@@TheFaceSoapHahah I often wonder how these Scottish characters sound to non-Scottish people. I knew an American who though a guy from the borders had a full on Scottish accent, the same as mine (from near Edinburgh) and I offer wondered how both accents sounded to her and how they sounded even close.
@@Ashethetics hell I'm from Moray. when I moved down to the central belt for a few years hardly anyone understood a word I was saying lol, had to totally switch up how I talk
I will never understand why this was procedurally generated. It could have been so good, the setting, characters, and plot are so so solid, but they went with a gimmicky, procedurally generated world instead of taking the time and effort to design the levels themselves.
It's because of how long the development cycle was- This video actually skims over the early development of WHF, I remember the very early alphas where it was more considered as a new spin on survival games like Sir, You Are Being Hunted, _(a survival game that focuses more on urban/societal survival and AI opponents, which is still an unexplored twist on the genre honestly)_ the idea of it being a Bioshock spiritual successor had not entered the picture at all. You could consider it a failure to "kill your darlings" and pivot the game to what most people clearly wanted out of it. The Long Dark is almost going through the opposite problem where the developers really wanted to do a story campaign mode and have spent years finishing it, but the core playerbase are exclusively devoted to survival mode.
@@darthvaderreviews6926 I think it goes without saying that the moral of We Happy Few is really that procedural generation should NOT be seen as a selling point, but rather a potentially useful tool in a developer's arsenal. A game like We Happy Few would've benefited greatly by incorporating the immersive sim and map design philosophy of Deus Ex and Dishonored. Large, self-contained, and open levels where different objectives can be approached in numerous ways. Unfortunately, it was developed at a time when games were touting "unlimited replay potential" thanks to procedural generation as seen through the sheer popularity of open-world survival games and roguelikes.
@@rileytruax766 Procedural Generation is something that is designed mainly for sandbox and roguelike games, where the whole concept is starting from nothing in a random environment and planning towards an end goal. We Happy Few COULD work with the idea if it was mainly focused on gameplay, leaning on the roguelike/survival elements, but a story focus like it has doesn't work.
“Life goes on. That is the mercy.” Just really hit this weird feeling. That feeling you get when you remember something from a long time ago. And it felt so big, and so important. And it ate up everything you did, everything you thought about. And now it’s just a memory. Nothing really came of it, no big solution or climax. It just disappeared. Idk how to put it. When you think back to these different points in your life. It almost feels like a different life. The bad things you did the good. It’s all just one big second chance. A lifelong mercy.
Until you make a new mistake that kicks you back into that temporary hell - in those times, you'd sooner bite off your tongue than call life mercy. Rise, fall, rise... fall.
No arthur is worse. He tricked his disabled brother on that train so he could get out of having to go. Since percy was too old to go being 13. He then stole his passport and ran off almost getting away before the cop stopped him. Who knew he was lying due to percy screaming for his brother and also cuz arthur sucks at lying but the cop was too guilt stricken to put arthur back on the train and possibly remove percy. He has been lying to himself and everyone around him that he was the older brother not percy and he really did want to go but the cop stopped him. His ending is him accepting hes a terrible person who murdered his disabled brother.
@supotter377 i mean, no. It's statatory rape, which is consensual. And a 16 year old isnt an infant and should know having sex with their bfs dad on multiple occasions is wrong. You dont need to defend a fake character that was literally written to be disliked.
@@MattGOG666 Statutory rape is not consensual just without force, (why the fuck would it be called RAPE if so) and it does not matter the age of the victim it is still rape. I don’t care if it’s a fictional character because people say similar things to real people and this shit being in popular media just reenforces the idea that a child seducing an adult happens more than it really does. (which is basically never) She was definitely a badly written character and shows that people shouldn’t throw in topics like this without thinking about the implications.
I wish that stories involving things like pharmaceuticals/anti depressants in particular would dive a little deeper on those themes than "pill bad, pill make you ignore things". I see this depicted a lot and it's starting to become dull due to how mis-informed this perspective is a lot of the time. I get that it's fiction but there are still ways to cover this subject matter that aren't so black and white.
As someone who's on like 269474091 meds, I get it. But I don't fault the game for this one thing. I never got the impression that the message was "pill bad", because no one's treating anything. The pills are not medication, it's quite literally a drug. Joy is a direct allusion to soma from Brave New World, or the "stirring suppressor" from The Giver. So yeah, instead of "pill bad", it's more like "refusing to acknowledge your misdeeds and trying to run from your past bad".
I think we're meant to read the pills as being more metaphorical than literal - symbolic of the very human desire to ignore our feelings by burying ourselves in pleasures which cost us our sense of identity (Brave New World). That said, it's kind of a poor choice of metaphor when there's a not-insignificant portion of the world teeters on the edge of the "pill-bad" mindset. Easy to miss the forest for the trees.
Of course yt deleted my comment. Ugh. I don't think the message is "pìII bad", because it's not meant to be an analogue for any kind of medication. It's literally a drúg. It's an allusion to sómà from Brave New World, and serves the same purpose. The story never read to me as "pìII bad", more like "running away from your problems and refusing to take accountability for your wrongdoings bad".
I'm on the fence on if I get that reading from this story, more as others point out that it's meant to be "ignoring your past and not coping with things is bad." But I do agree that the black/white perspective is bad and only causes people to stigmatize the mentally ill even further. I am someone who tries to kill myself whenever I'm not on an antipsychotic. I went off of it and 3 weeks later was going at my wrist with a box cutter. Some of us literally need these meds to stay alive. (Sorry to be so graphic, just the reality of it for some of us. And yes I am going back on the meds.)
It always felt like the devs wanted to bolt on all these "cool features" that were popular the the time (crafting, survival mechanics, procedural generation, etc) without actually considering why they were doing it, or how it would fit into an overall idea of game design. The procedural levels especially seemed like a terrible idea, given that it seems like there were talented 3D artists. The entire point of procedural levels is to make the game replayable, but every other aspect of the game seems to discourage replayability.
This is an unfortunately mixed game; the voice acting and creativity/plot are incredible, but the actual gameplay/mechanics/plot holes/glitches really weight it down. It had the potential to be an amazing game.
I think it goes without saying that We Happy Few, alongside many others including Starbound, Biomutant, and Hello Neighbor, is one of those games that had a fun and interesting concept, but was unfortunately brought down by sloppy execution and overall lack of direction on what it was supposed to be. Had the developers trimmed down things like the procedurally generated open-world map and focused on things that actually matter in the long run, it could've been great.
Thanks for pointing out how in all likelihood Sally’s supposed tryst with Arthur’s Father was likely a completely non-consensual act his dad inflicted on a recently traumatized teen in his care. Honestly it’s frighteningly believable that a self-obsessed & indignant tool like Arthur would blame her for “seducing” his dad instead of confronting how his grown adult dad, likely twice Sally’s age at the time, should have been more than capable of resisting the “charms” of a teenager when he’s got a wife & two kids. I’d call it an effect of the forgetful side effects of Joy though as the scenes between the two show, Arthur assuredly had the exact same attitude & oblivious reaction at that time.
bro thats insane how it was conveyed bc when he first said it i was like "damnnn she fucked his dad thats cold" and then the dude was like "she was underage" and i was like ARTHUR WTF BRO
While it is almost certain that Arthur's Father engaged in abuse towards towards a desperate young girl, Sally isn't innocent of other crimes. She is a drug dealer, likely the original inventor of Joy (that had their credit stolen), fine with cozying up to powerful people for perks (like the general for drugs and ignoring her being off Joy) and is fine with selling Joy while making sure to stay off it (hence how she was able to get pregnant). She is definitely a hypocrite regarding the drugs and a mess she had a definite hand in creating, but shouldn't be blamed for Arthur's father.
@user-oh4mb4vg5b Nobody is denying that Sally in the present isn’t innocent. But that does not mean she deserved to be raped. What is the point of this comment?
