We Happy Few
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Okay, we’re supposed to be on drugs, but this is ridiculous. We’re in Wellington Wells, a 1960s dystopia whose inhabitants self-medicate to forget a horrifying secret from the town’s past, and who don’t take kindly to those unwilling to take part in their collective delusion. Alas, we reach the pill-dispensing booth – a repurposed telephone box – a couple of seconds too late, our brief state of withdrawal somehow enough to attract the attention of around a dozen residents and policemen. Having popped a Joy tablet to no avail, we break into a house to escape, but something is deeply wrong with the occupants. Steeling ourselves to face the angry mob after racing upstairs, we instead find ourselves fighting off opponents that are somehow stuck between floors, with only their top halves visible as they flail desperately away at our kneecaps.
This comes not long after a fight that plays out like a bizarre cross between Dad’s Army and The Matrix. Having been alerted by a bottle we intended to throw as a distraction, a geriatric soldier inexplicably teleports away from our attacks, reappearing to launch us 20 feet in the air with his bayonet. Three healing balms later, we finally dispose of this elusive pest; luckily, his fellow squaddie has clipped through a bush and can’t reach us. We Happy Few might already have endured a lengthy spell in Early Access, but on this evidence its stay wasn’t nearly long enough.
Then again, Early Access is normally an opportunity for developers to test out ideas, iron out bugs and refine a game before release. Compulsion Games, however, has used that time to reinvent We Happy Few entirely. It’s partly the fault of a debut trailer which seemed to pitch it as a BioShock- style narrative-led adventure through a striking vision of an alternative post-war Britain. But the game itself was planned as something very different: a procedurally generated survival sandbox with meter management and crafting mechanics. Expectations intruded on that reality, encouraging Compulsion Games to pursue the game players seemed to want, rather than the one it set out to make. At some point, the whole thing has got away from the studio: the result is a messy hybrid that’s neither one thing nor the other, where the survival elements hurt the story and vice versa.
It hardly helps that you start in the shoes of the insufferably whiny Arthur, whose job involves redacting potentially upsetting newspaper articles. One day he decides to stop taking his tablets, jolted by a memory of his brother to embrace harsh reality rather than pretending everything’s rosy. Quite apart from the troubling anti-medication message, any potential intrigue quickly evaporates over the course of its tenuously connected missions, punctuated as they are by repetitive black-and-white flashbacks. The quests are the kind that might have worked as self-contained objectives in a straight survival game, but the cumulative effect is to turn the narrative into a disjointed muddle. What’s nominally an extended escape turns into a series of fetch quests for other characters: get this and I’ll give you that, which allows you to get through there. Just make sure you blend in and everything will be tickety-boo.
That’s easier said than done, of course, because this is a place that enforces rules with an iron fist – or a shovel or a shock baton, perhaps. On the outskirts, among the grubby waifs and strays referred to as ‘wastrels’, you’ll be attacked if you’re wearing a suit. Tear it and you can walk among them, but you’ll get an unfriendly welcome on the streets. Indeed, even in appropriate attire, if you’re spotted running, crouching or jumping, the residents will become suspicious and turn on you. As such, you’ll spend much of your time taking tediously long walks, following circuitous routes to avoid the machines that detect Joy refuseniks, or else making sure your path takes you past enough booths to top up before you go into withdrawal.
Flight is often the best response when you’re attacked, because the firstperson melee combat is dull and lacking in feedback. It does, we suppose, work as a deterrent, incentivising a stealthy approach – though that’s not much of an improvement. Good stealth needs a clearly defined ruleset, applied consistently. It says everything that the UI relies on an awkward jumble of icons and text alerts to warn you about dangerous situations, because you’ll rarely know instinctively. The missions themselves, meanwhile, are generally spoiled by technical flaws and procedural quirks. During one sticking point, we’re invited to locate a key card; only after half an hour of combing every room do we find it on a dead factory worker whose corpse has half-clipped through a wall in a darkened room. For another quest, we need two sewing kits to craft a boiler suit: after breaking into four houses, killing or incapacitating at least a dozen occupants, opening roughly a hundred vanities, dressers, wardrobes and closets – and a few filing cabinets and toilets just in case – we finally get our hands on the second.
Some credit is due to the artists, whoever’s responsible for the loading screens, and, in most cases, the cast, all doing their damnedest to make you believe there’s something worth persevering for here. In the second character’s story – curtailed as it is – there are glimpses of a better, more coherent game. But there are plenty of games with strong visual design and atmospheric settings that don’t make you jump through nearly so many hoops to get to the good stuff. If your favourite part of BioShock was rummaging through bins, then be our guest. For the rest of us, however, there is – irony of ironies – precious little joy to be found in Wellington Wells.
In the second character’s story there are glimpses of a better, more coherent game