We Happy Few, stop being a Downer and have a spot of tea dosed with Joy.
It took me forever to play this game, mainly because I wasn’t sure if I would like it or not. Seeing some small bits and pieces of gameplay (I never actually watched a YouTube video of someone playing the game), it just didn’t really call to me, though it was in my Steam library.
I think perhaps from a Humble Bundle of games.
The reason I didn’t think it would be up my alley was maybe because of the open world aspect.
There are too many games I’ve tried that are open world and I’m too ADD to actually focus on the questline, since I wander off the main path and end up somewhere completely different doing something completely different and then I just don’t know what to do eventually because there’s too much stuff to do, so I stop playing them.
Turns out We Happy Few wasn’t too much of an open world for me to get completely lost in it.
- Developed by Compulsion Games
- Published by Gearbox Publishing
FAQ
What is this page?
This is an in-depth critique of the game We Happy Few. I go all in with my review by picking apart the game, piece by piece. By doing this, I try to help not only the devs that created the games, but also future aspiring devs by giving my viewpoint on everything as an avid gamer, but please understand…
There may be spoilers.
Title Screen
Background
I was originally going to talk about the background that features the town but then I realized there’s really two backgrounds here if we’re taking into consideration the left-hand side menu, so let’s start there, shall we?
We Happy Few is for the pill-popper society.
That’s just what it is, and while I don’t know too much about the game right now as of the title screen, I can’t say much about the ripped paper feel. Out of what I’ve seen from the small snippets of gameplay, I know some newspapers are involved, so maybe there’s a lot of reading and writing of our personal thoughts?
Either way, I’m going to say the torn edges of the paper somehow fits into the game.
As for the background coloration, I love the diluted colors. They’re dulled down and not in your face, but they’re still kind of trippy and if you’ve taken a lot of pills in your life, you’ll know a lot of them come in a variety of colors.
The right side of the background focuses on what I’m going to assume is the main town we’ll be roaming around in. And this area has a bit of movement with the camera giving a back and forth sway, as well as a breeze catching some of the flags hanging from the overhead lines and a great many of the lights having electrical problems.
So it’s a place that’s run down and not in the best shape.
You see signs for “Play with Jack!” in a couple spots–though I don’t know who that is. And of course a sign telling you that you look smashing.
Well then. With a compliment like that, I have to play the game, don’t I?
Title Font
It’s big, it’s bold, and it’s beautiful.
Not to mention, it’s attached to a cleverly designed logo depicting the game itself.
The font has big fat letters that make it super easy to read with a solid black outline. Every word has a different color–pink, red, gold.
To the left of the title is what I assume is a woman’s face, due to its feminine structure, painted white. While her face is normal at the front, it begins to crack and shatter the further back you get with her mouth.
I assume in reference to eating the pills–they make you a little cracked.
The hair color coming off the face at the front comes in the same three colors as the text, though in a different order–gold, pink, red.
Not sure why they did them in a different order like that, but there’s nothing wrong with it.
Menu
New Game/Continue
Find out why there are so few that seem to be happy in We Happy Few, or continue where you left off from your previous save.
Load Game
If you don’t want to start from your previous save, this lets you choose exactly which save file you want to load into.
Story
You can play between three different characters once you’ve unlocked access to them, and this menu option is where you go to choose which character you want to choose.
You start out with Arthur automatically.
Not only that, but you can also change the difficulty. If you’re no longer in it for just the storyline, take it up a notch to Normal difficulty or even Hard if you want everyone to hate your guts and you want to forget there was even a storyline to begin with.
Arcade
Skip the main game and go straight into one of three arcades–Survival, The Night Watch, or Sandbox. The first two have set goals, but the third is basically a do-what-you-want thing with the availability of cheats.
DLC
There are three DLCs you can choose from–are you seeing a trend here yet with the threes?
- Roger & James in They Came From Below
- Lightbearer
- We All Fall Down
Options
First and foremost, you can select the language you want to play the game in. After that, it’s a matter of going into the sections of Graphics, Controls, Game & HUD, Audio, and Language Options.
I won’t be going into each one, because they actually offer you a whole lot of stuff that you can tinker around with in your game to make it a better experience for you.
Extras
This will take you to either the collectibles you’ve collected, in which you can watch them play out again, or you can watch the credits.