This game is always going to have a place in my heart. I love the game stylization, I love the storyline, I loved the immersion. It has *many* flaws, but it also had a unique feeling to it that no other game has ever given me. The only real crime was when they signed with Gearbox. This game could have been so much better if Gearbox hadn't come in and rushed the work while pushing so much DLC/add-on bs. If Compulsion Games had actually had time to work on it at their own pacing, so much more could have been done. And even so, I am not mad at this game. It's one of my favorites. Always will be.
You worded everything so perfectly. I feel exactly the same. Maybe one day we’ll get a remaster or something that more closely resembles what Compulsion intended.
even as a video addressing its flaws, I am beyond excited to see this game still getting attention. it is and will always be a favorite of mine, too 😌💞 the characters are convincing, and the voice acting is stunning. the visuals are so unique and, like you said, it provokes a feeling that no other game has been able to trigger from me. I love the dialogue. it compliments its surroundings and the acting very well
The problem is money. $250k sure sounds like a lot of money until you realize it has to pay the salaries for 5-10 people over multiple years. Going at their own pace means the game never gets finished. Unlimited time and money also doesn't make for a good game. Star Citizen is a prime example of the pitfalls of unlimited time and funds, but equally for every example of the creatives getting their vision crushed by corporate, you have one where the money people forced the developers to stick to a deadline, create realistic goals, cut the fat and a make a tight, focused game. We Happy Few needed cuts. Time was spent on element's that didn't work even in concept. A more limited scope with fewer mechanics and a goal of making it a 10h game would have helped.
Huh, really drives in the whole "government sanctioned gang" fact when they just have a full blown gang name rather than the more officious acronyms American sanctioned gangs use.
@@notsae66 Maybe you should google 'Peelian Principles'. They basically amount to: The police are 'citizens in uniform' The primary duty of the police is to the public, not the state The use of force is a last resort. He invented the idea of 'policing by consent'. Peel's ideas were revolutionary because he sought for his police force to serve through public co-operation rather than fear, which was incredibly unique in the 1820s. He had a net good on the world, and I wished we followed his ideals more closely today.
Right like rummaging a trashcan has a chance to proc a smell debuff on you then you have to go shower or make distance between you and people. Though I guess the Devs had a hard time with the stealth detection mechanics anyways so another broken one wouldn't make it better.
I really wish you tried the dlc, only because I share basically all your opinions about the base game. The dlcs honestly feel like they took the conceptual core of the narrative and created vignettes that were authentic to that core. One was silly, one effectively leaned into the psychedelic element really effectively and the last presented the large scale impact of the central scarcity conflict. They each trim the fat of the superfluous mechanics irrelevant to each campaign. They were tight and linear, but that hit much harder than a sprawling and vacuous environment.
Did you notice when Arthur asks why the Germans left the tanks, Ollie interrupts saying "i've made a map" but it sounds like he said "I made em up". In a game about unreliable narrators where the playable protagonists all perceive parallel experiences of the same events I think it's intentional.
I remember We Happy Few being "the next big indie game" when I was younger, and I admired the aesthetics heavily, and I thought it was truly the shit, but it seemed like nobody played it after we got that demo release. This video was amazing, and finally quenched my curiosity on this game. I seriously think this game could've been VERY good, and it feels like a death of a thousand cuts, chunk after chunk the quality diminished, its very odd how it was fumbled.
one point I don't get: if joy is SUPPOSED to suppress memories, how are our characters able to focus on their tasks while on it? Wouldn't it suppress their memories again? make them not desire to fight back because of the euphoria and addictive properties? The fact they act after the opening like taking joy is just like me taking ritalin is weird. Like, is it a psychoactive hallucinogenic drug, or is it merely a dopamine/serotonin booster with amnesia added in?
So the REAL question is how it targets memories, and those SPECIFIC memories. It's one thing to say it makes you feel a certain way. It's a totally different beast to just hand wave away memories. Like what if your brother was abusing you? Seems like you'd remember that as the best say ever. I mean realistically you don't NEED to fuck with people's memories. You just need to get them addicted to the point they don't care about anything else. I guess the idea is that joy allows them to be productive? Even then you could just make a super drug.
Simple: they don't. Joy rots your brain and makes you literally forget everything, even your own name if you take too much, but it also makes it so you don't care. No one's doing any actual work, nothing is getting accomplished, and so the town is on the verge of collapse. There is a form of Joy that doesn't turn your brain to mush, but the materials to make it are scarce so they only give it to the people in power who enforce this messed up system.
In the last storyline we get a glimpse of how far the city has crumbled with every higher up getting pumped full of Joy and not doing their actual jobs.
The most atrocious thing about this game is that the procedurally generated open world really works against the player (specially if your world has bad rng) because the game is just a glorified fetch quest game and it places your objective really far away and makes it such a hastle to finish, which why the game has a long runtime. I think the story itself is interesting enough to get me invested but the bugs/quests/gameplay pulls me away from the immersion which sucks because i really like the story. The dlcs are what the base game should have been all along and it's the only replayable part of the game for me.
My Sally playthrough was so botched because the mushrooms you need to craft all of her utility gadgets were just not spawning at all for me. So I spent all of her playthrough resolving combat and stealth with more combat. It was interesting.
You know they could have actually taken the social mechanics somewhere…something that annoyed me while playing was, in the garden district and parade district, me digging through trash cans for scrap to make home made nades out of never, really peeved the bobbies. Like, why not take it there. Would actually make searching the trash cans an active gameplay choice rather then mindless button promt. “Oh I really need x material, but there’s too many bobbies on this street. Let me find a side alley” like, yea no one thought in your social stealth game, digging through trash cans might not be socially acceptable to the posh people of the parade district but the run down village people aren’t gonna care
Right, that doctor smell mechanic could have just been attatched to the bobbies if you loot too many trashcans it makes you smell to people. Sadly these devs don't seem to be able to make that work.
I always find it hilarious when I find videos on this game and they're almost always negative. I genuinely enjoyed this game, and somehow, experienced zero glitches or issues with it while playing it - and mind you, I've played it 3 times. But - not every game is for every person, and you have valid concerns and opinions about the game!
Great video! A lot of quality here! I remember being really disappointed in the game because the concept was really interesting. It just lacked any sort of flavor or spice other than the base concept. I also really wish that the world looked more different with joy, in the opening cutscene taking joy influences the actual things you see a bit more with the rat but in game it just slaps on a slightly brighter filter.
I really just found Arthur to be so unbearably insufferable even if the game and story were overall good I'd still not enjoy it. He's not even an interesting jerk he just feels like a wet blanket of a character who hobbles around never really developing or improving. If he became better there'd be some sort of point to his story. It's like every time something interesting might happen the game slams it down and nothing will really come of it. At least if he realized how wrong he was about Sally and tried to improve and her actually helped her there might be something to latch onto but he's like a void of a character who's only interesting point is shown to you early on and the game just kinda sits on it.
Honestly, none of the characters really improve after learning the truth while off Joy. Arthur continues to be insufferable and making excuses for every bad thing he does and will move on as he always had "It's just self preservation after all". Sally wasn't on Joy (hence how she got pregnant) and was happy to be a drug dealer for the town for a drug that she avoided taken, is highly likely to be the real inventor of it (with the credit stolen), and once she gets to the mainland with no money, her skills are chemistry and the creation of an addictive drug. Ollie worked with the general to get the island to surrender to the Germans via creating the fake tanks (something left out of the video), and sold out Jack's daughter just because he didn't like Jack. His response after that is that he had suffered enough being on the island, flies away peeing on the people who he helped cause the nightmare in the first place. There is the DLC as well, Lightbearer has the main character possibly being a kind of purgatory to resolve to do better, They came from below had the protagonists actually try to do the right thing and didn't have a dark connection to the main ploy, We all Fall Down once again has Victoria Byng (who was responsible for getting Joy into the water supply to addict the town) walk off their guilt. They proceed to cut the entire town off of their addictive mind effecting drug that they were on for YEARS cold turkey. This leads to many dying or going insane, then gets upset the survivors hate her, and goes off to find her mother elsewhere.
