Originally announced in February 2015 as a Kickstarter project promising to be a genre-melding experience set in an alternate 1960s British style environment full of odd characters, drug addiction & scavenging for everything needed to survive in this world gone mad, the game that would become know as “We Happy Few” got an impressive trailer during Microsoft’s E3 2016 conference. The trailer harkened back to the days of the original “Bioshock” game before it was unveiled to be a survival game in early access that forced the player to simply find enough stuff to move across the spacey map; going from the Gardens full of wastrels to the rainbow-colored streets of the Parade. Listening to its player base, Compulsion Games added a full narrative featuring three acts focusing on a trio of characters all attempting to escape Wellington Wells. Though it definitely didn’t appear to be the next “Bioshock”, the promise of “We Happy Few” providing something memorable for all the right reasons was still there even if reviews of what was released in its rawest form two years ago gained mixed opinions at best.
Did I Complete “We Happy Few”?
The original premise of “We Happy Few” had a completion idea simply based on the player taking a character throughout the fictional world of Wellington Wells with the intent of becoming one of the “beautiful” people while avoiding permanent death via everything from crazed enemies, to bees, to hunger. The survival elements, though still existing in the finalized version, have been toned down in favor of the narrative implemented to give some more depth to the world & its people. After forty hours of playing through the three acts focusing on three different characters respectively while finishing main & side quests alongside searching for items to continue the story, I saw the finale of Act Three that completed the trio of excellent endings; and that’s all I could handle.
Did “We Happy Few” Live Up to the Hype?
Though initially seen as this generation’s “Bioshock”, “We Happy Few” proves to be anything but as the player isn’t running around shooting crazed Splicers; instead attempting to sneak around while trying to avoid detection upon trespassing in a home, taking on soldiers just waiting for another World War to break out & drinking the water that is tainted with an hallucinogenic drug simply titled “Joy”. “We Happy Few”, while not similar to its believed video game inspiration, does have a shockingly deep lore by placing the characters in a world where World War II didn’t go as it did in reality; leaving the people of Wellington Wells to suffer from the fallout of a war won by Germany. Through the eyes & actions of Arthur, Sally & Ollie, the player sees the anguish of existing in a world that is focused more on forgetting than living as all three protagonists attempt to save (or vindicate) themselves. With the narrative placed into the game upon its final release, Compulsion Games has produced a mostly memorable story featuring flawed characters stuck in an emotionally stressful situation that can get wacky depending on where the player is and what the NPCs has one of its three leads doing – such as a simple metal scraping of junk cars or attempting to escape a blown up building now inhabited by human lab rats. The strength of “We Happy Few’s” story & its characters featuring fantastic voice acting across the board – be it main characters or one-time appearances – will keep most people playing even if the gameplay itself struggles to reach its lofty ambitions.
“We Happy Few’s” gameplay is where everything falls apart. First there’s the combat – a melee system that doesn’t break the mold in design, but is completely inconsistent. All three main characters can pull off light hits or charged heavy strikes, block incoming attacks with their hands or equipped, degradable weapon & throw items that can both infuriate & cause adversaries to uncontrollably vomit. The biggest issues with melee combat is how loose everything feels with enemies being able to dash across the battlefield and land strikes before the player can even have a chance to react (not to mention the moments of adversaries teleporting right in front of the protagonist). The game provides a skill tree and while abilities such as being able to run around the more prestigious areas of the game without angering its townspeople or have more strength to carry all the loot one can find, combat skills (such as punching someone in the head may give the player a better chance to stagger an opponent) don’t feel like they have any effect on the quality of whatever character’s chances are for survival against a mob of enemies who didn’t take kindly to what the character is wearing at the time.
Stealth also plays a big role in the gameplay especially early on when the character doesn’t have much to craft weapons such as a rock on a stick or the aforementioned vomit bomb. Sneaking up behind intended targets, the player can perform a takedown and even carry the unconscious or deceased body to a hiding spot such as a nearby trashcan. Like the AI when going hand-to-hand, adversaries prove to be wildly inconsistent in not only their paths, but also in regards to their stability; randomly glitching from one spot to another that can cause an immediate detection moment when a player is attempting a stealthy takedown. Blending in is another big part of the gameplay as each protagonist needs to wear the appropriate clothing in specific areas such as Arthur tearing up his nice suit once he reaches the Garden to avoid being attacked by the filthy outcasts who couldn’t stand the absurdity of a society doped out of their minds. In regards to the drug usage, the implementation of Joy is strange at best.