Quit
When you’re one of the few that are no longer happy with playing the game and want to stop.
Misc.
We Happy Few News
On the upper right, there’s a header for the latest news and updates they’ve done for the game. All you have to do is hover over it and it’ll drop down to show you the latest release notes. That way you can keep up to date just before playing the game, in case you’re one of those people like me that doesn’t read the release notes on the game’s discussion page.
Build Version
On the bottom right, you can view the build version number, so you can see you’re on the proper build, I guess.
Probably goes hand-in-hand with the release notes of the news above. If so, it’s a nice touch.
Gameplay
Achievements
There are a total of 70 achievements you can acquire in We Happy Few that will make very few happy, we’re sure.
Plot
Set in retrofuturistic 1960s England, you will find a city ravaged by war and rebuilt by delusionally happy people. Everything appears joyful in Wellington Wells, including its roads, its people, and its omnipresent television personality: Uncle Jack! But, it’s actually a world on the brink of collapse. Come unveil its dark history, and discover how and why its residents came to be so beguilingly happy.
Game Length
For the main storyline, it may take you around 21 hours to complete according to Howlongtobeat.
Completionists are going to be having a doozzy of a playthrough at a whopping 60+ hours. Ya’ll must really like this game or be desperate to complete all your games to the best of your abilities.
I approve.
Replay Value
There are DLCs you can come back to and play once you’re done with the main game.
After that, you can still try out the arcade games in the menu screen, and upon completing those, if there are any leftover achievements you haven’t done, that’d be it for the replay value.
Genre(s)
The action comes from the fact that you’ll possibly be fighting your way through enemies at certain times to get to where you need to be. This action fighting comes from either your fists or weapons picked up throughout the environment/corpses.
The adventurous setting is from you going from quest to quest in order to build up the story from start to finish.
This isn’t a game where the horror will jump out from behind a corner and scare you. If anything, at times, it will be just an environmental creepy sensation where you know you’re going to see something bad, but it’s not going to scare the hell out of you.
The music of the game and the scenery around you definitely puts it into the psychological category.
You’re surviving because the townsfolk don’t exactly like you for one reason or another. That’s the reason for this category. You’re running for your life, sure, but it’s not in the same way that some of these survival horror games play it out.
If you can get out of the NPCs line of sight for long enough, they’ll forget about you.
Controls
I never had any issues with the controls in the game. They were pretty smooth, though be mindful that you do have a stamina bar during both running sequences and fights.
You’re able to control your character into doing the following:
- Run
- Jump
- Crouch
- Block
- Attack
Combat
The combat is super monotonous and boring.
The weapons you find are few and far between, so if you ever happen to get into fights, you’ll probably be using your fists, which aren’t super effective against enemies when they’re using frying pans to beat your skull in.
And even if you take their weapon after they die, it’ll have low durability, which means it won’t last long in combat anyway.
It’s all about button mashing. Either attacking, blocking, or shoving.
Otherwise, you’re running.
Not the most fun aspect of the game.
Interactions
You’ll be doing a lot of interacting with everything throughout We Happy Few, mainly because you’ll be needing items in order to craft specific things. Not to mention some people in the open world might be seeking items you can find in the environment, so you can easily complete their quests by having said item already on hand.
Some houses may have boards on them that you’ll need to pry off with a Jimmy Bar, or windows you can open. Then there are locked objects you’ll need to lockpick.
With lockpicking, you don’t control it. The game does, which makes it a little more dull than some other games that offer the same mechanic.
The lockpicks don’t break on you in the process, but you can lose them afterwards.
Aside from searching things for items, you can also pick up corpses of people in order to get them out of the public eye. This includes dropping them into places that you could’ve hid inside, like trash cans.
Characters
Voice Acting
I love the voice acting of all the characters. I think the voice actors have all done a marvelous job in their roles and conveyed the proper emotion when needed.
Movement
As far as the movement with our character, I didn’t notice anything off, but with some of the other characters?
Hoo-boy, I’ve seen some teleporting glitchiness that have caused me sheer panic at being caught, because I didn’t actually know where they really were.
Abilities
The first main ability you get in the game is called Sweet Dreams and it allows you to choke people out from behind them, or smother them to death in their sleep.
Fun, right?
You can get some other abilities, but for the most part, your skill tree provides you with a lot of upgrades that are useful depending on your playstyle in-game.