Bioshock had a budget of $25,000,000. We Happy Few had a budget of $200,000, and kickstarters campaigns usually use 2/3 of the budget promoting the kickstarter, so more like $80,000
Perfectly valid argument. But it's worth noting that Compulsion Games got funding from Gearbox as well. The amount isn't public but it allowed the team to scale from ten people to forty by the time the game was released; the overall budget is easily in the millions
@@ConversingGames bro this argument is dogshit. If you create a shooter on 2024 and it's worst than Doom, it doesnt have anything to do with the budget. The blueprints are out there, there is no valid excuse for a shit game nowadays.
@@DecimeCubaI get that point but their are definitely excuses for bad games existing. Big budget games nowadays have to succeed due to how much money is put into them, meaning some decisions will be made for mainstream appeal, instead of for a creative vision that works with the rest of the game. like a interesting mechanic could be removed or popular mechanics from other successful games might be added (even if the game wasn't built around them) and with teams so massive a consistent creative vision may get slightly watered down, leading to passion less and mid games. (i think hbomberguy makes some good points about stuff like this in a deus ex vid) also sorry bout the grammer
Budget doesn't make a good game. Look at COD. Basically bottomless budget and it's been mediocre for years. It's especially dirty that they took everyone's money through Kickstarter and delivered trash. There's pretty much no consumer protection.
@@starkillermarex I just mention it because he says something like "what are they doing? they had time and did very little", but the amount of assets and programing they did maches their budget, doing stuff takes a lot a lot of time, for example solo devs takes years to make extremely simple games sometimes. I'm a game dev and to my eye they did not wasted time out of laziness. But it's true the game is not very good, I'm not sure how to solve it, maybe making the game shorter with more quality, but people will complain regardless, or maybe improve the procedural stuff, I don't know.
Honestly the biggest missed part they could have done would be that you could be forced to take way more joy more often, and each time you overdose on it they could regenerate the map then instead of during each of the sections. The map changing would fit so much better and make sense then
To be fair Germany managed to capture the capital of Yugoslavia with 6 or so people, one even being a tourist. They simply snuck into the city, took a few prisoners, raised the German flag at the central plaza and told the major that they were already surrounded. He believed them and surrendered. So them believing that the tanks were real back then is not actually all that far off. Everything else about the situation still is of course.
Yugoslavia also isn't across the english channel, and didn't have the same will to fight as Britian did. Once Germany started gathering across the channel, The Royal Navy would have been able to sink multiple ships. Germany never really had a navy to fight a concentrated Royal Navy. It didn't even have the airpower to gain dominance over england. Much less the firepower required for a landing, or again, the AA guns from the Royal Navy.
@@SImrobert2001 From the information about the game I was told the Island is A off the coast and B, it's an alternative timeline in which the war was not only completely different but Germany is apparently not even Nazi Germany (that part I looked up).
There is a bit more to the fall of Belgrade than that. - The Nazis had prior to this subjected Belgrade to a brutal saturation bombing that had wrecked the Yugoslav military's communications and killed around 4000 civilians. This left the defenders in confusion and they were also clearly demoralized at this point. And the Mayor of Belgrade (who surrendered the city) probably didn't want another bombing. After all, when Klingenberg claimed to the Yugoslavians that there was going to be another attack by the Luftwaffe, it was not really a stretch to believe. - Klingenberg's unit did pull off a shockingly effective bluff, but they didn't have to do so for more than about a day. More Nazi troops arrived fairly soon to join them. - After Yugoslavia surrendered, the country went on to have what were the most active, deadly, and brutal partisan campaigns against the Nazis of the war (I use the plural because they were not united, fought against each other, and some of them cooperated with the Nazis at times when it suited them. It's really not surprising that sectarian violence continued long after WW2 in Yugoslavia and the countries that succeeded it).
At least the extremely difficult and anxiety-inducing gameplay in Pathologic was deliberately made that way to serve its atmosphere and story even further.
I hated everything in this game after deeply wanting to like it. The deal was sealed in act two as Sally, the only woman you could play and the only of any significance was given a rape baby that she needs to snuggle to replenish sanity. Like, thank you devs for thinking only rape creates strong women and that we are baby-crazed people just needing to nurture. I fucking hated that.
@@TheBlueLink3 Reducing women to breeders that can't possibly function without a baby and of course got sexually assaulted is not 'projection'. It's shit writers trying to justify a 'stronk wahmin' by letting her get raped. This is sick.
I never understood why people like it, it also does that plot shit where “two characters fight because they have different perceptions of what happened and they never ever try to talk about it normally”, It’s even dumber to me that the entire thing with Arthur is he was being drugged, like everyone, it’s so contrived and stupid and irks me and the whole thing with Sally just feels tacked on like, it doesn’t even feel like it belongs. However rape baby sanity meter is a hell of an idea 💀
@@doctorgrubious7725 Also I just remembered, this game tries really hard to shoehorn Orwell into it. There is ONE telescreen in the entire game! You never feel like you have serious problems acting a certain way and you can drug your life through- unlike in 1984 where the protagonists consider each move they make and still get observed. Like if you set the bar high up -like Atomic Heart tried with claiming it's like BioShock- you need to be able to reach it.
@@kwiiin_ fun fact: a lot of older communist systems worked by giving the lower class people the power in turn for loyalty to the state, the idea being that they haven’t actually earned anything and went form homeless to having authority and power and will be extra loyal, the game should have leaned into aspects like that, and made it clear the drug isn’t a “social class” issue because that’s dumb, there’s so much they missed on
The best solution I can think of for the story keeping in the three act structure they wanted would be to just tighten it up and cut the fat from other sections: Arthur: His story SOLEY focused on what happened to Percy. After each quest where an original "reveal" happens, instead have him "remember" something knew about his previous life due to the lack of Joy having his memories slowly return. Building up what the masks show the player until the end where you see the train scene play out and realize Arthur is an ass who sentenced his brother to death because he was tired of looking after him. Sally: Her story is focused on the baby and learning that Joy isn't working anymore. It makes sense for her since she has the Blackberry Joy. Please, oh gods, change her backstory for the baby. Like, she was in a CONSENSUAL ADULT RELATIONSHIP and dumped the guy when she realized she was pregnant because panicc. Keep at least the location cutscenes with Arthur the same. If you wanna run unreliable narrator, you can adjust what is said and done in the scenes, but the locations need to be the same. At the end, you learn as Sally that Joy isn't working period, only your Blackberry Joy is actually working. Thus leading to Sally NEEDING to escape with her baby otherwise someone will find out about her baby due to everyone going to her for the Blackberry Joy. This can also work with the baby mechanic in the game. Where you have to go back to feed your kid, sure, but also to distract those addicted to her Joy to keep from breaking in. Enough "bad mother" cards and a cop or downer breaks in and you get a game over because they found your baby. Ollie: His story is solely focused on the island falling to pieces and the food shortage. Keeping, obviously, the epic reveal that Margaret is Jack's daughter and not his. It seemed like the writers put all the reveals in Arthur's section because they were paranoid that people would stop playing after Act 1 and wanted to make sure all the reveals got out. Ironically, due to that decision bloating the game... Yeah, it at least made a bunch of Let's Players drop the game after Arthur's section. But if they had teased the twists in Arthur's section, it'd draw people in to the other two in order to learn the answers. Side note: Arthur is an even worse dick when you consider that Sally was literally asking for a night to pack up her baby's stuff so she could go with. I'm disappointed there was no pay-off for that. Like, he never learns she had a literal baby to worry over and just goes off thinking she was this sl#t who screwed about with older men just for the thrills. (In a negative sense, no shade to anyone who enjoys sleeping about with older men for the thrills. You do you.)
Adault Arthur is a massive asshole but kid Arthur didn't rat his brother out to the Nazis, he swapped with him. Saving Percy would mean sacrificing himself which is a really big ask for a 12 year old.
