#also one of the characters in game.name nick lightbearer...

[eziojensenthe3rd]

Midnight Gaming: Lovely day for it..

So last night I played We Happy Few, checked socials and found... Retrospring will shut down in 2025.

So retrosprings a sort of a q/a social media site and they've announced they will be shutting down next year. Screenshots taken from the site.

So We Happy Few, the game that can be summarised as modern britain simulator. Before launch, the game was garnering some attention with a lot of folks being fascinated with what looked like 1984 meets bioshock. Of course when the game did launch... it was a buggy, tedious mess of a game and wasnt great to play.

Now, the idea of a survival game were you need to play along and conform to societys quirks in order to blend in is an incredible idea that I feel isnt explored very much in games and holds some relevance in todays climate. Joy is the drug that made the town of Wellington Wells the way it is, people stoned off their minds and forgetting the terrible past, living in ignorant bliss. And if you didnt take your joy, you're labelled a downer and will be attacked until you conform or get chased out. And theres lot of effort in wellington wells, mainly within the town itself to detect downers, all to make sure everyone stays happy. And you'd assume there'd be some pressure to play along just enough to stay alive right? Well not really.

Truth is that We Happy Fews "survival" mechanics are rather toothless. In the games story you only need to occasionally eat, drink and sleep as you walk miles along grasslands and cobblestones street to reach the next cutscene, and in the early game you get introduced to the garden district were berries and clean water are abundant. Heck theres plenty of rose of giliead bushes that can be turned into healing balm, making most fights trivial since you're stacked with healing items. By the way, i said clean water because in the town and parade districts, the water is spiked with joy but only the water, the food isnt spiked so any pies, sandwiches, stews and cans of v-meat you find are joyfree. Even tea, grapefruit juice and coffee are safe for some reason. Actually there is quite a bit of food in the village, edible too despite the fact that the games story states that theres currently a famine going on. Where mass starvation is a looming threat that everyone is too overjoyed to care.

The opening had a bunch of wellies eat a dead rat thinking it was candy from a smashed pinata but you never get anything like that in game. Joy does make things look pretty but outside of getting past a detector, there isnt much of a reason for a player to decide to chase the joyful bulldog. No circumstance in the game made you weigh the pros and cons of taking joy either to get past a detector or even just making rotten food edible for a lil bit, dealing with the consequences of withdrawal and memory loss later, which tbh all they did was made the visuals more morbid and made you more noticeable to wellies. You know, I actually recall that taking joy had a more dire effect that once you take enough, the games over. Your not a downer anymore after all are you?

Apparently in its earlier concepts the game was planned as a roguelike kind of game where the joy and survival mechanics wouldve been fleshed out more. But I suppose as the game gained traction and attention, especially after the xbox presentation at e3, the expectations for the game to be a bioshock-esque kind of game may have caused development to change direction in order to realise that expectation, yet they end up keeping a lot of the now abandoned elements for the rougelike, incorporating some of it like the procedural generation, into a mashed together game that couldnt make its mind up. And thats a real downer.

You cannot accuse this game of being lazily made, far from it. The enviroments and writing is fascinating, the story and characters are interesting and voice acted tremendously well. Behind the mask of a game thats mostly running to one place to the next, theres a small glimpse of something truly great. This isnt just a bad game, this is a bad game that couldve been a great game which is a worse than just a any bad game because now im sitting here mad, typing on a touchscreen about the pontential this game had and couldve realised had the leadership of this game made their bloody minds up. The story, the world, the characters and general style. The game had the talent and resources to make something great and at times, you can see that quality. But the direction behind this game was flawed, the ones leading the project could not figure out what kind of game they were making and all we got was a rushed, buggy, confused mess.

Im just writing a blog post, paraphrasing my thoughts here. But if you're interested in delving into this further, theres a couple of videos that are worth watching. First off is the The Cost of Joy which is a documentary by the developers that details the development of the game itself.

The second is a video by Abbsynthe titled We Happy Few: An amazing story weighed down by a bad game, which covers a lot of the aspects of the game and its story and goes into more detail.

I recommend giving these videos a watch if you're interested.

Thats all for today, see you all tomorrow. Feedback is appreciated, anons are currently on.