We Happy Few is an odd little beast from development studio Compulsion Games (who have previously worked on the interesting puzzle-platformer Contrast). This partly crowdfunded title is essentially a roguelike survival game, where you must traverse the world finding materials to craft items so that you can better traverse the world to find materials to craft better items. What sets this apart from other survival games of this ilk is in its ponderous dystopian setting. Prior to the alpha there were many mutterings of a Bioshock-esque vibe, and while I don’t think this comparison is particularly apt in describing We Happy Few’s world, the premise is interesting nonetheless. Basically you live in a 1960s Britain-inspired world that has experienced a terrible calamity and now the population liberally doses themselves up with a drug called Joy in order to forget the crimes of the past. In the alpha you take control of Arthur Hastings, a pathetic whelp of a man who skips his Joy on a whim one day and starts to see the fabric of his drug-addled reality fall apart. Turns out that beneath the surface of all that synthetic happiness is a menacing and uncaring world that is rotten to its core. Arthur works at a redaction centre (where they edit newspapers of the past to give them a more pleasant spin), and after not taking his Joy he is revealed by his boss to be a ‘Downer’ (nobody likes a Downer) and is promptly chased from the building by the local constabulary. This begins your journey, with your only real goal being to escape the crazy reality you have found yourself in.
It looks like Barney the Dinosaur met an unhappy end here
Tea for We Happy Two
Somewhere out there there’s a very happy purple Smurf
This setting is undeniably interesting and holds much promise, but unfortunately it does not carry well into the actual gameplay. The game is currently in a very rough alpha state, and as of writing there is a cornucopia of technical problems (which can mostly be forgiven in an Early Access game), but the real problems are in the gameplay department and overall world-building aspects. As stated previously this is a roguelike survival game, so item hunting, crafting and inventory management are naturally central mechanics. Think of games like This War of Mine and The Fire in the Flood and you’re probably not far off. I really enjoy a good survival game, but they do have to be careful to strike a balance. They often involve you having to tend to every aspect of a character’s life, even the very mundane ones like eating, sleeping and drinking. The problem therein is actually making that process fun, which on the surface seems like a fairly tall order. For instance, This War of Mine successfully implemented these mechanics (although I probably wouldn’t describe that game as fun per se) by creating a brutal atmosphere where you control innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of war. Yes they were needy bastards, but you wanted to take care of them, if only to give
them some temporary reprieve from the horrors going on in their world. We Happy Few does not strike this balance, and in fact its moment-to-moment gameplay is the very definition of tedium. Arthur is constantly hungry, thirsty and tired, and often a mix of all three. This sleepy camel with a voracious appetite requires constant care, and this really hampers exploration. It’s like taking care of a baby, and it is anti-fun. You’ll never feel like you can venture far or explore too thoroughly because every moment you spend somewhere there is a clock ticking down and soon Arthur will need a good meal, plenty of water and a little nap before you can play again.
Ironically this quest couldn’t be finished
See how the other half live
The mechanics of maintaining optimum levels of Joy are plagued with similar problems. In order to blend in you’ll need to become one with the population by regularly imbibing Joy to maintain that happy exterior, but the effects of the drug wear off faster than that dodgy eccy you bought from the weird guy sitting in the corner at your bogan uncle’s house party. This means you’ll require constant top ups and an initially cool idea of conforming with society to survive becomes yet another tedious thing to add to the long list of things that Arthur needs often and in large doses. You can however avoid taking Joy by wearing a nice suit and talking politely to people. Simply interacting with an NPC in the happy districts will have Arthur utter some pleasantry that (very) temporarily allays suspicion if you’re not hepped up on Joy, but this has to be done constantly (every five seconds or so), and is the antithesis of enjoyable. In a similar vein, melee weapons have very low durability as well, meaning they will break constantly should you get yourself caught in too many donnybrooks. The first-person melee combat is currently quite floaty and imprecise too, and makes the Elder Scrolls series’ combat look like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Just because it’s a drug-addled dystopia doesn’t mean you can forget trigonometry
We Happy Few contains quests that give some structure to your foraging and crafting, and while these should be used to give you a better idea of the world, they’re really just confusing and poorly laid out fetch quests for the most part. You never get a sense of how the world works, as everyone you talk to is more or less spewing nonsense (and when speaking to them Arthur reciprocates by spewing his own nonsense like: ‘Penguins. Just… too many penguins.’). I get that the world and its inhabitants are supposed to be a quirky lot, but the execution makes everything just seem weird and out of place (in a bad way). It doesn’t help that the quests you embark on can’t be individually tracked on your compass and require you to constantly open a map to see where you are in relation to a quest marker (which in the alpha’s current state often don’t appear or update probably). To add insult to injury, while you peruse the map the game’s world is still running, meaning Arthur is getting hungry, thirsty and tired at the same alarming rate as when he’s walking around. Perhaps once Arthur’s narrative (and the other two promised characters’ stories in the full release) is more fleshed out these quests will become more enjoyable, only time will tell.
I’d love to investigate this but I need to eat a heap of stuff and down a gallon of water or I’ll die
We Happy Few is a game that needs a lot of work before its full release. Visual inconsistencies, bugs and glitches aside, the gameplay and the way in which the world is conveyed have to receive some serious attention. In particular, the rapid passage of time in the game world and the character’s endless need for food, drink and sleep needs to be toned down considerably. If Compulsion fail to balance these issues and to make the game actually fun to play, then the name of this title might end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
