We Happy Few (which I also reviewed!) is a game set in a dystopian alternative past, but you shouldn’t let that get you down when you can get a free PSVR game out of it even if you don’t own We Happy Few! You wouldn’t want people to think you’re a downer, would you?!
Uncle Jack is the famous television and radio host in Wellington Wells, and you were lucky enough to win the chance to produce an episode for him! After a very brief introduction, you’re thrown into your job, to carefully choose one of three news stories that aren’t tragic, sad, contentious or otherwise just a downer. After you choose, Uncle Jack is given the news story you chose and reads it live on TV! Be careful, if you accidentally (or “accidentally”) choose one that isn’t perfectly happy Uncle Jack is going to have to figure out how to put a positive spin on it while you read the real story on the teleprompter. This is perhaps one of the funniest things ever, hearing Uncle Jack come up with “news stories” on the fly after reading half of a bad sentence or staring at the screen like “really?”, and I highly recommend purposely picking stories about dead bodies and such. But like everything else in Wellington Wells, it isn’t long until something goes horribly wrong…
The “game” portion of this is incredibly simple and short, but then that’s to be expected out of a surprise free release. You only get three rounds of choosing news stories, and on one of my playthroughs the same happy story came up twice in a row. It was pretty dang funny hearing Uncle Jack read the same news story a second time in a matter of minutes! This is the first PSVR game I’d highly recommend a chair for; it’s thematic since you’re sitting in a chair in the game and it’s much easier to turn from the screen and teleprompter to the news story choices.
The real surprise with We Happy Few: Uncle Jack Live VR is that you’re also given access to The Archives, an area in which you can sit there and watch 80 videos from the game! This includes songs (audio with a record player as the video) from the soundtrack, 40(!) Uncle Jack episodes, and other goodies like the Kickstarter trailer and various other promotional videos. Compulsion Games did a phenomenal job crafting hilarious and fitting videos for Uncle Jack, and Julian Casey pulled off the role PERFECTLY. Technically you’re supposed to watch these videos in order, but you can totally just pull up each video, play a second or so of it and then pull up the next. This way you can unlock every video in the game in a matter of minutes to watch in whatever order you’d like! They’re not in any particular order, so finding specific videos can be tricky, but hey that’s what happens when people high on Joy run a recording studio!
As for controls, you can use either a DualShock 4 (the standard PS4 controller) or a move controller. I tried with the DualShock 4 first and had a hard time since you end up aiming with your head, and it feels weird getting super close to stuff so that it properly selects things. But when I swapped to a move controller, the game instantly got so much more fun! The game displays the controller as a hand, so you physically grab (or punch, maybe?) the buttons in the game portion, and in the archives you can physically grab the tapes and put them into the slot. And yes, you can also take the tapes and chuck them all around the room; sometimes things threw in weird directions but for the most part it worked rather well, and I even had fun just taking tapes and placing them on top of objects!
The game portion of this is clearly just a very short promotional piece for the main game, but even that alone would’ve been nice for free since it’s a unique, fun, thematic minigame. But when you add the 80 videos that come with it, this is an absolute must-have for anyone who loves We Happy Few as well as anyone who enjoys thematic, chipper, dystopian television or 60s-style music.
We Happy Few: Uncle Jack Live VR is available exclusively on PS4 (PSVR required).
This game is entirely free, so while the provider may have technically provided everyone a free copy of the game, it wasn’t in exchange for a review!