@@NeoHellPoethe didn’t save Percy the kids got shipped off to die. If not it’s a massive pothole bc why wouldn’t they just come back home after become adults 20 years later
The art direction 10/10 gameplay 2/10 story 8/10 After reflecting I changed my story rating to 8/10, it actually is really good. The finally bridge scene? Gets me every time. And what’s to say about Uncle Jacks last broadcast? It’s brilliant
They needed to 1) make the map smaller - 9/10ths of it ends up walking 2) make the map static, not generated - allows for better layout of quest points and keeps it consistent between characters, as well as tightening the content more and maybe making the map feel like a real place instead of some circles with bridges 3) Make the social aspects of Joy consistent - a lot of the 'rules' surrounding joy use and behavior are counterintuitive and/or contradict what people say about it and how it functions as a plot device. It's confusing from a narrative perspective and makes the gameplay tedious.
23:30 we actually did do that. US/UK forces set up a “battalion” of a bunch of inflatable & paper maché tanks, planes and soldiers to scare off any Germans doing air reconnaissance
This is a great video. I loved watching streamers play the game but never knew how tedious it actually was. Very interesting video, I like how calm you explain things. It's like listening to a mate talk about his interests. Keep it up
Got like an hour into the video before I checked the channel and saw that your not huge, that's surprising this was really good. I love having long videos of people complaining about bad games to listen too while I work. keep it up!
I got we happy few for the plot, and stopped playing cause of the gameplay. The best part of the game was the linear part right at the beginning. If they had just kept the entire game like that I imagine it would've been one of the best games of 2016.
Hey, this is a really cool video and analysis! I just randomly stumbled upon your channel thanks to the algorithm, looks like you're just coming back from a break and I think you smashed it. I'm curious to see what you put out next, good luck on having this video and your channel blow up. :) As suggested by some other comments, I'd also like to see a follow-up video on this game's DLC and how it compares to the base game. I think We Happy Few is really fascinating to look at for its sheer, stunning amount of unused potential and I'd love to see if the DLC could make better use of it. Cheers!
I have 46.3 hours precisely on my Steam account in this game and I finished the main story and I actually loved the game and voice acting and many of The Mechanics. granted I haven't played the game since 2021 which I can also see on my Steam account and stuff you are bringing up I definitely agree with. but I cannot shake that I actually love the game for what it is, I think it also helped that I managed to buy the game for 60% of maybe more? anyway I can sadly not finish this video because this might be false memories but your video is tainting my rose colored glasses from when I played. but I did like your video👍
Hey there! (long comment incoming sorry about that) I got this recommended to me randomly, well maybe not completely randomly, I've been getting into WHF. I was really hesitant to watch this, because I LOVE this game. I've played the main game and DLC and I plan on making at least two video essays on two aspects of the game. But I didn't want to jump to conclusions right away, so I gave it a watch. Every single thing you said about the gameplay, I agree 100 percent. I have to fight for my life to try to get through that. Which, I know is a MAJOR part of the game, so it may seem wild that I love WHF. But I love the story. Its writing, characters, plot points, for me it's all worth it to push through the gameplay. So, needless to say I didn't agree with the comments you made about the story or how the game tells it. But I get that the gameplay will interfere with the story, it may not be a compromise some people are willing to make. And you do make points I agree with, like how there's no logical way for the tanks to have survived that long, or how joy will affect some areas but not other areas that could be just as important. And that some ways they tell the story could have been better fleshed out, like the unreliable narrator. I do think you were a little unfair with the dev team in terms of what work they had put in. It's clear that they had gone through development hell to get this game out and make sure that it was in some way successful. Honestly I wouldn't put it past if some of the core problems came from Gearbox themselves. Not only that, prior to WHF, the dev studio, Compulsion Games, only made one other game with their small team. With how much hype WHF quickly got I'm sure there was this new pressure that they hadn't felt before. It's clear that the dev team were aware of the criticisms that came with the release as its so apparent with the direction they took for the DLC. I don't blame you for not wanting to give Gearbox more money, honestly I just waited until there was a sale to buy them. But, I hope you give the DLC a chance one day as it really shows they listened to the players and really improved as a dev team. It also gives you the vibes that you were looking for in your video and uniqueness in gameplay/combat/not randomly generated and not open world. We obviously have different opinions on the story and if its worth playing the game for that alone, but I respect that you feel so passionate about how much you hate this game. I feel that it's always best to feel strongly about something rather than feel nothing. And I do agree with your complaints about the gameplay. Honestly I think every WHF fan agrees with that, we know its bad LMAO. This video clearly took time and effort and I like that. It's my first video that I watched from you and I definitely wouldn't mind giving your other videos a watch.
I don't know much about this game but from the clips in this video Sally's VA is doing a stand-out job, she does a great job delivering some incredibly clunky lines in pretty natural ways. Arthur's voice makes me want to tear off my ears.... and since he's a shame on my name I reserve the right to kick in his teeth
The reason why the Police are nicknamed Bobbies in Britain is because the British Metropolitan Police Force (the oldest modern Police Force in the world) was set up by Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel.
What a perfect time for this video. I bought the game on sale years ago, finally started playing it a few months ago. It’s.. hard to play. I barely made it through Sally’s play through and once I got to the next part.. I just got tired. Glad I can watch someone else suffer through it too!
Just found your channel through the algorithm on a random Tuesday night, I will definitely be subscribing with the bell and everything. Videos like these are perfect for my commute to work to just listen along Have you considered reviewing any of the AC games, or do you only review traditionally bad games? As fun as being an assassin is, I’ve always felt the AC games to be terribly boring and over fluffed with unnecessary back and forth between objectives, much like this.
1:00:40 "She's going to FUCKING KILL US if we keep FUCKING UP!" 😂 Okay the panic screaming was funny. James and Roger were my only two favourite side characters (apart from the dude in the treehouse who has dolls and is a little kooky bastard)
Funnily enough I didn't find out about this game through its marketing or anything like that, but from the VR game where you can watch uncle jack tapes. I was so mesmerized by the aesthetics of it I knew I had to get the game. I just wished the actual game lived up to that. I think if they did away with all the survival stuff and focused only on making a compelling story, I think it would have worked so much better.
I love watching videos on how bad this game is, I've been super into it since 2016 as a sort of guilty pleasure, I know its bad, but I'm still obsessed with it. These types of videos help see a perspective of people who have just played the game, and not have dug into research on why specific aspects of the game work the way they do. Things like all of the key locations like Dr. Faradays house being in wildly different areas, or cutscenes playing differently with more or less dialogue (Reasons being that joy fucks with all their memories, some characters can't tell exactly where they are so some locations are scattered, even off of joy it still permanently fucks up your brain). When you've liked something so much, even if you know its bad, you'll dick ride it like crazy still over time because you're looking for something to continue liking it. So with the example given, I'd explain to people that sure, the gameplay is terrible and some places are different or characters are there when they had just died or disappeared a while before, but its because of the effects joy gives and it totally makes sense and its cool story wise! And I feel like in concept it can be cool, but when it's actually clear what they're doing and whats intentional, and when it feels more like a purposeful and not just because they forgot or whatever else the production hell the game is. Watching this video, I had moments being like "Hey! I know what that's about and the reason for that!" But it isn't actually explained in the game. You have to play the dlcs for some background knowledge on things in the base game, and scroll through the fandom wiki for hours to know why certain things work in certain ways, or why some characters do some things. I love this game, its a major guilty pleasure of mine and there are some genuinely good things about it, like a lot of the art and cutscenes and voice acting, but it is so confusing to play when your just trying to learn about the game from the game, because nobody wants to google why specific things happen and work and find reddit posts of people theorizing or click through a wiki article inside of a wiki article. The game doesn't make the message its trying to convey clear at all, or even make it seem like it was intentional. It sucks because the dlcs are a lot better, less survival and more linear story, but they're so buggy that 2 out of the 3 dlcs you can play (excluding the bobby minigame) just don't work for me, I can't proceed through because I'm softlocked, and even restarting it, I get softlocked again. I think its just a me issue but still. AND. With the dlcs, spoiler warning I guess, Nick Lightbearer (my favorite) and his dlc "twist" is complete ass. I thought the concept of Foggy Jack being Night Lightbearer when he's all fucked on drugs was cool, it shows how he truly has no control over his life ever, it played out till he died and he had to suffer from his regret of never truly living life. But they made the big plot twist for it to be Uncle Jack instead. Which also felt like it had less meaning in Ollies ending, where as you mentioned, it felt cool confronting a killer till it turned out he wasn't actually a killer. Now you do confront him as one, but it would've been better the opposite way. I feel like if Ollie didn't kill Margaret all those years ago and knew it was Uncle Jack, while Lightbearer did kill his biggest fans and thought it was someone else, that could've been cooler. Like a role swap kinda. I'm rambling at this point but I just do enjoy videos like this. It makes me realize how hard it is to like this game when you don't put in unnecessary effort and delusion to like it.