Narrative
Voice Acting
The voice acting is on point.
From the people who are actually on their Joy to the people who are Downers and no longer take Joy, you can definitely tell the difference between the two groups. And for us, as Arthur, you can most certainly hear the depressing edge in our voice when we speak, especially when it comes to Percy.
Every main character that we come up against in conversation has their own personality in how they talk to us as well.
The main problem here comes from the random NPCs that you come across while walking through the town or open environment. They either ramble and say some nonsensible things that make sense to them, or they repeat the same lines to us as we pass them by. And it gets kind of monotonous after a while. Maybe even a little annoying, because there are a lot of people you pass in town, even if they’re the same person.
You’ll find that some of the lines in this game reference a wide variety of movies, books, possibly other games, and maybe more.
Subtitles
Oddly enough, everyone in this game seems to have a name, though the subtitles don’t come with a name attached to the words.
There’s only a colored arrow pointing to the line and that’s that.
Honestly, I don’t really mind that there aren’t names attached to the subtitles, because there are an awful lot of characters that speak in this game and it would probably be pointless since with a lot of them we don’t come back to.
Plus, the colored arrow indicates that it’s a different character speaking anyway.
Graphics
Style
They’ve done an amazing job with the graphics in this game.
There are basically two different styles you come across.
One is the grunge look that depicts the depressed style of those that no longer take Joy or have received bad batches of them and can’t take them anymore, I think? Run-down houses in the garden district. Missing floors and side foundation in general. Overgrown foliage. People walking around in torn clothes.
Then you’ve got places like Hamlyn Village that are a bit more cleaned up and as soon as you pop one of those Joy pills around this area you’re going to notice a clear difference in graphics.
You’ll be in LSD town.
So many bright colors will assault your vision and you won’t know whether you should be happy like your character or fear for your life because that Joy isn’t going to last forever and if we know anything about drugs, there’s a crash that comes after.
Unfortunately, a downside is that everything graphic-wise tends to look the exact same.
Soundtrack
Background Music
All right, I’m not gonna lie, for most of the game, I didn’t really pay attention to any kind of background music while playing the game, and I know the soundtrack is good, because people have talked about it. And the only bit that I know of is with the trailer of the game, and even then I don’t remember it because it’s been a long time.
So I had to do a refresher and look up the soundtrack for We Happy Few on YouTube.
It’s got such a spy theme going on when I hear some, I love it.
But I just miss that stuff when I’m actually playing the game, so I don’t know if it’s just me being ADD in the actual game and not hearing the music, or if the music just doesn’t play until specific points are triggered.
I get chase music and such, but I’m talking about natural background soundtracks here. They’re just not as strong as other games out there.
Ambiance
The ambiance was definitely there for wherever you were, whether you were in an abandoned house in the Garden District or sneaking through an enemy campground or just wandering through town. There’s always something to listen to, and it always seems to add to the mood of the setting, which is perfect.
Sound Effects
You’ve got the snicks of the lockpicks, the crunches of the boards breaking when you use the Jimmy Bar, footsteps of people that are walking nearby as you’re crouched to get around them. There’s sound effects of the different items you grab to stash away for later use, the sounds of glass shattering when you throw a bottle as a distraction.
And of course the sounds of you getting into tussles with people, whether they be fist-fights or with weaponry.
Let’s just say there are a lot of sound effects they’ve put into the game.
Final Thoughts
We Happy Few has flaws, I won’t say it doesn’t, but a lot of people were happy with the game as it expanded upon its first release.
I just wish the combat was a bit better, though it makes me wonder if maybe they were more focused on the stealth concept of the game–what with the fitting in with the residents with the different clothing sets and how you need to take Joy to pretend to fit in and go through the Joy detectors.
Still, they’ve got fun concepts for weapons when and if you find them. Their durability is a bit of a bummer.
The environment does get a bit stale to look at after a while too.
But I’m a sucker for games that focus on story, and that’s what this one did from the very start.
The Review
We Happy Few
A psychological action/adventure game that tests your survival in a world that relies on Joy and panics at the sight of Downers. Blend in with society as you search for a way to flee the disaster Wellington Wells has become before you become another victim.
Review Breakdown
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Title Screen
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Gameplay
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Characters
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Narrative
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Graphics
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Soundtrack
