Review for We Happy Few. Game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 10/08/2018
Happiness is an ephemeral concept, especially if you start looking for it in the dystopian context of an alternative reality in which the Second World War is going differently than what we have learned from the history books: the Germans are winning and the British are not they are doing just fine. In another game we would have taken up the rifle and attacked Wolfenstein Castle head down, but this is not the case: in We Happy Few we will just comply with the inhabitants of the radiant English town of Wellington Wells, who just have to take a pill of Joy - the distributors are stocked by the government and the supply is free, what more do you want? - to forget the past and live in a world of rainbows and perennial smiles… or maybe not.
Never a joy
Joy (with a capital G) is at the center of We Heppy Few's narrative system: it is a synthetic drug that the British are forced to ingest and that, in this Orwellian videogame universe, brings them in a distorted version of reality by standardizing them and leaving them peacefully happy (and easily controlled by the invaders). Forget the dirty streets, the flies around the garbage, the degradation ... forget also your past, a source of disturbances and bad thoughts: a nice tablet of Joy will make you see butterflies and rainbows, printing a stupid smile on your face and making you jump ride like Alice in Wonderland.
Too bad it doesn't take much to break this idyllic moment: the memories of the German invasion and deportation (the hostile forces took all the children from the city) are difficult to repress and a minimum delay in the assumption of the daily Joy breaks down the thin veil of hypocrisy bringing us back to the harsh reality. When this happens we are in the shoes of Arthur, the first of the three protagonists that we will play in We Happy Few (the other two are the pharmacist Sally and the soldier Ollie): the brave Arthur will go in no time from censoring inappropriate news to delving into his past, to the point of bringing out the rottenness of a corrupt society devastated by massive drug taking.
Arthur's story is also the most interesting from the point of view of the narrative, which is the real strength of the game: demonstrating how much Compulsion Games has listened to the requests of fans and bakers on Kickstarter during the three years in which the game has remained in early access: the strong themes, the cruelty and violence of a society now in disarray are masterfully inserted in a plot that makes the player feel part of an intertwining of events much greater than him and the protagonist he is playing. In this sense, the comparison that most comes to mind during the game is Bioshock, which We Happy Few is clearly inspired by to create that sense of oppression and anguish that we all know well.
Drugs free, not everything else
Even the gameplay of We Happy Few has changed compared to what was shown in early access: from a purely survival experience with a world each time generated procedurally it has passed to a much more forgiving level of difficulty towards the player, while the world is generated randomly only when we impersonate one of the three different protagonists.
The survival component maintains the indicators of hunger, thirst and sleep, even if ignoring one of these primary needs will not lead to death, but rather to simple bonuses or malus on the physical characteristics of the character in use. In the game start menu it is possible to select different difficulty levels, also going into detail and changing the challenge level only for some specific elements of the game. Masochists can also activate permadeath which, given the somewhat tricky initial learning curve, still risks being more of a frustration than a real challenge.
In fact, Arthur's adventure, at least for the first two hours of play, also serves as a tutorial: in his shoes you learn how to move around the world, hide, fight and create objects. Crafting is another fundamental element of We Happy Few: Many of the items useful for the missions of the main plot can be purchased, but at a high price, so much so that it is much better to hunt for the necessary items and create them yourself.
During the wandering in the world - some missions require a fair backtracking - for the thirty hours necessary to complete the adventure and the main secondary missions, it is necessary to pay attention to the clothing, the status of the various indicators and the items in the inventory, as well as than to your own behavior: inside Wellington Wells you will need to wear elegant clothes and avoid running or jumping, as well as respect the curfew and be careful to enter the homes of others. To act undisturbed in some places closed to the public, you will need a work suit that will allow you to pass yourself off as workers, just as outside the walls it will be good to dress as a beggar so as not to attract too much attention.
More important than all this, in the city we must avoid being "curmudgeons": to enter some areas it will be mandatory to take Joy and, once the effect of the pill is over, a withdrawal crisis will follow which will make the NPCs suspicious, who will attack us and call the authorities to have us injected a new dose. Moving with caution, avoiding attracting attention and sipping the use of Joy are the actions to be balanced in the right amount to remain lucid enough and at the same time quite hidden in the environment.
So far so good, too bad it is not all roses: starting from the flowers, it is quite ridiculous that one can hide from enemies only among the yellow flower bushes, resulting perfectly visible even from a long distance if crouched behind any other plant . Even the combat system, although the variety of weapons and situations is appreciable, is a bit cumbersome and is not able to give great satisfaction, making fights at the highest levels of difficulty more tedious than rewarding. Add a map that is not always easy to understand and a fairly tough learning curve (navigating through menus and understanding how objects and actions work is not as immediate as you might think) and you will immediately understand how We Happy Few is a title that can give satisfaction only to the most patient players.
The pace of the adventure is also a bit fluctuating, with a fairly crackling start that slows down a bit with the use of subsequent characters. The different skill trees and quirks of each one give a little variety and force slightly different approaches: Arthur has a long tongue that saves him from many situations, Sally is a pharmacist who can create powerful healing items and Ollie an ex. soldier who compensates for the lack of intellect by force. Fortunately, the downtime and some movements from one place to another are compensated only by the goodness of the plot and the twists, because otherwise we would have really risked abandoning the adventure in the middle.
Between rainbows and dead mice
The graphic design is as interesting as it is a dancer: the clear inspiration from Bioshock and The Witness - the latter above all for the exteriors - is evident, and the fusion between a Clockwork Orange-style violence and character design poised between realism and cartoon is perfect to create that dreamlike atmosphere of amazement and horror in which We Happy Few constantly wants to keep us. If on the one hand the realization of the different areas and, above all, the change of the color palette that distinguishes the moments of addiction to drugs and those of abstinence are studied in detail, on the other we must report a series of problems on the technical side. In the version we tested (we played on PlayStation 4) frame rate drops were frequent and at times annoying, as well as some problems of interpenetration between characters and objects. During a fight we even happened to get stuck behind an obstacle after receiving a push from an enemy, finding ourselves forced to reload the last save in order to proceed in the game. These flaws, if you think about the possibility of choosing permadeath as an option, are unforgivable.
The music and dialogues are well made, entirely dubbed in English and for which you can choose the subtitles in Spanish. Also in this case, however, we point out some small shortcomings: in fact we have happened to come across descriptions of objects or flashes of dialogue in which the subtitles magically changed language becoming English, or to find ourselves in front of translations that are a little too literal of some expressions: for example, when the characters say “I don't hear you” this is translated as “I don't hear you”, when obviously it should be “I don't understand you”. These are certainly small things, but overall the feeling we had was to find ourselves in front of a product that, despite the three years of early access and the undeniable progress made, would still need a period of optimization to become well more than it is now, which is a decent adventure with a beautifully well-narrated plot.
We Happy Few is a controversial title, which features light and dark as much as the great story it tells. It is thanks to the intriguing narrative system that the Compulsion Games game stands out, offering a far more interesting narrative experience than what could be expected from what was seen in early access. The other side of the coin is the optimization of the technical sector and gameplay: the first inspired but kicked by too many slowdowns, the second deprived of a certain depth in favor of a simplification that made the title more accessible without mitigating the curve. of quite steep difficulty. There is always time for patches and corrections, but at present we recommend We Happy Few only to players with a certain amount of patience, willing to turn a blind eye to the laudable attempt to complete such a complex work.
► We Happy Few is an Adventure-indie game developed by Compulsion Games and published by Gearbox Software for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 10/08/2018
