Dealing with backlog: We Happy Few

I was interested in this game from the moment it was announced several years ago. It sounded like something out of Bioshock and I love that series. I stayed away from it while it was in Early Access, though, since I've been burned a bit by Early Access before and only bought it once it was properly released. 

I'm being purposefully cryptic and avoid names as I discuss the game below. No spoilers.

The game takes a little while to get into and there's a lot of inventory management. It's like in Fallout 4 where you pick up all the crap you come across because it can be used for crafting. The story and gameplay doesn't pick up properly until you get inside the village. There are side quests in the garden district where you first end up, but the best thing you can do is just focus on the main quest until you get inside the village. You can go back and forth between districts (there are seven) as much as you want later. 

The game is divided into three acts. The first act is the longest and tbh the most tedious, but it introduces the world, the overarching story and the other characters pretty well. For each act you play as a different person, and they all have different reasons for getting out of Wellington Wells. 

Gameplay wise my favourite act was Act 2 because it's more of a puzzle. In the other two acts, if you want, you can just charge straight ahead and fight everything and everyone. In the second act, because you're playing a pretty small person, you have to rely more on wit and cleverness and contraptions to make your way around and it's a lot more fun. 

Storywise I love the third and last act because everything that started in the first act comes to a point and I just love seeing the delicate balance of things come apart at the seams. 

That said, nothing in the second or third acts would've happened if it wasn't for what you do in the first act. The small, seemingly inconsequential thing that happens in the prologue sets everything into motion.

I can understand why people drop the game halfway through the first act because the first character is pretty boring, both as a character and as for gameplay. He can be anything you want basically. Do you want a bull just charging through everything? Fine, you can do that. Do you want to be clever and sneak around and use contraptions? You can do that too. And if you're like me you end up doing a bit of both, which makes a lot of the situations a tad easy. Did the NPC turn around just as you were about to take them down? Fine, just throw a non-lethal shock grenade in their face and then pummel them with your fists. 

That said, if there are a lot of NPCs around when you get discovered for looting a body or punching somebody in the face then a situation can easily get out of hand. The best thing you can do in this game is to always remember where your closest safehouse is so that if you get overwhelmed by hostile NPCs you can just run as fast as you can to the nearest safehouse and jump in. That immediately gets them off your case and eliminates agro.

In the beginning a lot of things are hard. Like if a NPC sees you run or climb they'll get mad at you for not conforming, immediately assume you're a dreaded Downer and starts attacking you. In the village there's also a curfew which makes every police attack you on sight if they catch you outside between 9pm and 7am. And if you want to break into a house it makes a lot of noise to lockpick or to pry open windows so make sure to do it when nobody is around to hear. All of these things can be eliminated with perks as you progress through the game. So towards the end I could run around like a madman and break in everywhere and nobody ever caught me. The first guy has all the perks to make the game as easy as possible and it kind of ruins it tbh. The characters in Act 2 and 3 don't have all the same perks and so it takes a little more to get through those acts. They're definitely more fun. 

After the credits there's a cutscene that makes some pretty obvious and daunting hints towards the role of Wellington Wells, and it's pretty damning. 

As for the DLCs, there are three. The first, called They Came From Below, gave me strong Portal vibes. You don't run around with a portal gun, but you get two separate contraptions that work as guns and they'r eboth used to manipulate the environment to get you past traps and barriers and enemies. It was a lot of fun. Didn't hurt that the protagonists of this DLC were my new favourite gay couple. 

The second DLC, called The Lightbearer, stars our favourite rock star and deals with the aftermath of ending up in the bathtub while drugged out of your mind. I promise that sentence makes sense after having played the first two acts and this DLC. This DLC was outrageous and a lot of fun to play. The end gave me a omg holy shit moment as a piece of the story from the base game fell into place. It was glorious. 

The third DLC, called We All Fall Down, stars the general's daughter and this whole DLC shows the aftermath of what happened in Act 3 of the base game. The end of this DLC coincides with the end of the base game as you can hear the same thing over the speakers at the end of this DLC as you can at the end of Act 3. It's a fitting end to the story of Wellington Wells. I also really enjoyed flying around the roof tops in this DLC.

Gameplay wise this game is sometimes a buggy mess. There was one part of the main quest in the base game that I got stuck at for ages. The Extractor just wouldn't do its thing. The only thing I could find online was to reload the game from that point until it worked. And after a while it did. Another thing was during a side quest that I could've left well-enough alone without impacting the game itself, but I hate having unfinished things in my quest log. Same solution. Just reload until it worked. The last thing I can find from the devs for this game was in 2019, so it appears they have dropped this game altogether. 

Something I enjoyed was that the world and the map are procedurally generated. I only discovered this while I was running around looking for side quests in one district and decided to look up a map to see if I had missed something. And found that there are no maps, because nobody plays on the same map. That's really cool. Even with that knowledge I still didn't expect the map/world to be procedurally generated between acts. None of the three characters have the same map or buildings in the same place. But, when you think about it, it makes sense. Because they're all more or less on some kind of drug and all of their pasts are just half-remembered glimpses. So the maps are basically just how the characters find their way around, who can tell who's got the right of it? Probably, the middle act protag.

The story of this whole game is very clever and there are lots of little things that fit together to create the whole, not just the big, overarching story and seeing the whole story unfurl itself before you is definitely an experience. 

These two songs show the whole mood of the game. Eerie, somehow wrong and yet strangely cheerful. The first is a piece of soundtrack. The second is a fanmade song.

Story Trailer. Launch Trailer. Announce Trailer. 

London bridge has fallen down, fallen down, fallen down
London bridge has fallen down, my fair lady.
Take the keys and lock them up, lock them up, lock them up
Take the keys and lock them up, my fair lady.
Everything is quite alright, sleepy tight, nighty-night
Everything's tucked out of sight, my fair lady.