We Happy Few (Video Game Review)

Is Gearbox engaged in some sort of a Springtime For Hitler gambit? Really, between this and Aliens: Colonial Marines, the company is making a name for itself as a publisher which churns out broken rush-jobs. Sure, Paradox might have committed that sin a few too many times, but they were never this high profile. Those were down to incompetence, you have to try to shunt out a game this utterly broken.

If you haven't gotten the point yet, We Happy Few is the Ride to Hell: Retribution of 2018. In fact, in many ways it's worse. Ride to Hell was never going to be a good game, and nothing of value was lost with its bug ridden mess of a release. We Happy Few had genuine talent coding the game, designing the setting and writing the story. It's just that you now have to dig very, very deep to find anything of value within it.

Synopsis

Set in the town of Wellington Wells, you play as three characters who have become sane. The entire town is being kept addicted to joy through its pills, and lives in a self-enforced system of authoritarian control. As each seeks their own path to freedom, they uncover the dark secret behind the town, and the true horror of the conspiracy to keep it hidden.

The Good

The good here can be summed up in the essential screenshots. The game is enthralling in its surreal 60s inspired visuals, from the rainbow streets to the rictus grinning population. With characters, environments and dynamics which seem more at home orbiting a yellow submarine than on a suburban street, it's clear that this entire world has gone insane. Simply stating that would have undermined the very point the game is attempting to make, but by exaggerating and grossly twisting the world beyond recognition, it hits that much harder. It's in the same way that Bioshock's blunt force trauma messages and iconography would have been laughable if presented directly to the player. Yet when it was combined with the art deco designs and body horror, the experience was elevated to a new level. Yes, that's a bit of an obvious comparison to make given who was involved here, but it's the easiest one to cite.

The nature of the enemies and their quirks is surprisingly enthralling, especially when it comes to what they represent. While the delinquents skulking around back alleys and crumbling buildings might seem like basic societal rejects, you only need to look at the society itself for their presence to have a whole new meaning. After all, if Wellington Wells is a saccharine nightmare of joy, what did these people do in order to become outcasts? A few hints are dropped in places, but the answer is satisfyingly disturbing when finally given. The same is true of the police who patrol the streets, keeping watch for anyone who might even fail to keep up with mandated happiness. While it's an old concept - one dealt with by Doctor Who's Happiness Patrol among others - there is no clear villain here. The masks used, the fact that so many people rise up against you once you're outed, and the lack of a definitive end-game villain means that the system itself is your opponent. The way the narrative plays this to its advantage leads to some of its darkest moments.

The dialogue and (most of) the voice acting does work in limited doses. It's remarkably humourous and exaggerated in exactly the right way to fit the 60s aesthetic, but it few cross the line into being utterly incomprehensible in their colloquialisms. It's another atmosphere building element, and if further enhances this essential part of the game. Yet, more importantly, it offers a far more "lived-in" sense to the homes and town itself, giving it that right sense of a society undergoing decay from within.

The absurd nature of the game is largely told through dialogue, more than a few mechanics help to reflect this. Several are counter intuitive, seemingly intentionally so, and to a point this actually helps the game. The way in which you are forced to harm yourself to overcome certain obstacles and remain hidden can often end up hurting you, especially in the long run. This is especially evident when it comes to the use of Joy - the addictive substances used to maintain the population's searingly sunny disposition - but it does come into effect with a number of secondary elements as well. Giving these away would ruin their impact, but suffice to say, you're forced to work with a system which simply doesn't work at points. This is very much a two-edged sword, however, which leads us right onto the negatives.

The Bad

Now, you might have noticed that all the positives cited the visuals and atmosphere above all else. There's a very, very good reason for that: All other bits are unfinished, bug ridden or so poorly designed you'd be forgiven for thinking Compulsion Games hates its audience. Take the aforementioned counter intuitive systems cited above, just for starters. Now, having an intentionally harmful series of mechanics which gradually wear you down? That can be done, and done well. The problem is that it's gone a little too well, and it carries over to everything here. 

There's never a moment where you're not hungry, thirsty, exhausted or sort on something, and nine times out of ten this gets in the way of the story. Even without that, the detectors for those not on Joy are so widespread that you have to constantly down the drug over and over again, until you overdose on it. Yes, there's a bar which counts down, but only at a snail's pace. To wait it out, you'll need to hide in a corner of the map, hope no one finds you, and cool your heels for minutes at a time. Really, the bar is so slow to cool down that the only effective way is to just run and hide, then walk away from the game for a while. Without that, you just end up with the entire town trying to chase you down and beat you to death. Now, this might have been more effective if there were good alternatives, but there really aren't. Walk through Wells without Joy and, in checkpoint after checkpoint, if you're not dosed up to your eyeballs on the stuff then you're immediately found out.

