing because I already knew where everything was. You don't need two full runs. You need a specific order and the right settings. The trophy list has roughly 45 entries. About 30 are story-related and can't be missed if you're paying basic attention. The real problem spots are the collectible-heavy ones, the combat challenges, and the ones that lock behind New Game Plus requirements. Let me walk you through what actually works. Start on Normal difficulty. Don't bother with any other setting for trophy purposes. The difficulty trophies are tied to story completion, not challenge runs. Finish the main campaign once and you unlock the majority of the story trophies in one sitting. I'm talking about three to four hours if you don't get sidetracked by optional dialogue loops.
Here's the part nobody emphasizes enough: the collectible trophies are gated behind a single in-game mechanic called the Scan Mode. Karl, one of your companion guns, has a scanning ability that reveals hidden items scattered through every level. When you see a shimmering outline through a wall, stop and scan it. I found 87 percent of the collectibles on my first pass just by actively using Karl's scan whenever I heard the audio cue. The remaining 13 percent were tucked behind doors that require backtracking with Garmantuous's size-changing ability, which you won't have unlocked until Act 3. For the combat trophies, you need to complete specific kill challenges. The game tracks these in the Trophies menu under the Challenges tab. I kept losing track of which ones I'd completed because the tracking UI is buried. My workaround was opening that menu every time I finished a major encounter and noting which checkboxes filled in. This took about twenty seconds and saved me from grinding the same enemy type repeatedly across multiple acts. The gun upgrade system also affects difficulty here. Invest in the damage upgrades early. Running into the endgame with stock weapons makes the harder combat trophies unnecessarily tedious. There is one trophy that genuinely requires a second playthrough. The choice-based story divergence trophy locks you out if you make the same decisions both times. I ran into a specific edge case where the game registered my second playthrough choices as identical to the first, even though I consciously picked differently. The workaround was loading a save from right before the branching point rather than just pressing on from where the first run naturally ended. Starting fresh at that checkpoint seemed to reset the game's choice memory. I wasted about forty-five minutes before figuring this out.
New Game Plus unlocks after completing the story. You carry over your weapons and upgrades, which makes the NG+ playthrough significantly faster. Use it to grab the achievements you missed on your first run. The secret ending requires a specific sequence of dialogue options and a timing-based action near the climax. If you're chasing the 100 percent trophy, this is mandatory. The trigger condition is easy to miss because it's not flagged as a quest objective. I only discovered it by checking a community wiki after finishing the game for the third time out of frustration. A few things that will slow you down if you let them. Side quests are entirely optional for trophies. The only exception is one side quest that rewards a weapon upgrade needed for a combat challenge. Do that one side quest early in Act 2 and you won't need to circle back. Multiple save scumming for dialogue choices will fragment your progress. Pick a path and commit. The story doesn't branch enough to justify reloading every conversation. The game does not support trophy tracking across platforms on the same account. If you're playing on both PC and console, you'll need separate runs. The trophy list is identical but the requirements don't carry over. Also, the game crashes occasionally during cutscenes on PC. I experienced three crashes in a single two-hour session on the Steam version. Saving frequently between acts prevents progress loss. The auto-save points are generous but not infinite.
Get the Full Details
If you're optimizing strictly for trophy time, expect about eight to ten hours total split across two playthroughs with targeted grinding for the challenge trophies. Going in blind without a checklist will push that to twelve or thirteen. The challenge trophy tracker in the menu is your best tool. Use it religiously and you won't waste time on irrelevant combat encounters.