But then again BAH i love the concept of Ollie actually killing Margaret too, because the whole cutscene is really cool and really well written. But it feels lessened knowing the Lightbearer dlc, I dunno :/
Doesn't the whole conversation with Arthur from Sally's point of view have different dialogue, not just a different setting? Def some attempt at unreliable narrators. A common theme on this channel seems to be "super cool concept, super bad execution." I remember seeing ads and thinking this game would be so fun to play and explore. The rat piñata in the beginning showing the effects of joy was one of the first things I saw and I was so ready for it. It was screwed up in a "show me more" kinda way. Never had the money for it and kinda glad now. Another great video! Also I had no idea who Randy was but Randy if I see you it's on sight I have nothing to lose
This game was the last straw for my decision not to pre-order anymore. It also soured my mood for any survival games. I'm sure I'm not the only one either, so congrats dev, you ruined an entire marketing strategy and genre for a few people who are not unhappy.
This game’s story had potential, especially with the arthur side of of the story. The gameplay is just terrible though. I played through like half of it and I remember clipping through the map repeatedly
We Happy Few always felt to me like someone tried to make 'The Next BioShock' as their first big project. The story and world feel promising, and like they could be very interesting and engaging, but the gameplay feels like a beta version of a procedural generation tech demo. All it ends up being is a bunch of very promising cutscenes floating in a sea of sloggy quests and potentially-beautiful but thoughtlessly-thrown-together levels. I can imagine a much better version of this game, but I can't imagine a series of events that would allow it to exist.
I frankly never noticed that anything was procedurally generated in all the gameplays I watched of the game, but some of them edited the grindy bits out of the videos, so maybe didn’t catch on to the fact? (Shrug) Interesting video, and hope that they do a better version of the game. I really liked the story elements, and though Arthur was a p.o.sh to his disabled brother, him going through all that trouble to only later not be able to get closure for it was good. You hope he gets redemption, but I got the feeling that his brother was dead long before the game was over and it was futile for him to look. Would have switched the stories around and mixed them up, where you go through their stories more or less simultaneously as you play. 2-3 cycles though, no more than that. This would take care of the issue of padding and get rid of the procedural elements to focus more on the story and survival. Sharing supplies between characters maybe to emphasize the quickly shrinking necessities, and only certain characters can find certain items because of how Joy affects them? Thanks for the discourse dude, and have a great day.
Jesus that's dead right?! I've just come near the end of the video and looked at the comments and up until now if assume that he had millions of subscribers, the passion and time it must take to make a video with this kinda quality is insane,
I was a backer for this. I was a teenager when I did so and I got beta testing. Watching this bc I never actually played bc beta was so incredibly frustrating lol. It’s been like 10 years. I’m almost out of my 20s 😢
So glad to see you're still posting because though I just found your videos, I love em. Great creator, can't wait to see what you do next. Also glad to see you getting more recognition, a lot of the older videos don't have as many views as they should for the quality you provide so it's good you're finally getting discovered.
The reason why Sally wasn't able to get the drugs 1:36:10 was because she had slept with the clerks husband, so she refused to sell her anything. It even says it in the subtitles
Can't wait to see the next video whatever that may be. This was really well made, hopefully dont habe to wait 9 months for it like the distance between the last two videos
@@insertgenericusernamehere2402 thank you! It shouldn't be such a long time between videos. This one just had so many problems during editing and was a massive effort. Next video is smaller and already well underway!
@@ConversingGames Well worth the wait though if you ask me. Love the long form content myself. Great to listen to when walking the dog (although I do look like a psycho laughing at some of your quips)
It's people who played the game when it came out and enjoyed it and now can't look past their nostalgia (or alternatively they watched their favourite youtuber playthrough it). Appreciate the kind words!
game had a very compelling start but kinda trailed off and stopped making sense. I never finished this game and I don't think i'll bother after watching this haha
Hooked by the opening already and excited to watch this, the production quality is really good but I'd like to ask if would be possible to please add captions to furure videos? I ask not because of audio quality as delivery is really clear so far but because would personally help a lot, although i understand this can be a large task especially after youtube removed user submitted captions. Thank you for hearing me out and excited to watch the rest of this
I used to do them for every video but I will moving forward again! Only stopped as it was taking days to do it but if there's a want then I'll make it happen!
If i remember correctly, the game doesnt take place in our universe. So, the invaders werent Nazis, they were the imperial german army, similar to something we saw in WW1. I dont think WW1 happened in the ingame universe.
Oh really? Wow. Didn't realize that. I thought the deviation was much earlier in time than that. I'll have to check out the wiki to see where that note is from. I couldn't be fucked to pick up every scrap or memory, because the game really drags when trying to be a completionist 😂
so, I feel like you don't know that inflatable decoy vehicles are still extremely effective as deterrents today. They were used toward the beginning of the Ruso-ukranian war, and are still being used to make the ruskies sweat any time they want to launch jets over the border.
@@redjack2629 the issue isn't that it's decoy vehicles. The issue is that it's really dumb to use them as a dramatic narrative reveal and that better options existed
@ConversingGames Could be. It's such a vital part of the game though (first main character vs your second playable character) and because it is a main quest on both, a cutscene and then it was just like... forgotten? It doesn't get answered or a full circle moment. Always found it frustrating and confusing. I love this game (flaws and all) but that bit always irritated me because it never gets answered
Great video! I was honestly surprised to see your channel is so small, this was really well done! Definitely subscribing to see future reviews like this :) I followed We Happy Few's development like a hawk since it was first announced because I fell in love with the art direction, and I played it as soon as it came out... And it had just as many game breaking bugs as you can imagine :'). (I usually don't mind bugs and glitches but I remember I had one sidequest where the npc I needed to talk to was unmarked on the map but would teleport to a new location everytime I left the city, so I had to sweep the whole city until I found him 🥲) Honestly, I agree with every point you made here- the gameplay and tone was scattered and the game was so artificially padded I actively groaned when it was revealled that there were two more acts to go. That being said, I think We Happy Few is the best worst game I've ever played- positively terrible gameplay and questionable story choices, but it clearly had a lot of heart put into it, so I don’t regret my time playing it! I still listen to the soundtrack all this time later lol.
I honestly played through the whole game just to figure out what Jack was all about. After the opening sequence, I was so curious as to what his story was, because it seemed so obvious his fake persona was hiding something big.
if this game had better writers it could have been so good. the story and set up is so interesting and has so much potential and these characters have so much potential to be great morally grey characters too - selfish ppl doing desperate things to survive.
i just want to say something about the running(if someone hasnt said this before) there is a Perk you can get called "Oh you", but i can understand why its easy fo miss since the game makes the perks really really annoying due to a certain path you can follow and the amount of side quests you need to do over the game to the point when you do get it. Its basically not even useful anymore Other than that!, This video is basically perfect and as someone who played we happy few multipr times and began to see the flaws on my second playthrough, So yeah Great video! subscribing to see what other great videos you got in store!
i really love this game, and i havent watched the vid yet but my only critique right off the bat is how quickly becomes a walking sim. It had great potential but turned into a bunch of fetch quests. Once you have the upgrade that allows you to run in the city without it affecting others, you've beaten anything hard about the game
I play 90hrs , it was pretty fun although does have its up and downs , the rng sometimes is very painful, super buggy cam break, walking sim and tp npc etc etc.
