"I down a couple downers
I've been to mushroom mountain
Cool, calm, just like my mom
With a couple of valium inside her palm
It's Mr. Mischief with a trick up his sleeve
Crawl up on you like Christopher Reeves"
D12 - Purple Pills
"You are congealed" - (what I always think the game is telling me while I wait around in bushes or dressers for aggro timers to expire.)
I remember a brief chat several years ago with someone who protested there are simply too many open-world RPGs being made. While I happen to like the sandbox routine, I had to concede most rushed blindly to copy Skyrim's success, when Skyrim was only borderline sandboxy to begin with. If you'd like to see a good game which fell prey to that pitfall, try We Happy Few. You've probably heard of it: that one about a town full of drugged-out '60s Brits. If you've heard any reviews, they'll be of the mixed variety: good concept, poor execution. But that's not entirely fair. After all, Wellington Wells portrays a deluded dystopia quite amusingly, with signs of drug culture and its impact permeating all interactions and perceptions.
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| Left-to-right: On Joy / coming down / clear head / Joy crash* |
Took me a while to realize the withdrawal filter imposes a slight fish-eye effect to make the architecture loom over you menacingly. Damn graphic design majors earned their keep for once. Wizard of Oz similes are obviously intended. Most would liken the game's basic plot to Brave New World. I find its layers of (self-)deceit better recall the tone of a (sadly) lesser read novela by Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress, which I cited before as example of SF stories about population control... ironically enough in current context. Eh, don't worry, that grand reveal is not so grandly revealed in the first zone after the tutorial. Really, I found my impression of We Happy Few hit me in distinct waves of admiration and disappointment:
Stage 1) The "wow" factor
It kicks off strongly enough, with a potential nonstandard game over as soon as the curtain lifts. Though cutscenes are frequent they're also, as I suggested, sufficiently prefaced not to jar you out of gameplay itself and often paced by your own keystrokes. The campy retrofuturistic aesthetic is played up to great success, voice acting dependably charming, and even the endless references (from balm of Gilead to the little dalek trashcans to quests like
"The Scottish Play" to snippets of poetry mumbled on the roads) support rather than disrupt the setting. Uncle Jack's broadcasts warrant halting for a listen, going the extra mile in recreating the incompetent guile of early radio - and holy shit, you will learn to hate his creepy fake laugh!
Stage 2) The grind
But then you get into the open world elements. The various zones are randomly generated, which is to say quest/loot locations are randomly shuffled around. In its campy English setting and in its combat mechanics, WHF so closely resembles Sir, You Are Being Hunted that I was surprised to find they weren't made by the same team. Unfortunately, this means my criticism "the British heath soon grows frustratingly dull" from SYABH also applies here, with randomization yielding an overly-tame, flat, repetitive clutter of identical houses and plains.
Like SYABH this is not a strict stealth-based game but an FPS with a high damage/health ratio heavily encouraging stealth. However, while combat does include blocking and block breaking, it still
boils down to left-clicking and popping insta-heal potions, so you'll probably avoid fighting because it's largely unrewarding and clunky. Technically you could make use of a wealth of consumables, but the quickslot system expects you to rummage through dozens of flashlights and rubber duckies trying to find your darts while you're being walloped with frying pans and rolling pins. Targeting is also marred by an infuriatingly oversensitive pointer snap range, so don't be surprised if you find yourself chugging drugged water by mistake while reaching for medicine cabinets.
So you'll be relying heavily on your stealth skills, aggroing the hair-triggered NPCs then running around the nearest corner to hide until they reset. This single routine outweighs all the rest of the action combined, and when the most common activity in the game is "do nothing for thirty seconds" you can damn well expect a few negative reviews.
Stage 3) The play's the thing
However, if you have the patience to advance through all the zones, you start encountering Wellington Wells' true charm, one chunk of fool's gold at a time.
Particularly inspired though is the overall portrayal of the Wellies themselves. While bashing escapism in a video game is always risky, We Happy Few goes a step further by equating dissasociative bliss with infantilism, a stance I find myself forced into more and more* witnessing the computer game creative medium and especially cRPGs fail to outgrow grade school theatrics even as their market demographic has shifted toward thirty-somethings. Incapable of all but the most abbreviated thoughts, grinding through their lives by sheer routine, the Wellies are reduced to playing Simon Says to the point of elevating it to a religion and splashing mindlessly about in puddles like toddlers. And then... you discover an old soldier's secreted-away military radio** communicating with the resistance. Brace yourself.
Stage 4) Playing's a letdown
However, as I rounded out my playthrough of Arthur, the first and supposedly longest of the game's three viewpoint characters, I found my disappointment washing over me again in force. My pile of hundreds of accumulated foodstuffs, grenades, balms and cricket bats went entirely to waste, as the action failed to ramp up to any climactic battles requiring you to splurge, and the stash doesn't carry over between characters despite them sharing the same environment. This is not helped by needing to burgle for more important items, which almost inevitably makes you sift through mountains of trash loot, compounded by most stat increases coming from skill books spawned more or less randomly in certain uncertain locations, forcing even more obsessive hoovering through every closet in town.
At first you'll welcome your skill trees offering more utility allowing you to move about freely, but as the need to allay NPCs' suspicions or even feed yourself disappears, as you become so stealthy (shoes, camouflage, night bonus) as to never need to fight, nothing takes the place of these as gameplay elements, leaving you with an unsatisfying walking simulator as timesink between the admittedly well executed story quests. Items like gas masks are only used half a dozen times, flashlights or electrical protection only twice or so each, and rarely in any intersting combinations. Others like water filters prove completely useless, as you can make a couple of trips back to Barrow Holm and stock up enough drug-free water to last you a month in a two-week campaign. Worse yet, you're often treated to idiot-friendly supplies placed in boxes near where they'll be needed, denying you even the satisfaction of meeting new challenges by a well-stocked inventory.
It's one thing to display artistic awareness, and quite another to be induced by that awareness to scoff at the quality of your own work. While decent from a linear storytelling perspective, as a game too much of We Happy Few seems phoned in, treated as an external concern beneath the designers' conceit, just slapping on as many selling points as apossible. Customers like Skyrim open-world exploration? Give 'em that! They like loot? Give 'em mountains of loot! They like combat? Give 'em grenades they'll never have cause to use! That'll shut the rabble up.
And with that I'm afraid we've come to the end of our time, as little here makes me want to start all over again with the next characters, or get my money's worth from the DLCs I got with the super-deluxe edition or whatever. Tune in next time for more of Uncle Werwolfe's fan letters.
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** I honestly can't help but feel this blog is that radio.
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