It isn’t often that a game as unique as We Happy Few comes along. I don’t mean that in the gameplay sense, as pretty much every mechanic that We Happy Few uses has been used before in other games. No, instead I mean the overall presentation and style of We Happy Few is something completely unique and also fills me with both dread and excitement.
The team behind We Happy Few, Compulsion Games, are not complete unknowns. Their previous game, Contrast, was an arty 3D platformer told heavily through the use of shadows and featured heavily stylised characters and locations. Switch out the shadows with drug induced hysteria and the 3D platformer with FPS survival game, and you may start to notice something of a pattern in their development cycle.
As I said, the gameplay is nothing particularly new, it borrows elements from survival games like Minecraft and Rust, and it borrows combat from pretty much every first-person game with a melee focus, and it borrows its crafting mechanics from pretty much all games these days. Not to mention that the game was heavily influenced stylistically by stories like Brazil and 1984, or basically anything that could easily be described as ‘a very British dystopia’.
So, with all that in mind then, why did I call it unique before? Well, for the most part, it’s the way that all of these ‘borrowed’ elements have been put together. The strange way that the dystopia is hidden behind drug-fuelled euphoria like a stoner version of Syndicate Wars and the painted on white faces feel both terribly familiar and horrifically original.
The story (in the alpha at least) concerns Arthur Hastings, a worker at the state-sponsored censorship bureau. One day while going over his archived articles, he notices a story about him and his brother which causes him to remember something traumatic from his past. Instead of reaching for his Joy, a euphoria-inducing drug used by all ‘normal’ citizens of Wellington Wells, he throws it away and is chased out of the city for being a downer. The story progresses from this simple beginning but not too much in the alpha version of the game, and I won’t spoil what’s going on for you. The major factors that are important to remember are that you are an outcast from society and you have to try and escape.
When the map first loads, you are in one of the safe houses that populate the different areas of the game world. These are abandoned underground stations, each of which has at least a bed and a safe to store items in. These safe houses will be the places that you return to between excursions into the danger filled world outside, and the safes in each one have a shared inventory, meaning that you can keep a few essentials ready in case you find a new safe house while exploring.
The first thing that you need to do in the game is finding yourself some food, some water containers, and explore your immediate surroundings. Luckily, you start in an area populated by wastrels, people who are immune to Joy and have been forced to the outskirts of the town to live off of rotten vegetables. These wastrels don’t particularly care for you, but they are also not outright aggressive towards you and will leave you to your business.
Moving around the world and exploring the ruined remains of houses feels quite nice, and your character is agiler than he at first appears. He can lift himself up onto ledges that go well above his head and has quite a strong punch in case you don’t manage to find yourself a weapon to use. The world is constructed in such a way as to make every move feel tense. Exploring feels completely nerve-wracking at first until you realise that the game doesn’t force you into anything that you can’t handle, and you’re free to move at your own pace.
The game has perma-death, but this can be disabled when you start a new game if you want to get used to everything before you throw yourself fully into the experience. There’s also a ‘second wind’ feature that allows you a few moments to heal when your health falls to zero. Combined with the ability to disable perma-death, this means that you can really relax with the game if that’s what you’re looking for.
Most of your time in the game is spent running around the map collecting items to complete missions and making items which help you advance through the story. There are upgrades to your storage capacity which are hidden throughout the world, as well as blueprints which unlock new and more powerful weapons and items.
The experience of playing the game with the rogue-like settings dialled back is completely different from the experience of playing the game in full on hardcore mode. The game feels much more dystopian and oppressive with the settings turned on, but if you’re more interested in the story than the overall atmosphere, then it’s nice to have the options available to you.
There is a surprisingly large amount of things to do in the game, despite it being an early version. There are a fair few main missions, as well as a whole hell of a lot of secondary missions and random encounters and plenty of interesting things to find as you look around. The only issue with some of them is that they seem to sort of go nowhere and end abruptly. Sometimes they throw in a special or useful item, but half the time it just ends with no explanation. The little story that is presented in the alpha is primarily told through the medium of letters and journals which are scattered throughout the broken and crumbling ruins of the once glorious society.
Graphically, the game is heavily stylised. In the outskirt areas everything is grey, depressing, and run down, and when you make your way into the main city, everything becomes hyper coloured and sunny. The characters and architecture are deliberately designed to be reminiscent of 60s England, not to mention the visual references to other dystopian works like Brazil and 1984.
The music is a big part of the feeling of the game. During your trips on Joy, the music becomes very bright and sunny to match the oversaturated visuals. During your stints of anxious exploring out in the grim world, the music is dark and sombre, and during combat, it becomes tense and agitated. Everything from the score to the sound effects is designed to keep you constantly immersed in the world that the game creates, and it demands your attention.
Finally, I really need to talk about the alpha status of this game. As it says the moment you boot up the game, ‘We Happy Few’ is a game currently in its alpha build, but there’s something a little odd about that. The main reason it feels so strange to call the game an alpha is that it is the most complete alpha version of a game that I have ever seen. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t still lots and lots of work to be done, it’s just that the stuff that is there works almost like a full release of a game. There are a few bugs, some of which have a tendency to break questlines or make areas render incorrectly, but they’re pretty rare as far as I can tell, and usually they can be worked around.
Developer: Compulsion Games
Publisher: Compulsion Games
Platforms: PC, Xbox One
Release Date: 27th July 2016