“Happy is the country with no past” – We Happy Few can sure quote but how well does it play?
From the independent studio that brought you Contrast, We Happy Few is an action/adventure game set in a drug-fuelled, retrofuturistic city in an alternative 1960s England. Hide, fight and conform your way out of this delusional, Joy-obsessed world.
What is We Happy Few?
Time Played: about 70 minutes
I had no idea what I was getting myself into when getting ready to start my first time playing. What kind of game is We Happy few? What are the rules? All I have seen was screenshots of a bobby (police officer) with white face paint on, and a Joker-like smile from ear to ear (Kano ref), all the while looking straight at us.
I come into life sitting at my desk with a red pill on my desk. Newspaper headlines are coming into a machine and my job is to okay them or censor them. With each paper sent off another comes to take its place. After a while someone comes into my room, it’s a female with white face paint on letting me know that it’s time to celebrate someone’s birthday. I make my way there carefully exploring every room and taking power containers out of machines, like the one I was just using.
I finally get to the room and they are hitting a pinata to death, I’m handed the tool and strike it, opening it on my first swing. It explodes with blood, as there is a rat inside the pinata itself.
Making it outside I am told to make it to a specific spot, complete with a waypoint. The inventory screen is where you can see your vitals, as well as craft. We Happy Few has a strong survival game aspect to it. In order to survive you need to sleep, eat, and drink, I have yet to figure it out but I did steal some rancid soup from one house. I died from jumping off into the water, thinking it would refill my thirst, how wrong I was.
When you enter a town, there are guards patrolling the streets, these prove to be useless at this point as you can quickly dispatch them with a couple of swings from your crowbar. Stealth seems like it isn’t a mandatory part of the game, and I can respect that.
Overall from this short play session of We Lucky Few, I felt like I’m just starting to get a grasp about what this game is, and what it’s trying to achieve. I enjoyed it from what I’ve played and the world is interesting enough to make me want to go back. Until then.
