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Dickie Bow would like to wish all Americans a Happy Labor Day and remind them that they should do their Bolshevik banging on at home and not in the workplace.

We didn't win the war by letting our soldiers extort proper safety equipment from their superiors, did we?

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Join us for this week’s We Happy Few Stream :D

Thursday 5pm PST (7pm CDT) over at the Low Art Lyceum YouTube channel

Last week @djangodurango @monstroso and I finished Sally's Act! Much shorter than Arthurs, the time flew by!

This week we’re starting Act 3: Ollie! Gone are the days of charming our way through the village. With poor manners, a swiss cheese brained memory, and an imaginary friend, we're in for a wild ride in this short but potent final act of We Happy Few. It's one of our favorites, so we're in for a good time.

Join us live this Thursday at 5pm PST (7pm CDT). All streams are also available to watch afterwards on our channel’s Live archive.

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Which is a favourite side quest of yours?

I like the way you phrased this. A favorite quest. Doesn't have to be the favorite (and good thing, there's a lot of contenders), leaves the door open to revisit the question in the future. Just talk about one quest I particularly like.

I like a lot of the quests. I mean, I think I could find something to say about almost all of them, but some are certainly doing more than others. If y'all start asking about specific quests, I think it would not be unlike the thing I do on my Thomas the Tank Engine sideblog feature where I try to teach people how to appreciate the CGI era but sometimes I'm left strugglin' when the episode is shallow (but I always come up with something).

On the other hand, my initial choice was going to be "Old Soldiers", except that really that quest is really also "Gland of Hope and Glory" and "A Dead Man's Best Friend" too. I suppose I could just talk about the first one on its own; it's got enough to work with.

But how about one that's pretty self-contained?

I'm gonna go with "Cathouse".

So the premise of this quest is that Lionel has sent Ollie to Thomasina House to steal three onyx cat statues (these being distinct from the marble one Arthur was sent to steal). Straight off, this is interesting design wise. Many of the simpler side quests are shared between characters with only minor dialogue changes between them. Quests like "Flower Picking", "Bring Out Your Dead", "Wild Picnic", basically anything where it's not inconceivable that any or all of our main characters could easily progress through the same simple plot without many changes.

This was also originally the case for some of the more complex quests. "Constant Gardeners", for instance, has a slightly different concept in Poedit for a version of the quest for Sally that would have made it much more explicit that Margery Flowerdew was her aunt. When you get into actual story quests rather than loot opportunities, it starts to beg the question of why those characters would go through the same experience with more than one of our protagonists.

Anyway, point is, you might think you're going to repeat the same quest that Arthur was tasked with... except that Ollie lacks Arthur's stealth skills. Practically speaking, you could probably still sneak as Ollie, no accoutrements or nothin'. It really is just a matter of staying out of sight. But this quest does not permit this. The objectives of this quest require an upfront approach.

Ironically, what Ollie lacks in stealth skills, he makes up for in people skills. Funnily enough, this is also written into the canon: he was a former "song and dance" man and is a passable actor as well, not unlike Arthur if he's talking to other men. Ollie's talents - fortunately - have no gender restrictions.

While it is a bit OP, I do generally do most of Ollie's playthrough in the boiler suit (I find the maid's uniform visually distracting). If you do too, you might not know that the Criers won't let you in when wearing anything else. If you knock on the door wearing the maid uniform, for instance, they have this line to shoo you away.

We don't want to buy anything! We already have a religion! Charity begins at home! Goodbye!

You could write that off as just denial of sales tactics, but given that they actually do have a religion (witchcraft), one could read into that a bit. I have a chapter in my WIP file about Reverend Charles Peter developing joy intolerance and part of that story based on this line involved a joint effort on the part of the various local clergymen to convert the Thomasina House Criers away from paganism. As a symptom of his growing Joy intolerance, Peter sees Eyes on the Criers, leading him to believe this is God marking those who need his help.

Obviously this intervention wouldn't have taken; what do any of those religions have to offer women? But that whole sub-idea comes from this one line.

So you put your boiler suit on and now the ladies are quite pleased to have a strapping young-old repairman on their doorstep. They make him wait outside for a moment while they purposely break a few things in the house for him to fix.

I know you're still waiting on the Lightbearer stuff, but I did take a hot second to go grab the lines for this quest for us. There was only a couple removed scenes and only one major rearrangement, so we didn't really lose much of the original intent.

Upon being shown the broken refrigerator, Ollie had this small exchange for the event that he didn't have the parts on hand to make the repair kit for it.

