It isn’t often that a company creates a new game set in such a unique world that’s so perfectly thematic I want to buy it without even seeing how gameplay works, and that’s exactly how I felt about We Happy Few from the very first trailer. When I was lucky enough to get a review copy of the game I was practically screaming at my PS4 to download it faster!
We Happy Few takes place in a fictional 1960s setting, and you initially play the game as a man named Arthur Hastings in Wellington Wells. Arthur is an ordinary dude who’s a journalist of sorts: he checks news articles to see whether they’re happy or not, redacting anything that’s any kind of negative or contentious before anyone gets a chance to read it. When he comes across an article that reminds him of his brother, memories start flooding back, and he reaches for his Joy like any good citizen would… but then he doesn’t take it. Arthur’s eyes immediately start to open as it wears off, and when he goes to the work party and hits the piñata he realizes that they were, in fact, smacking a rat, not a colorful piñata. Even worse, everyone happily snatching candy out of it and scarfing it down was eating a freshly-killed rat! Arthur does what anyone would do in that situation – he loses every bit of his lunch – which doesn’t go unnoticed by his supervisor who immediately realizes he’s not on his Joy, he’s a downer!
Thus begins Arthur’s ridiculous adventure to find his brother, and it’s so full of lovely little moments that I could fill a book with what I saw in the [30ish?] hours I played. Arthur comes to grips with a lot of things, and the fact that Joy causes memory loss means he even questions his own past. It gets so bad that at one point he wonders if that’s why so many of the people look alike, because the Joy has been in his system for so long that it makes him see people that way. Arthur will question his motives, his path and most of all his ability to even accomplish things since he’s just an ordinary guy up against insurmountable odds. Like another famous Arthur – Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – or Dante from Clerks, this is not what Arthur Hastings had in mind to do today and he makes it known. Nearly being beaten to death by Wastrels (people who can’t or won’t take Joy) because his clothes are too nice is the least of his problems, and even doing things like running and jumping in the little respectable areas of Wellington Wells can be seen as so non-conformist that he’ll be beaten to death by every bobby (that’s a police officer for those who aren’t British) and Joy-taking citizen (Wellie) in the area. But hey, that’s what you get for being different and trying to bring other people down, you rotten downer!
The game also includes brilliant episodes of Uncle Jack’s various shows and manages to weave them into the game. If you’re in a civilized, proper area you’ll be able to see episodes play on video screens that rotate toward you as you walk by, but if you’re in a downtrodden area full of Wastrels you’ll only be able to hear the episodes from loudspeakers scattered here and there about the landscape. One of the letters I found and read in the game was from a woman that had been moved to the wastes with the Wastrels. She understood that she was stuck there now, but was so disappointed she couldn’t actually see Uncle Jack anymore and that they only seemed to play old episodes there. She was begging for new episodes, not to be accepted into society, despite Wastrels having to fight over scraps of food and potentially dying to all sorts of diseases! Even in the worst possible positions, these people have ridiculously skewed priorities and I love it! Really though, Uncle Jack is so terrific that I can understand why she’d be so upset, and you can learn more about him and his show in my review of the free PSVR exclusive game We Happy Few: Uncle Jack Live VR.
Like a pendulum swings to and fro, it seems that everything I love about We Happy Few has a major negative to it. Combat is the first casualty: while you have a slew of objects you can throw or use as a weapon, it basically boils down to just hitting the block button and then hitting the attack button once they’ve attacked. Oh and you never really have to worry about dying because while the game has a system in place for hunger, thirst, and tiredness you never take damage from them, and in combat you can just pause anytime and get in your inventory to use healing items at your leisure. As Arthur, you’re also faster than any NPC, and since there are no long-range weapons aside from the very rarely thrown object, you can always just run away until you get out of a fight if you want. Joy must also grant telepathy since even one angry enemy means every single person you see until combat ends will come after you on sight. Heck, one time I was inside someone’s house and knocked someone out from behind, but apparently someone through the closed door saw it because they walked right through the door (without opening it!) and attacked me. When I killed them another person did the same thing, and then another and another and another until I had 8 bodies on the ground! And even though I put a bunch of points into upping my health and reducing damage, a few hits from any enemy would have me near death. I’m scared to ask what would’ve happened if I didn’t do that, I might have been facing one hit kills by the end of my adventure!
The game also requires you to run back and forth a lot if you’re interested in upgrading your skills with sidequests, and while there are fast travel spots you’ll still have to do a lot of on-foot travel. This is made worse by the fact that until you unlock a very pricey skill you can’t even run in town, which is thematic as heck but also irritating. Oh and there’s a curfew in town, and without buying a different very pricey skill you’ll be immediately attacked on sight at night, so you’d better go to one of your underground bases and sleep! Even things like the hunger and thirst system are a double-edged sword here: it’s very thematic and while you won’t die from hunger or thirst they do impact your stamina, which is used to run, jump, and attack. If you’re hungry and thirsty you’ll have a much harder time running or fighting. On the upside, if you eat or drink something (food and drink are rather common finds, don’t worry) you’ll actually get a temporary boost to your stamina so you can run even more!
