“We Happy Few” is a game which is still in “early access.” For those unaware, this means that what is available for sale right now is not by any means a finished product. It could radically change between when I write this column and when a final version of the game comes out. This article is strictly a review of the early access version of “We Happy Few” as it stands at 3:48 AM on August 2nd, 2016.
“We Happy Few” tells the story of Arthur Hastings, a British man in the 1960s who decides one day to stop taking a medicine known as “Joy.” However, “Joy” is mandated by the state, and when Arthur stops taking it, he realizes that he lives in a horrible, shallow world where people are placated by drugs into accepting the horrors of the world around them. If you’re thinking that this plot sounds a little familiar, it’s because it was also more or less the plot of the film “Equilibrium” and bears striking similarities to the classic novel Brave New World. “We Happy Few” does put a few interesting spins on this particular theme, such as having the Big Brother style character be a talk show host rather than an obvious dictator. But… you’ve really got to work to make your dystopia unique, and “We Happy Few” kind of falls flat in that regard.
Parts of this game look great, but it does have a lot of problems with its visuals. Even with my gamma cranked all the way up, it was almost impossible to tell what was going on around me at night time because the objects all just blurred together into a muddy mess. I also had a problem with a lot of things just not showing up. For instance, there would be roofs and support beams for a house just floating in mid air because for whatever reason, the second floor just didn’t feel like showing up. However, the actual aesthetic of the game is pretty compelling. “We Happy Few” has a nice somewhat cartoonish but still grounded character design, and it know how to make happiness seem menacing, which can be difficult. Hopefully by the time that the game is actually finished they’ll have a lot of these problems ironed out.
I honestly have nothing to say the sound design of “We Happy Few.” I suppose that is rather damning in its own way, though. The only time that I ever even really noticed that there actually was any sound, is when I was mildly annoyed by every NPC I passed spouting off repetitive and overlong voice-clips like a game that came out in 1999.
Other people will doubtlessly love the way that “We Happy Few” plays, but I do not. I feel like the survival mechanics (hunger, thirst, fatigue) feel jarringly out of place in this particular setting. The crafting mechanics feel terribly forced to me, as they do in most gamesAnd then there’s a randomly generated world which can shake things up a bit (it worked wonders in the original “Diablo,” a game which holds up surprisingly well) but here all that it seems to do is add a bunch of empty space to the map. If this early access release is trying to sell me on a foundation of solid gameplay, I find it woefully lacking.
Despite how negative that all sounds, I really do have high hopes for “We Happy Few.” It has an abundance of style, and has a lot going for it that would easily allow it to stand out from the crowd of other indie horror games. However, what is available right now does not meet my standards, and I do not feel that this early build of the game should have been released for sale.