046 PC_Ollie I'll have to step out for some parts.

048 WellF Come back soon!

050 Meg I think she fancies you.

052 PC_Ollie Don't be ridiculous. They're much older than I.

We know the Criers a bit better than Ollie at this point, having listened to their comparative analysis of their favorite bobbies in Arthur's Act, so we know Meg is on the money here. If you've read How to be Happy, you also know that canonically Thomasina House is located within ogling distance of the constabulary exercise yard.

The lines in Poedit have the scene with the toilet before the Popper, suggesting the quest was written before the set piece was designed or that the writers just didn't have access to it yet.

There were a few lines removed from the dialogue after you repair the toilet.

084 PC_Ollie There. That should work now, if ye ever need company.

086 WellF We like your company!

088 PC_Ollie Anything else need fixin'? Maybe something in that locked bedroom?

090 WellF Ohhhhh… we're all out of broken things.

092 WellF Maybe more things will be broken next week!

094 PC_Ollie I'm sure the cats are in there. But how am I supposed to get into the bedroom?

096 Meg I think you know exactly how to get into their bedroom.

098 PC_Ollie Hoo. That'll require a wee dutch courage.

100 WellF We've made you tea and watercress sandwiches! You must stay for tea. You simply must!

I think these two bits were removed because they make Meg a little too knowing. Which is to say, being this aware and astute about the situation is quite precocious for a twelve-year-old girl, but not for the imaginary friend of a man in his 50's. It might've given away the game too early if Meg is seen to be too comfortable alluding that closely to what Ollie's going to have to do here. What remains of her input on the situation in the final game is a lot more distant: she merely comments that Ollie is bad at taking hints and later says she does not want to talk about what he had to do to get the cat statues.

And so things... come to a head.

The Criers invite Ollie to stay for tea and there we get the best animation in the game

So in game design, there are rewards like loot and skill upgrades and unlockables, etc, you know, quantifiable things you get for progressing in the game. There is a further idea though - and I very much believe in this, so much that I think it can even carry game on their own - that things like this are also rewards. This absolutely filthy animation of the player character's finger suggestively stroking the neck of a Scotch bottle, putting extra pressure on to show how hard it is, that is only used once in the entire game: this is a reward for successfully doing everything you need to do to get to this point.

'Cause think about it. You have to get through this without alerting anyone or causing a panic, probably the number one way this quest gets ruined. Beyond that, you also have to five Advanced Machine Bits (which means you need to either buy them from Lionel or know to be extracting from Dud German Bombs in anticipation of this quest) as well as two regular Mechanical Bits, three Metal bits, two rolls of Duct Tape, and two Metal Tubes. Completing this quest takes patience, awareness of one's surroundings, discipline to keep your grabby hands out of drawers until time, and considerable resource collection.

I couldn't tell you what quantifiable reward the game gives you for this quest because the only thing I give a fuck about having received for it is this raunchy animation of Ollie assuring three women that he's enough Scotch for all of them.

I learned another thing about this digging out the lines in Poedit.

See, I had thought that this animation was just one of many in a "pack" of animations that player arms can do. That this animation could be done by any player character theoretically, but that they only used it specifically for Ollie in this moment just because they had it and it was too good not to see at least once. But I don't actually think that's true anymore.

Because this cutscene around the tea table... is actually cinematic. It's pre-rendered.

I hadn't noticed before because usually a scene is pre-rendered in this game because the scene is supposed to be particularly important and the character you're speaking to needs to do more than use the stock of shared body animations. The DLC's have many more cinematic scenes like this, but in the main game, they're generally used for emphasis, to mark the most important story beats. They're not often used in side quests because those are optional.

Sometimes in those pre-rendered cutscenes, the player character also has custom animations for specific movements as well. Arthur putting his glasses on after escaping the motilene mines, Sally's little dance for General Byng or pretending to pour him a drink and hitting him with the bottle, Ollie's assembling the hot air balloon.

And this.

I now think this was not just an animation they had and wanted to use, but that they specifically made this animation for this scene. That they thought this scene was important enough that it needed to be a cinematic. I might even go so far as to suggest that this scene is only cinematic for the purpose of doing this animation, that this animation is the entire reason for this scene and the Crier animations were an afterthought.

I'd missed it all this time because the Criers aren't doing anything like characters in other cinematics do. There's none of Verloc's dynamic physical comedy or the player's viewport tracking General Byng's menacing movement around his office. If you look closely, though, you can see the Criers doing custom movements. The one on the right particularly is fluffing her hair and stroking her chest. The one on the left gesticulates with her teacup a bit later in the scene.