Taking a Joy pill will change the world’s appearance for the player; causing a euphoric effect that also helps each character blend in with the “Wellies” (Wellington’s townspeople) for a short time before a crash hits and the character becomes an obvious “Downer” (someone off their medication) & someone worthy of being attacked. Even though the game warns a player Joy abuse will cause memory loss & hinder the character in certain ways, the only issue came when the “Joy Meter” in the left corner of the screen filled up & caused Arthur to become sick (Ollie becomes ills after ingesting Joy immediately unlike Arthur & Sally). While an interesting concept, the implementation of Joy doesn’t add much to the overall experience after the first couple of times seeing its effects.
In the middle of all these gameplay elements are the three main characters that have different base stats, abilities & social perceptions such as Sally being a black-market Joy maker. Arthur is a jack of all trades who can craft almost everything available in the game be it weapons, clothes or chemicals while handling himself fairly well in combat; Sally is physically weaker than her contemporaries while focusing on projectiles to get her by as she struggles to take people down without a specific chemical in her inventory; Ollie is a tank who’s slower than the other two protagonists while suffering from his inability to understand chemistry for crafting like Sally & Arthur. All three characters suffer from the needs of simply living including hunger, thirst & sleep with each meter depleting after a while and reducing the character’s stamina until refilled; and societal opinions are different for each character especially the nearly universally hated Ollie. Sally & Ollie also have two other health issues to manage with the latter being less of a time diversion than Sally’s Thanks to the difficulty modifiers where a player can choose to turn down the combat & stealth in favor of story progression, a lot of these gameplay issues can be avoided; though it just further hinders the game’s overall flow – something that is hurt by “We Happy Few’s” mission design.
Missions in “We Happy Few” usually boil down to traveling across the land and retrieving a certain item to return it back to its quest giver. While there are some interesting missions here & there such as working alongside a group of witches living on a hill to stop a suicide cult, a majority of what the player does is meandering & uninteresting; made even worse by the fact certain mission destinations will force the player to traverse across the islands; losing minutes upon minutes of time just wandering forward with nothing interesting to see. There are fast travel points that can be unlocked featuring varying difficulties, but don’t completely rid this game of its time management problems.
Wellington Wells is also a procedurally generated world featuring randomized loot options and level designs with the prior being a big hindrance on the game’s flow & progression. A third of the way into Arthur’s story the character must break into an area with a lock pick made with bobby pins. Without the lock pick, the player will have to scour nearby areas in hopes of finding the parts needed (in my case taking almost two hours to find what I needed). Sally’s reliance on chemically-based attacks can prove to be disappointing thanks to not knowing what she’ll need until she needs it and no Chemical Set station being around to actually craft, say, Knockout Juice to avoid a five-on-one fight. The idea of random loot tied in well with the game’s original premise, but now that “We Happy Few” has a narrative with certain missions needing certain items there’s no reason why the developers didn’t think about the player’s needs first.
The biggest issues attached to “We Happy Few” is definitely the game’s overall stability & performance. As mentioned earlier, enemies can be glitchey and ruin stealth scenarios. There are imbalance issues during combat thanks to teleporting and, at times, invincible attackers. Adversaries can become stuck in walls or stairs, yet still successfully attack. NPCs will randomly suspect a protagonist even if that person is wearing the right clothes for the area. Quest items & givers can randomly become locked or even disappear. Add glitches both heartbreaking & hilarious with frame rate drops & surprising loading screens that pop up while moving through an area that seems to have already been generated ahead of the character and you have a mess of a performance. There are also audio issues at times including out of synch cutscenes and, most importantly, the potential for crashing. During the last two hours of Act I, the game continuously crashed when trying to load a mission simply involving Arthur entering a building; taking a good hour before the game got its act together – sadly this wasn’t a rare occurrence during Act I; though Sally & Ollie’s sections were less prone to system failure. Saving often is a must when playing “We Happy Few” and even then it sometimes doesn’t work out like it should.
“We Happy Few” is the type of game you want to love even if it didn’t reach the heights of its promise; yet the gameplay & design choices take away the joy found when simply watching its layered characters interact with one another or are having internal conflicts within themselves.
Should You Play “We Happy Few”?
Simply put – “We Happy Few” is a game placed in the wrong genre from a narrative perspective. The survival & RPG elements like crafting, looting & managing certain meters were perfectly fine when it didn’t have a story. But with the game now featuring a plot without much of the initial gameplay design being restructured or even removed, getting to the next point of interest be it during a quest or simply looking to see what’s about to happen in the protagonists’ stories is a drag – something that can be made worrisome when the game decides it can’t handle its own ambitions even though it would be considered on the low side of impressive in this generation of gaming from a graphics perspective. If the story sounds interesting make sure you turn down the difficulty settings to “Easy” to avoid the mind-numbing & mostly broken gameplay. Even if a player wants to simply take in the gameplay, there’s a “Sandbox” mode based on the game’s original premise; but even that experience is flawed due to performance issues & stability problems. “We Happy Few” is another example of unfulfilled promise meeting poor execution.