What was intended to offset this was the skills system, where you can unlock a variety of new abilities and powers to make life easier. Based on tiers, the idea was that you could have means to improve your situation by nullifying certain threats or weighting events in your favour. It's a basic design concept, but the staging reflects Dishonored's system over your typical RPG fare. The problem is, the system itself has been built arse-backwards. The high tier upgrades range from basic options that people wanted from the start (such as removing the need to maintain a thirst and hunger meter) to a minor chance to break an enemy's weapon while blocking. At the same time, lower level ones such as boosting your health by 50%, or doubling the time it takes for an NPC to become suspicious, can be unlocked after just a few basic tasks.

Now, the skills layout on its own would be more irksome than a true flaw. After all, most of them are helpful in some way, and you can think out just want you want before picking anything, long in advance. However, a sizable number of these simply don't work. You can spend quest after quest charging up the points needed to buy them, only for the effect they promise never to actually trigger. The most widely reported of these is the skill which switches off thirst, hunger and tiredness, which simply doesn't work. Players who though they were free from the most heavily criticised part of the game soon found their characters keeling over from exhaustion, dehydration or starvation but without any indication that this was still a threat. So, you can waste hours at a time, charge up point after point, and have the game outright lie to you about what it will effect.

So, what of the quests? They're bad. Well, mostly bad. It's less the "Dear god, why am I doing this!?!" kind of bad, than it is the "You really had no idea what to include here, did you?" sort of bad. The big ones are where the game clearly starts to run out of steam at specific points, with situations such as carrying someone a few thousand yards across town... and that's it. You move at a snail's pace, you're stopped by everyone it's possible to be stopped by, and quite often you'll need to double back to hide from basic threats. Why? Because carrying someone is seen as suspicious, and the sheer distance you need to lumber across is so vast that something, somewhere, will spawn in your way. This isn't the only one like this, as many devolve into sheer tedium over anything truly engaging.

Speaking of spawning, there are countless oddities and strange occurrences which take you out of the experience. The big one is the spawning system, and the specific NPCs which arise from seemingly nowhere. Certain character models are rehashed ad nauseam, to a degree rivaled only by games built on stock Unity assets, and for seemingly no reason. If you're unfortunate enough to get this game - and if you have, seek a refund ASAP, trust me - then try counting the sheer number of old women in the streets. You'll know the one, it's a rather distinct character model. Do it, and you'll soon realise that We Happy Few re-uses voices and visuals more often than even Oblivion.

Oh, but now we get onto the festering abscess lurking under the skin of We Happy Few, the bloated decaying mass of refuse which defaces all it comes into contact with: The bugs. The Ride to Hell: Retribution example above might have seemed like hyperbole, but I sincerely assure you that it is well and truly earned. You can encounter NPCs having scene specific conversations but in completely the wrong room, sometimes without the man they are arguing in even showing up. The entire Joy mechanic can suddenly fail without warning, and despite being drugged up to the Nth degree, you can still get called out for somehow breaking the law, or have powers suddenly fail. The only reason you might complete the game despite this is to the complete absence of intelligence in the enemy AI, which often gets caught on scenery, or sometimes even thin air.

It's possible to accidentally phase through buildings over and over again, speed-running missions purely by accident or abruptly fail them because a character will straight-up die simply because you tried to talk to them. You're not in control here, you're beholden to the whims of the cruel god of Murphy's law, and his minions lurk behind every shred of coding in this chaotic mess of a release. Of course, even then, this is assuming that there was an attempt to finish things there. Entire areas of the map completely lack collision defection, causing you to fall through the world and abruptly die. Yes, the average Steam Early Access game has more QA assurance than this allegedly AAA release.

There is honestly not enough space in this review to cover all the flaws, and that's because every time I am forced to restart, something new comes up. The worst one of late was where all the dialogue in the game refused to trigger, meaning missions could not be completed, and there was no way to progress forward. Still, even if they fixed that, this is one of the worst optimised games release on PC since Magicka or Minecraft; with all the screen tearing, pop-ins and uneven frame-rate that such a comparison implies.

The Verdict

This is an utter disaster of an experience. Between bugs, poor implementation of essential systems and a mission system which would be bad even in a polished release, it's not worth it. The writing is great, the voice acting is spot on and the visuals are brilliant, but this is supposed to be a video game. You play these to experience them, not just to watch an art department's mobile monument to their brilliance. This is the sort of thing which really does make you question your sanity for ever trusting a developer again, or something with Gearbox's name stamped on it.

While Gearbox itself has to certainly shoulder a substantial amount of the blame for publishing a game in this quality, you have to wonder what just Compulsion Games was doing. Contrast might have been a flawed gem, but it had far more good than bad, and it was at least largely finished. With this one, we had a 2015 Kickstarter, a 2016 Early Access release, and eventually a major publisher backing them. Money shouldn't have been a problem, and three years of development shouldn't have resulted in something so bad as this. A few bugs? Sure, I could see that, but not an entire bloody hive!

Folks, avoid this one entirely. Unless a few major patches followed by a No Man's Sky level overhaul follows, there's simply no reason to play this. Go elsewhere for your fix of joy, all you'll find here is non-stop misery.

Verdict: 2 out of 10