Their movement is so subtle and the fact that they stand around awkwardly rather than sit (which there is a stock animation for)... it's is almost as if this scene were disguised as a normal in-world cutscene, making it a reward for only the kind of person who appreciates this sort of thing, seeing how the magic trick works.

There's one last thing I think is really fun about this quest. When the idea that he's gonna have to fuck these ladies to get into that bedroom becomes clear, he acts as though he's loath to do it in the removed lines. And I think based on the rest, it's not because he finds the idea repulsive but because he thinks it's going to be asking a lot of luck. In that cut bit of dialogue early in the quest, he writes the idea off entirely because these ladies are so much older than him. He misses the cue about his nimble hands and has to be told what she's getting at. If you try the door before you're invited in, one of the Criers will mention "how many services you provide", which Ollie ignores/misses again. He seems to find the idea that anyone would find him attractive preposterous, let alone women who I suppose he must think are beyond the age for it.

There's a very interesting dynamic present here. Ollie is here to steal from these women, to take advantage of their age and ostensible helplessness, but they in turn want something from him and have conspired together to force him into a position to at least propose it. This is a situation that coulda read in much less satisfying ways, but it was written with such balance that it's just a fun romp!

The lines for the cinematic in Poedit are titled CIN_Ollie_Gets_Seduced_ALL. Ollie gets seduced. Not the other way around. lol.

And to top it off, the delivery on his line directly following the fade-to-black...

118 PC_Ollie I suppose that's not the worst thing that's happened to me since my house fell down.

...actually sounds quite pleased with this turn of events, pleased with his own performance even. Like, I think it's quite cool that he ends the quest with that attitude. It could just as easily ended in "Ugh, I had to fuck three old ladies, gross" but no! It's "Well, that wasn't half bad!" And the quest finishes with everyone (even Meg if you leave them some money) happy.

Good shit!

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Join us for this week’s We Happy Few Stream :D

5pm PST (7pm CDT) over at the Low Art Lyceum YouTube channel

This week Sally's desperate times call for the most desperate measures. Reaching out to her ex, catching up with a long lost friend, popping by her current benefactor's house and hoping that at least one of the men in her life can point her to the cure for her daughter's illness. Surely nothing can go wrong!

@djangodurango @monstroso and I are starting the stream in about 2 hours. Hope to see you there! All streams are also available to watch afterwards on our channel’s Live archive.

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"But that ship is toxic and problematic" okay ❤️ yay ❤️

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Join us for this week’s We Happy Few Stream :D

5pm PST (7pm CDT) over at the Low Art Lyceum YouTube channel

Today, @djangodurango @monstroso and I are continuing our quest for Blackberry Joy ingredients with Sally Boyle, but first we need to stop a cult. And to stop a cult first we need to open the doors of our perception. Histoplasma mushrooms are back on the menu! We're in for some mushroom espionage, poison sabotage, and quests around Lud's Holm where we may loot some cellarage.

We’re starting the stream in about 2 hours. Hope to see you there! All streams are also available to watch afterwards on our channel’s Live archive.

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foreshadowing done well makes me go feral like there’s NOTHING better than getting to the end a book or an important storyline moment and realising that the author laced information so intricately into their writing that weren’t noticeable upon first read but when you read back sections they’re light giant red flags like wow writing is amazing

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Do you have any notes on the Blight/Plague in the game? I think they're supposed to be derived from the same thing - the Histoplasma mushrooms and I'm also pretty sure they're an ingredient in Joy or I'm mixing to lore items up

So the relationship between histoplasma mushrooms, plague and blight is nebulous and the further implication the game presents us is that both are caused by the toxic waste that Haworth Labs dumps into the river. There isn't anything concrete about this aspect of the game, it's all just supposition on the part of various characters. Gemma has her hypothesis that the Doctors discuss near the end of Arthur's act and Sally supposes something similar when she's exploring Ratholm.

Acknowledging that the game is purposely vague about the specifics, here's what the game tells us definitively and what I further theorize about these things and how they are related.

To start, I think the relationship is actually more like this:

The toxic waste dumped from Haworth Labs causes the Blight. The Blight seems to effect only certain kinds of plants - basically anything edible, with the exception of rowan berries, blue currants, and yams.