The biggest plot hole for me is why would this one island be left abandoned for 20 years after the war? No one tries to buy it? Take it over? They’re just like oh you lost all your kids, and then went drug crazy. But no one? Not a single politician or rich person or someone even in the town tries to intervene? I mean I guess it’s realistic considering the current geo political state. But why don’t more people leave? Like I don’t understand this story line honestly and I played this game to completion. They gave them the kids to make them leave… and then what? They really just kill the kid’s and leave? I don’t understand lmao
I havent really played this game, only seen a bunch of videos about the story, cutscenes and what went wrong, so take this with a grain of salt. Would the acts be better if information was cut up between them? Like, arthur is the regular man, he knows as much as everyone else, just a bit more from being off joy and remembering the horrors, so it makes sense if the knowledge in his story is all about the basic bits, there is no more food and the city/town is crumbling down, meanwhile sally is a higher up, she makes the only good joy, she would already know there is no food and wellingtonwells is doomed, the stuff we learn there could focus more on the medical effects of joy and the children after the war, the contraceptive effects of joy, why the remaining kids after the victory/train stuff are gone and stuff like that, while ollie's could focus on the war and the lies surrounding it, since arthur meets all of them we could get a glimpse at that new knowledge but not the whole picture, as a sort of hype for the next acts maybe? It wouldn't fix all the problems obviously but for the repetive information learnt throughout each act it might be a good idea, it can't really happen now obviously since its already out but its just a thought i had
I'd read a book based on this story or something similar. I'm a habitual cut scene skipper, I don't read anything or pay attention to dialog when playing games. I have no idea what's happening, and I don't really care to know if I can't read the lore from an outside source like a book. It's the only reason i know halo lore lol The story looks really interesting. Do any of yall have recommendations for similar stories?
A couple hours ago from me posting this, there was an announcement/leak that claimed that the next BioShock game is going to be an open world game. And I have absolutely no idea why they would ever do that because an open world BioShock game is what We Happy Few is. And it sucked.
@@ConversingGames 2 is the only one that has meaningful story choices. In BioShock, there's no reason not to take the good ending because the "difficulty" of saving the little sister barely there. And Infinite doesn't even have choices, which I guess is the point. But BioShock 2's morality system is all built around what kind of person you raise Elenore to be.
I don't get why this game gets so much hate, it was a fun quirky story. Maybe it's because of what they said during development that changed expectations?
It's amaizing how much worse the game was on release then it was in the little preview demo thing I played at some point. The overly big boring open world is just the worst. Of course pretty much all the mechanics suck, one of my bigger disappointments as the game had such potential as an idea and the little demo thing felt pretty good as a starter.
I'll say the voice acting in this game is really good. Maybe that's where the money went.
except the VA for the Scottish guy. I can tell he isn't originally Scottish and non-Scots have a very tough time with our accents
@@TheFaceSoapHahah I often wonder how these Scottish characters sound to non-Scottish people. I knew an American who though a guy from the borders had a full on Scottish accent, the same as mine (from near Edinburgh) and I offer wondered how both accents sounded to her and how they sounded even close.
@@Ashethetics hell I'm from Moray. when I moved down to the central belt for a few years hardly anyone understood a word I was saying lol, had to totally switch up how I talk
I will never understand why this was procedurally generated. It could have been so good, the setting, characters, and plot are so so solid, but they went with a gimmicky, procedurally generated world instead of taking the time and effort to design the levels themselves.
It's because of how long the development cycle was- This video actually skims over the early development of WHF, I remember the very early alphas where it was more considered as a new spin on survival games like Sir, You Are Being Hunted, _(a survival game that focuses more on urban/societal survival and AI opponents, which is still an unexplored twist on the genre honestly)_ the idea of it being a Bioshock spiritual successor had not entered the picture at all.
You could consider it a failure to "kill your darlings" and pivot the game to what most people clearly wanted out of it. The Long Dark is almost going through the opposite problem where the developers really wanted to do a story campaign mode and have spent years finishing it, but the core playerbase are exclusively devoted to survival mode.
becuase it doubles as a survival game lol most survival games are procedurally generated
Yeah it would have been really cool to have a detailed focused setting, bioshock esque would have been cool
@@darthvaderreviews6926 I think it goes without saying that the moral of We Happy Few is really that procedural generation should NOT be seen as a selling point, but rather a potentially useful tool in a developer's arsenal. A game like We Happy Few would've benefited greatly by incorporating the immersive sim and map design philosophy of Deus Ex and Dishonored. Large, self-contained, and open levels where different objectives can be approached in numerous ways. Unfortunately, it was developed at a time when games were touting "unlimited replay potential" thanks to procedural generation as seen through the sheer popularity of open-world survival games and roguelikes.
@@rileytruax766 Procedural Generation is something that is designed mainly for sandbox and roguelike games, where the whole concept is starting from nothing in a random environment and planning towards an end goal.
We Happy Few COULD work with the idea if it was mainly focused on gameplay, leaning on the roguelike/survival elements, but a story focus like it has doesn't work.
“Life goes on. That is the mercy.” Just really hit this weird feeling. That feeling you get when you remember something from a long time ago. And it felt so big, and so important. And it ate up everything you did, everything you thought about. And now it’s just a memory. Nothing really came of it, no big solution or climax. It just disappeared. Idk how to put it. When you think back to these different points in your life. It almost feels like a different life. The bad things you did the good. It’s all just one big second chance. A lifelong mercy.
Until you make a new mistake that kicks you back into that temporary hell - in those times, you'd sooner bite off your tongue than call life mercy. Rise, fall, rise... fall.
Yeah I totally get that. I like the way you put it too, like another life.
No arthur is worse. He tricked his disabled brother on that train so he could get out of having to go. Since percy was too old to go being 13. He then stole his passport and ran off almost getting away before the cop stopped him. Who knew he was lying due to percy screaming for his brother and also cuz arthur sucks at lying but the cop was too guilt stricken to put arthur back on the train and possibly remove percy. He has been lying to himself and everyone around him that he was the older brother not percy and he really did want to go but the cop stopped him. His ending is him accepting hes a terrible person who murdered his disabled brother.
He also blamed Sally for “cheating” on him with his father when his dad was raping her (coercing a child into sex is still rape) as a teenager.
This is all types of fucked up.
@supotter377 i mean, no. It's statatory rape, which is consensual. And a 16 year old isnt an infant and should know having sex with their bfs dad on multiple occasions is wrong.
You dont need to defend a fake character that was literally written to be disliked.
@@MattGOG666 Statutory rape is not consensual just without force, (why the fuck would it be called RAPE if so) and it does not matter the age of the victim it is still rape. I don’t care if it’s a fictional character because people say similar things to real people and this shit being in popular media just reenforces the idea that a child seducing an adult happens more than it really does. (which is basically never) She was definitely a badly written character and shows that people shouldn’t throw in topics like this without thinking about the implications.
@@supotter377wrong
I wish that stories involving things like pharmaceuticals/anti depressants in particular would dive a little deeper on those themes than "pill bad, pill make you ignore things". I see this depicted a lot and it's starting to become dull due to how mis-informed this perspective is a lot of the time. I get that it's fiction but there are still ways to cover this subject matter that aren't so black and white.
Especially in a science fiction setting where you can do almost anything. It's really strange to do "pill bad"
As someone who's on like 269474091 meds, I get it. But I don't fault the game for this one thing. I never got the impression that the message was "pill bad", because no one's treating anything. The pills are not medication, it's quite literally a drug. Joy is a direct allusion to soma from Brave New World, or the "stirring suppressor" from The Giver.