The game also includes crafting, although I only really used it to make a couple outfits, a handful of weapons, countless healing items and some pills that fake the effects of Joy. Taking Joy is required for downer detectors unless you want to set off all sorts of alarms, but each time you take it you get closer and closer to memory loss, and when it wears off you go through a period of withdrawal where you look sick and are labeled as a dirty downer until it’s over, so the fake pills come in super handy. There are lots of options available, but just like the weapons I never really used much variety once I found what I liked. Weapons degrade and break over time but shovels are very common and later on when I came across shock batons I never used anything else again. Shovels also double as a necessary item when you find Dig Spots, so it’s great to have one in your inventory anyway!
There’s so much I like about We Happy Few. If there wasn’t, I’d just be happy to tear it apart in this review. But the game needs so much work done with it, most of all fixing all the glitches, before I can even consider recommending it. I had no idea there were save file issues so I always saved in the same slot. When I got near the end of the game, the game crashed for the 8th time on me. When I tried to load my save it refused to work. I tried a few times over multiple days, restarted the system, did everything short of reinstalling the game and nothing worked. Later I realized the game automatically saves in a few slots, but I still lost over an hour of progress, and it isn’t made clear when hitting continue that other saves exist. Using one of these set me back a little over an hour, and it took me a while to realize that the game wasn’t allowing me to save after that point because the game had me permanently stuck in finishing a quest that completed right as the game crashed the time before (fast traveling fixed it!). I luckily did manage to finish Arthur’s story, and it was almost as awesome as the very high expectations I had for it, but as the game was loading into the second character’s portion (Act II), the game crashed again.
“Oh hey, it’s okay,” I thought to myself. “I used every single save slot this time, so even if one is broken I’ll have another that works from no more than 10 minutes ago!” Well, some mysterious, powerful force must not have wanted me to play the other two stories in this game because when I restarted the game PlayStation itself told me the file was corrupted and ALL OF MY SAVE FILES WERE GONE. Every. Single. One. There wasn’t even an option to load a game any more, the New Game button sat there mocking me as if daring me to play the same story for 30+ hours and have it happen all over again.
One day I’ll be happy to do that, but it’ll be a long time from now when the game is fixed. The game had other technical issues, like the door issue I mentioned earlier with people just walking right through it and the game slowing way down over time. That was the number one sign there was trouble: the game would just start chugging and slowing down more and more, and then the game would start bringing up loading screens even when I’m not going into a different area, until eventually the game just fully crashed. This was especially bad once I unlocked the ability to run through town without being labeled a nonconformist, but it would happen even when almost nothing was going on at all. To make matters worse, when this starts happening it becomes much more likely that the Save Game button in the pause menu won’t work; normally you can pause the game pretty much anywhere and save, but when the game gets glitchy the button is deactivated, so when the game crashes you’re at the will of the automatic save system. Sometimes I’d load 5 seconds before when it crashed, but once I lost progress in a couple quests! As a completionist, I was also majorly disappointed that some quests, when failed, seemed to be impossible to restart and try again. That quest wanted you to do something without getting caught? Nope, can’t ever try again now. Another quest wanted me to give a character something she’d lost, and I ended up getting in a fight nearby. Somehow she happened to notice it, so every time I went near her to hand it to her she’d put her fists up and scream for help, so I could never give her the item and the mission failed.
Finally, for those who want a challenge or for who just want to experience the story without too much trouble, there’s a great difficulty mode selector before starting a new game. You can play Easy, Normal, or Hard mode, sure, but there’s also a Custom difficulty where you can set all the things that make modes harder or easier. Want to deal with more survival issues but make combat easy? Go for it. Don’t want to deal with people being so suspicious of you all the time, but want everything else to be difficult? That’s totally an option. And if you’re really aching for a challenge you can even turn Permadeath on!
We Happy Few is a game I think everyone should experience, even if I wasn’t a big fan of the gameplay itself, but I wouldn’t recommend it in its current state. When selecting a new game there’s a Sandbox mode that’s “coming soon”, and I’m assuming that’ll be more like what people played in the game preview. I’m hoping this mode makes surviving harder; I was already facing a little difficulty finding things like flour for my fake Joy pills and I would love to have more of that challenge in a full, separate mode. I hope more than anything that this game gets fixed up and becomes the masterpiece it can be; as soon as I discover that the game has been patched up a lot more I’ll happily start all over so I can find out what happens with Arthur and the other two characters. This could’ve potentially been a Game of the Year contender for me, but it needs to be reliably playable for that to happen.
We Happy Few is available on PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One, and Steam (Windows).
I received a free copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.