Their resistance to blight as well as being the only of those three to offer significant nourishment is, I think, why a cult formed around the yam. Cults have similarly formed loosely around the histoplasma mushroom, but I actually think histoplasma is... not blighted exactly.

Blight seems to effect normal vegetables in pretty predictable ways. In the absence of whatever it is about phytosteroid that prevents Blight from taking hold in yams, it causes rotting upon harvest in everything else. But a mushroom is not a normal vegetable. It's not a vegetable at all. It's a fungus, which is neither a plant nor an animal but some secret third thing that moves in most mysterious ways.

I think histoplasma has, in fact, absorbed Blight into itself - added Blight to its very genetic makeup - to become some greater mushroom amalgam. I also think normally histoplasma, despite its new and terrifying powers, is still mostly benign. It's not out here trying to kill you, just open the doors to your perception a little wider than it could before. When used by strong, healthy individuals, it's probably harmless.

But who can say that about themselves in Wellington Wells?

When discussing Gemma's hypothesis about the source of plague, the Doctors state their own, which is that it's an opportunistic infection. That is to say, normally histoplasma spores come to no affect, but in underfed, malnourished, and/or injured subjects, the Blight inherent to histoplasma can dig in and become an opportunistic infection. They go on to claim that the bad batches of Joy "knocked out" people's immune systems, but I don't think there's any other support for that so I'd write that off as just trying to blame Verloc for plague since Wellington Health Doctors consider him an adversary.

Don't worry. We'll get to his place in all this.

Anyway, from there, an infected individual will devolve into a Beowulf-quoting brute with an unusually strong strike for someone who's barely eaten in weeks. Since they become so inordinately beefy after infection, normal Wastrels will find them difficult opponents in a fight and even if they win, the chances of catching plague off inflicted injuries is pretty high. Thus, the plague propagates even without a person coming into direct contact with the mushrooms themselves.

So, if toxic waste causes Blight and Blight causes histoplasma and histoplasma causes plague, then the plague must have originated in Ratholm, an island mostly devoted to dumping toxic waste.

Nope!

We actually have pretty concrete proof that Ratholm, though a dumping ground for Downers, was not plague-ridden until very recently. Like, very recently.

"Resignations", a note to Verloc from Jimmy Cardigan, makes no mention of plague on the island, only that Jimmy's workforce has either quit or gone on holiday because they don't want to work on Downer Holm. The note is dated September 28th, 1964. That's about a week before the official start of the events of the game. The timeline is obviously ??? once you get past the first day in any given Act, but that just gives you the idea. Ratholm seems like it should be the epicenter of plague and it apparently has hit the island and spread virulently among the population, owing to the toxic environment diminishing their health.

But it isn't the source of plague.

I talked a bit about how toxic waste dumping from Haworth Labs also obviously causes the toxic fog that seeps out of the sewers at night in the Village. Unlike the Blight, we can assume the fog has actually been around for some time, about ten years, as long as Joy has been in production. What this tells us is that it is not toxic waste alone that causes Blight. Something has changed recently that made the toxic waste interact with the local plant life in a new and novel way!

You were right that mushrooms were an ingredient in Joy. Or rather, they are an ingredient in Strawberry Joy, the source of all of Wellington Wells' sudden compounding problems.

For once, though, I don't think this one is on Sally. It is Verloc this time!

If you will recall, the formula for Strawberry Joy - particularly its substitutions in the original formula for local flora and fauna (liberty caps, poppies, and bufo toad venom) - was developed on the advice of the Witches, specifically Nimue. Nimue, in addition to her skills in witchcraft, was also a former chemist for Haworth Labs. This suggests that she alone really understands the ways in which the substitutions she's made could affect the local environment under the wrong conditions. She probably considered this when giving this formula to Sally who knows herbalism but not well enough to come up with this formula on her own or consider the consequences of mishandling it. It's a dangerous gamble, but it was Sally asking for it, and she is nothing if not fastidious with her chemistry. Why, she was even correcting Verloc's calculations by that point!

And that's where the problem lies.

Verloc doesn't respect or understand herbalism, but the formula he's relying on to buy him time to develop his permanent solution depends on it. He doesn't have the knowledge to keep the formula to its apparently exacting measures and so the quality of the product has declined. Worse, though, is that whatever figures in that formula that had thus far prevented the ingredients from the local ecosystem from mutating all their like in the Garden District are not being observed carefully enough anymore. And so, Blight.

So then where did the plague originate?

