The PC open world survival with crafting mechanics market is fully saturated. To be a successful newcomer to the genre, you have to stand out, which is what We Happy Few did with the game’s E3 reveal trailer. The trailer depicts a dystopian 1960’s Britain where everyone willfully forgets their dark present and past with the help of a hallucinogenic drug called Joy. There was no mention of the true nature of the gameplay, where you have to manage your health, thirst, hunger, blah blah blah blah etc. etc. We Happy Few’s trailer succeeded in being distinctive, and attracted people, like me, who aren’t the type to enjoy one of those types of games, up until the point that I actually had to play the game.
We Happy Few’s blending of classic dystopian literature, from the happy pills of “Brave New World” to erasing the unpleasant past of “Fahrenheit 451”, is an intriguing idea for a video game. What We Happy Few lacks (so far) is what makes those books so interesting to read, the process of learning the minutiae of how the society functions. Instead, the player’s time and energy is focussed on managing stat bars and inventory screens, at which point the surrounding world is irrelevant. The background dressing serves no purpose when the gameplay still consists of stabbing strangers with a sharpened stick and then crafting a bandage with the materials you looted from their corpse. This game is just one step away from having you punch a tree to get wood like every other fucking game on Steam.
The intriguing concept and art style immediately garnered attention from survival genre outsiders, but the boilerplate moment to moment survival gameplay, pushed us farther away and made us feel swindled with what we were originally shown with the game. The concept and gameplay of We Happy Few feels like they were created by separate teams and then shoved together to construct a jarringly disjointed experience.
I am interested to hear from fans of the genre to see if the setting and story is enough to make it stand out amongst the crowd, or if they only really care about the mechanics and player driven stories of the game. Because after failing to convert genre outsiders, We Happy Few needs to at least attract the genres core fans in order to survive.
Article By Taylor Kalsey
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