So yeah, instead of "pill bad", it's more like "refusing to acknowledge your misdeeds and trying to run from your past bad".
I think we're meant to read the pills as being more metaphorical than literal - symbolic of the very human desire to ignore our feelings by burying ourselves in pleasures which cost us our sense of identity (Brave New World). That said, it's kind of a poor choice of metaphor when there's a not-insignificant portion of the world teeters on the edge of the "pill-bad" mindset. Easy to miss the forest for the trees.
Of course yt deleted my comment. Ugh. I don't think the message is "pìII bad", because it's not meant to be an analogue for any kind of medication. It's literally a drúg. It's an allusion to sómà from Brave New World, and serves the same purpose.
The story never read to me as "pìII bad", more like "running away from your problems and refusing to take accountability for your wrongdoings bad".
I'm on the fence on if I get that reading from this story, more as others point out that it's meant to be "ignoring your past and not coping with things is bad." But I do agree that the black/white perspective is bad and only causes people to stigmatize the mentally ill even further. I am someone who tries to kill myself whenever I'm not on an antipsychotic. I went off of it and 3 weeks later was going at my wrist with a box cutter. Some of us literally need these meds to stay alive. (Sorry to be so graphic, just the reality of it for some of us. And yes I am going back on the meds.)
It always felt like the devs wanted to bolt on all these "cool features" that were popular the the time (crafting, survival mechanics, procedural generation, etc) without actually considering why they were doing it, or how it would fit into an overall idea of game design. The procedural levels especially seemed like a terrible idea, given that it seems like there were talented 3D artists. The entire point of procedural levels is to make the game replayable, but every other aspect of the game seems to discourage replayability.
Yeah pretty much. They really should of stuck with their original idea, it would of been a much more unique product and might of actually been good
This is an unfortunately mixed game; the voice acting and creativity/plot are incredible, but the actual gameplay/mechanics/plot holes/glitches really weight it down. It had the potential to be an amazing game.
I think it goes without saying that We Happy Few, alongside many others including Starbound, Biomutant, and Hello Neighbor, is one of those games that had a fun and interesting concept, but was unfortunately brought down by sloppy execution and overall lack of direction on what it was supposed to be. Had the developers trimmed down things like the procedurally generated open-world map and focused on things that actually matter in the long run, it could've been great.
Thanks for pointing out how in all likelihood Sally’s supposed tryst with Arthur’s Father was likely a completely non-consensual act his dad inflicted on a recently traumatized teen in his care. Honestly it’s frighteningly believable that a self-obsessed & indignant tool like Arthur would blame her for “seducing” his dad instead of confronting how his grown adult dad, likely twice Sally’s age at the time, should have been more than capable of resisting the “charms” of a teenager when he’s got a wife & two kids. I’d call it an effect of the forgetful side effects of Joy though as the scenes between the two show, Arthur assuredly had the exact same attitude & oblivious reaction at that time.
Yup. It's super gross. She was only 16 at the time. She was 13 when he took her in.
What's disgusting is how many people actually do villainize her for it.
bro thats insane how it was conveyed bc when he first said it i was like "damnnn she fucked his dad thats cold" and then the dude was like "she was underage" and i was like ARTHUR WTF BRO
While it is almost certain that Arthur's Father engaged in abuse towards towards a desperate young girl, Sally isn't innocent of other crimes. She is a drug dealer, likely the original inventor of Joy (that had their credit stolen), fine with cozying up to powerful people for perks (like the general for drugs and ignoring her being off Joy) and is fine with selling Joy while making sure to stay off it (hence how she was able to get pregnant). She is definitely a hypocrite regarding the drugs and a mess she had a definite hand in creating, but shouldn't be blamed for Arthur's father.
@user-oh4mb4vg5b Nobody is denying that Sally in the present isn’t innocent. But that does not mean she deserved to be raped. What is the point of this comment?
This game is always going to have a place in my heart. I love the game stylization, I love the storyline, I loved the immersion. It has *many* flaws, but it also had a unique feeling to it that no other game has ever given me.
The only real crime was when they signed with Gearbox. This game could have been so much better if Gearbox hadn't come in and rushed the work while pushing so much DLC/add-on bs. If Compulsion Games had actually had time to work on it at their own pacing, so much more could have been done.
And even so, I am not mad at this game. It's one of my favorites. Always will be.
I feel the same way loll
You worded everything so perfectly. I feel exactly the same. Maybe one day we’ll get a remaster or something that more closely resembles what Compulsion intended.
even as a video addressing its flaws, I am beyond excited to see this game still getting attention. it is and will always be a favorite of mine, too 😌💞 the characters are convincing, and the voice acting is stunning. the visuals are so unique and, like you said, it provokes a feeling that no other game has been able to trigger from me. I love the dialogue. it compliments its surroundings and the acting very well
The problem is money. $250k sure sounds like a lot of money until you realize it has to pay the salaries for 5-10 people over multiple years.
Going at their own pace means the game never gets finished.
Unlimited time and money also doesn't make for a good game. Star Citizen is a prime example of the pitfalls of unlimited time and funds, but equally for every example of the creatives getting their vision crushed by corporate, you have one where the money people forced the developers to stick to a deadline, create realistic goals, cut the fat and a make a tight, focused game.
We Happy Few needed cuts. Time was spent on element's that didn't work even in concept. A more limited scope with fewer mechanics and a goal of making it a 10h game would have helped.
Wow, gearbox ruining something
Unheard off
They are called Bobby's after Robert Peel, or basically the first director of police in London. "Bobby's boys" as it were.
Thsnks for that interesting fact
Huh, really drives in the whole "government sanctioned gang" fact when they just have a full blown gang name rather than the more officious acronyms American sanctioned gangs use.
@@notsae66
Maybe you should google 'Peelian Principles'. They basically amount to:
The police are 'citizens in uniform'
The primary duty of the police is to the public, not the state
The use of force is a last resort.
He invented the idea of 'policing by consent'. Peel's ideas were revolutionary because he sought for his police force to serve through public co-operation rather than fear, which was incredibly unique in the 1820s. He had a net good on the world, and I wished we followed his ideals more closely today.
Odd that jumping or jogging causes the good folks in town to want to kill you but rummaging through trashcans like a bum doesn't bother them.
Right like rummaging a trashcan has a chance to proc a smell debuff on you then you have to go shower or make distance between you and people. Though I guess the Devs had a hard time with the stealth detection mechanics anyways so another broken one wouldn't make it better.
I really wish you tried the dlc, only because I share basically all your opinions about the base game. The dlcs honestly feel like they took the conceptual core of the narrative and created vignettes that were authentic to that core. One was silly, one effectively leaned into the psychedelic element really effectively and the last presented the large scale impact of the central scarcity conflict. They each trim the fat of the superfluous mechanics irrelevant to each campaign. They were tight and linear, but that hit much harder than a sprawling and vacuous environment.
@@IAmSuperMan1988 considering how well this video did. I probably will check them out down the line when they go on sale
Yes! The DLC was everything the main game should have been. It has the best song of the entire soundtrack, too.
Why would he though?
@@charlesman8722Because they are better than the main game?
there is some way to play just the dlc?
Should've just been a novel
Isn't that just Brave New World by Aldous Huxley?
Did you notice when Arthur asks why the Germans left the tanks, Ollie interrupts saying "i've made a map" but it sounds like he said "I made em up". In a game about unreliable narrators where the playable protagonists all perceive parallel experiences of the same events I think it's intentional.
