SANTA MONICA, California—It took a few years, but We Happy Few is finally shaping up to play as well as it originally looked.
The 3D adventure game has thus far taken a strange publicity route, as its splashy 2016 reveal was followed by a bizarre early access game launch. Gamers were sold on something that looked like a trippy, story-filled fusion of Bioshock and Brave New World, but the paid, playable version was instead a procedurally generated sneak-and-fight sandbox.
“The problem was, you don’t want to play half-baked story after half-baked story in the early-access process,” Compulsion Games Creative Director Guillaume Provost explained at an E3 preview event. Rather than string early access players along with unfinished plot morsels, the studio chose to give eager players a look at the game’s mechanics first.
“[Compulsion] went quiet eight months ago,” Provost added, after hearing fans’ unanimous request: “We want story.”
“I REMEMBER”
The fruits of Complusion’s labor were laid bare in a 45-minute demo that made a few things apparent. First and most importantly, We Happy Few now has an apparently coherent campaign mode. What’s more, the story and its delivery are firmly in Bioshock-loving territory, and that shamelessness is what redeems the whole package.
The story portion that debuted at Ars’ pre-E3 event was admittedly a little hard to follow, owing to its placement roughly 15 minutes after the game’s tone-setting intro. I played as British protagonist Arthur in an alternate-history England of the 1960s, and my avatar had just stopped taking a government-mandated mood stabilizer called “Joy” as I began searching for my lost brother. Honestly, this demo’s slightly disorienting, “where am I?” feeling seemed to be part of the point: we as players were regaining plot consciousness at the same time as Arthur. It didn’t take much suspension of disbelief to fall in line with how the game fed bits of story.
We Happy Few‘s Bioshock comparisons became immediately apparent as story details were meted out in hidden, hand-written letters and environmental details. But the demo’s opening portion serves as a firm reminder that the Bioshock series wasn’t merely successful due to story bits being tucked into a 3D world. Rather, WHF includes an opening series of war-shattered towns and compounds that combine visual and architectural design to goad players into peeling back layers of a story. Books use words to make you turn a page, while WHF uses a mix of open architecture and subtly paced, subtly directed content to fill you in on what’s what.
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