Well, there's nothing definitive to say, but I think Lud's Holm is the most likely. Across all the Acts, its the location we see the most histoplasma use. While there is some recreational histoplasma use on Ravensholm and we do see the plague progress there across Acts as well, Lud's Holm features histoplasma pretty frequently in its very culture with recreational use apparent there as well, in addition to religions and cults (themselves a fixture more often found on Lud's Holm) featuring it prominently in their rituals. Arthur mentions that he and Sally used to eat "magic mushrooms" as children and so there was also probably a broader culture of that in this area previously which only informs the current now. In fact, those magic mushrooms may very well be the liberty caps that are now used in the Strawberry Joy formula, which is why they've taken so nicely to the toxic waste in recent years where before they were apparently incompatible.

Going back to the Doctors blaming Verloc for the plague, I actually think the only reason plague broke containment from Lud's Holm is because the Doctors were less than diligent with their handling of test subjects. If we assume Lud's Holm is the origin of plague, then it remains pretty much contained there until Ollie's act when we may find the Megiddo bridge overrun.

The other canon places where plague has broken out - Ratholm and the Parade - are both the result of improper containment of the part of the Doctors. Wellington Health is on the lookout for a Downer with plague when Arthur is there so they've already misplaced one even before Arthur turns off the quarantine grid. And the tape in Ratholm laboratory tells us something similar happened there. Ratholm remains contained for the most part, but the plague begins to spread from the Parade more broadly in the Village by Victoria's DLC.

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Finally, some art of her other outfits!

art for Sally's alternate outfits that DJ requested on our We Happy Few stream!

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Join us for this week’s We Happy Few Stream :D

5pm PST (7pm CDT) over at the Low Art Lyceum YouTube channel

Today, @djangodurango @monstroso and I are continuing with Act 2 and heading to the toxic isle of Rat Holm. With both the constabulary and client list breathing down her neck, Sally Boyle is on a time crunch to get the ingredients needed for the coveted Blackberry Joy. Being the local dealer has its downsides - especially with a secret baby upstairs.

We’re starting the stream in about 2 hours. Hope to see you there! All streams are also available to watch afterwards on our channel’s Live archive.

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Yay more art for Sherry!

With the mask

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I can finally share aome concept work I did for a personal project me and @devilishlyvintage are working on! Her name is Amy and she is an OC of ours made for an alternate/ ongoing storyline for thr game „we happy few“.

if you wanna know more about her, check out @strxberryblxnde

rough concepts of Amy, appearance and face according to the ingame style

lookbook and costume design

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Sherry and Charles!

Another redraw!

Blue and red version

Okay ngl why does this remind me of tf2 I swear that wasn’t intentional😭

Anyways old art

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Join us for this week’s We Happy Few Stream :D

Friday 5pm PST (7pm CDT) over at the Low Art Lyceum YouTube channel

Last week @djangodurango @monstroso and I finished Arthur's Act, gut-wrenching ending and all.

This week we're starting Act 2: Sally! It's time to properly meet the enigmatic It Girl of Wellington Wells, Miss Sally Boyle herself. Arthur's childhood friend and crush, Anton Verloc's ex, General Byng's special friend, and chemist extraordinaire. But Sally has some secrets of her own and may be in far more of a pickle than she lets on. And much like Arthur, she can't always be trusted to tell the truth.

Join us live this Friday at 5pm PST (7pm CDT). All streams are also available to watch afterwards on our channel’s Live archive.

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Look at all the notice you get this week! Two whole days in advance. See you on Friday. Not today.

Join us for this week’s We Happy Few Stream :D

5pm PST (7pm CDT) over at the Low Art Lyceum YouTube channel

Last week @djangodurango @monstroso and I finished Arthur's Act, gut-wrenching ending and all.

This week we're starting Act 2: Sally! It's time to properly meet the enigmatic It Girl of Wellington Wells, Miss Sally Boyle herself. Arthur's childhood friend and crush, Anton Verloc's ex, General Byng's special friend, and chemist extraordinaire. But Sally has some secrets of her own and may be in far more of a pickle than she lets on. And much like Arthur, she can't always be trusted to tell the truth.

Join us live this Friday at 5pm PST (7pm CDT). All streams are also available to watch afterwards on our channel’s Live archive.

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In honor of @djangodurango, @monstroso, and I finishing Act 1 of We Happy Few over on the Low Art Lyceum channel, here's a collection of some screenshots we took along the way. Anyone who watched our streams, know we're not immune from the siren call of a photo op.

Join us next week on Friday (5pm PST, 7pm CDT) as we embark on Act II: Sally!