It's a mess, and you have to look hard to find the fun.We Happy Few’s reliance on copy-pasted rows of uninteresting buildings and lifeless townsfolk (until you provoke them) sometimes makes traversing its randomized world a chore - but its collection of hand-crafted encounters across three engaging stories with unique characters are where this world truly comes alive, even if you aren’t on drugs. My impression of "We Happy Few" is that a bunch of people shouted out random ideas and tried to cobble them together into a game. That in a nutshell is the problem with the whole endeavor. There's not much reason to take Joy in the game itself though outside of a few quest-related instances, so it seems like a lot of development effort was spent creating a mechanic that doesn't add much to the game. One of the genuinely cool things in this game is you can take a hallucinogenic drug called "Joy" which changes the way the world looks like a giant AR filter. It's more content, so it's not bad exactly. It's almost like the game developers didn't know what story they wanted to tell, so they went with 3. Another thing that I almost never see in other games is that you play 3 characters consecutively, each with their own abilities, storyline, and side-quests. It's a bizarre usage of development resources, since almost no-one is going to play this game again. Something that is very different from other action RPGs is the emphasis on randomizing the maps, so the town city layouts, as well as quest and safehouse locations will be different every time. It feels like just another chore you have to finish to get to the next part of the game. Stealth mechanics are basic, and if you mess up you can usually just run away for a minute until enemy aggro resets and then try again. You swing at people until they start blocking, and then you wait until they unblock and swing again. It would be great if you could carry everything with you, but the game has strict weight limits for your character. I love spending five minutes running back to base to retrieve a mundane item. Quests often ask you to retrieve some common item you have left in your stash back at base like mushrooms or sewing kits. Quests are mostly of the fetch variety, and also endlessly annoying and badly designed. I started skipping them after a while because they were so pointless and uninteresting. There are flashback cutscenes that are dull and serve no purpose. The humor is like Mike Myers in his later years, or a bad Monty Python skit, and it almost always lands with a thud. It's a strange stew of themes and gameplay elements that don't work together at all. The setting is a post WW2 Britain where Germany won, and the society has been reshaped into something gaudy and cruel like Huxley's "Brave New World." There's a good amount of political messaging, and an undercurrent of absurdist humor in just about everything. If I had to describe it, it's like a discount version of Dishonored with a Bioshock aesthetic. This is an annoying schizophrenic game that doesn't know what it wants to be. Well, it turns out the developers didn't know either. Well, it turns out the developers didn't know I've been putting this off for a long while because I couldn't figure out what it was about. I've been putting this off for a long while because I couldn't figure out what it was about.
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