Yeah definitely
I'm Scottish and it sounds like both when I say it
I remember We Happy Few being "the next big indie game" when I was younger, and I admired the aesthetics heavily, and I thought it was truly the shit, but it seemed like nobody played it after we got that demo release. This video was amazing, and finally quenched my curiosity on this game. I seriously think this game could've been VERY good, and it feels like a death of a thousand cuts, chunk after chunk the quality diminished, its very odd how it was fumbled.
one point I don't get: if joy is SUPPOSED to suppress memories, how are our characters able to focus on their tasks while on it? Wouldn't it suppress their memories again? make them not desire to fight back because of the euphoria and addictive properties? The fact they act after the opening like taking joy is just like me taking ritalin is weird. Like, is it a psychoactive hallucinogenic drug, or is it merely a dopamine/serotonin booster with amnesia added in?
So the REAL question is how it targets memories, and those SPECIFIC memories.
It's one thing to say it makes you feel a certain way. It's a totally different beast to just hand wave away memories.
Like what if your brother was abusing you? Seems like you'd remember that as the best say ever.
I mean realistically you don't NEED to fuck with people's memories. You just need to get them addicted to the point they don't care about anything else.
I guess the idea is that joy allows them to be productive? Even then you could just make a super drug.
They're not even productive though. All the infrastructure is failing because the workers are unable to work at all (as far as I saw anyway)
Simple: they don't. Joy rots your brain and makes you literally forget everything, even your own name if you take too much, but it also makes it so you don't care. No one's doing any actual work, nothing is getting accomplished, and so the town is on the verge of collapse.
There is a form of Joy that doesn't turn your brain to mush, but the materials to make it are scarce so they only give it to the people in power who enforce this messed up system.
LISA did Joy so much better.
In the last storyline we get a glimpse of how far the city has crumbled with every higher up getting pumped full of Joy and not doing their actual jobs.
The most atrocious thing about this game is that the procedurally generated open world really works against the player (specially if your world has bad rng) because the game is just a glorified fetch quest game and it places your objective really far away and makes it such a hastle to finish, which why the game has a long runtime. I think the story itself is interesting enough to get me invested but the bugs/quests/gameplay pulls me away from the immersion which sucks because i really like the story. The dlcs are what the base game should have been all along and it's the only replayable part of the game for me.
My Sally playthrough was so botched because the mushrooms you need to craft all of her utility gadgets were just not spawning at all for me. So I spent all of her playthrough resolving combat and stealth with more combat. It was interesting.
did you not use fast travel? lol why does a objective being far away matter when you can just use fast travel to get to the district its in
You know they could have actually taken the social mechanics somewhere…something that annoyed me while playing was, in the garden district and parade district, me digging through trash cans for scrap to make home made nades out of never, really peeved the bobbies. Like, why not take it there. Would actually make searching the trash cans an active gameplay choice rather then mindless button promt. “Oh I really need x material, but there’s too many bobbies on this street. Let me find a side alley” like, yea no one thought in your social stealth game, digging through trash cans might not be socially acceptable to the posh people of the parade district but the run down village people aren’t gonna care
Right, that doctor smell mechanic could have just been attatched to the bobbies if you loot too many trashcans it makes you smell to people.
Sadly these devs don't seem to be able to make that work.
I always find it hilarious when I find videos on this game and they're almost always negative. I genuinely enjoyed this game, and somehow, experienced zero glitches or issues with it while playing it - and mind you, I've played it 3 times. But - not every game is for every person, and you have valid concerns and opinions about the game!
@@litacakes3422 fuck yeah. Glad you liked it
Same i loved this game
It was amazing to me as well the storyline was great
same! it’s one of my favorites but it’s always dogged on it’s not the best but it has its charm ):!
highly agree! definitely could be made much better but I LOVED the story and had fun playing
Great video! A lot of quality here! I remember being really disappointed in the game because the concept was really interesting. It just lacked any sort of flavor or spice other than the base concept. I also really wish that the world looked more different with joy, in the opening cutscene taking joy influences the actual things you see a bit more with the rat but in game it just slaps on a slightly brighter filter.
I really just found Arthur to be so unbearably insufferable even if the game and story were overall good I'd still not enjoy it. He's not even an interesting jerk he just feels like a wet blanket of a character who hobbles around never really developing or improving. If he became better there'd be some sort of point to his story. It's like every time something interesting might happen the game slams it down and nothing will really come of it. At least if he realized how wrong he was about Sally and tried to improve and her actually helped her there might be something to latch onto but he's like a void of a character who's only interesting point is shown to you early on and the game just kinda sits on it.
Honestly, none of the characters really improve after learning the truth while off Joy.
Arthur continues to be insufferable and making excuses for every bad thing he does and will move on as he always had "It's just self preservation after all".
Sally wasn't on Joy (hence how she got pregnant) and was happy to be a drug dealer for the town for a drug that she avoided taken, is highly likely to be the real inventor of it (with the credit stolen), and once she gets to the mainland with no money, her skills are chemistry and the creation of an addictive drug.
Ollie worked with the general to get the island to surrender to the Germans via creating the fake tanks (something left out of the video), and sold out Jack's daughter just because he didn't like Jack. His response after that is that he had suffered enough being on the island, flies away peeing on the people who he helped cause the nightmare in the first place.
There is the DLC as well, Lightbearer has the main character possibly being a kind of purgatory to resolve to do better, They came from below had the protagonists actually try to do the right thing and didn't have a dark connection to the main ploy, We all Fall Down once again has Victoria Byng (who was responsible for getting Joy into the water supply to addict the town) walk off their guilt. They proceed to cut the entire town off of their addictive mind effecting drug that they were on for YEARS cold turkey. This leads to many dying or going insane, then gets upset the survivors hate her, and goes off to find her mother elsewhere.
Bioshock had a budget of $25,000,000. We Happy Few had a budget of $200,000, and kickstarters campaigns usually use 2/3 of the budget promoting the kickstarter, so more like $80,000
Perfectly valid argument. But it's worth noting that Compulsion Games got funding from Gearbox as well. The amount isn't public but it allowed the team to scale from ten people to forty by the time the game was released; the overall budget is easily in the millions
@@ConversingGames bro this argument is dogshit. If you create a shooter on 2024 and it's worst than Doom, it doesnt have anything to do with the budget. The blueprints are out there, there is no valid excuse for a shit game nowadays.
@@DecimeCubaI get that point but their are definitely excuses for bad games existing. Big budget games nowadays have to succeed due to how much money is put into them, meaning some decisions will be made for mainstream appeal, instead of for a creative vision that works with the rest of the game. like a interesting mechanic could be removed or popular mechanics from other successful games might be added (even if the game wasn't built around them) and with teams so massive a consistent creative vision may get slightly watered down, leading to passion less and mid games.
(i think hbomberguy makes some good points about stuff like this in a deus ex vid) also sorry bout the grammer
Budget doesn't make a good game.
Look at COD. Basically bottomless budget and it's been mediocre for years.
It's especially dirty that they took everyone's money through Kickstarter and delivered trash.
There's pretty much no consumer protection.
@@starkillermarex I just mention it because he says something like "what are they doing? they had time and did very little", but the amount of assets and programing they did maches their budget, doing stuff takes a lot a lot of time, for example solo devs takes years to make extremely simple games sometimes. I'm a game dev and to my eye they did not wasted time out of laziness. But it's true the game is not very good, I'm not sure how to solve it, maybe making the game shorter with more quality, but people will complain regardless, or maybe improve the procedural stuff, I don't know.
Honestly the biggest missed part they could have done would be that you could be forced to take way more joy more often, and each time you overdose on it they could regenerate the map then instead of during each of the sections. The map changing would fit so much better and make sense then
To be fair Germany managed to capture the capital of Yugoslavia with 6 or so people, one even being a tourist.
They simply snuck into the city, took a few prisoners, raised the German flag at the central plaza and told the major that they were already surrounded. He believed them and surrendered.
So them believing that the tanks were real back then is not actually all that far off.
Everything else about the situation still is of course.
Yugoslavia also isn't across the english channel, and didn't have the same will to fight as Britian did. Once Germany started gathering across the channel, The Royal Navy would have been able to sink multiple ships. Germany never really had a navy to fight a concentrated Royal Navy. It didn't even have the airpower to gain dominance over england. Much less the firepower required for a landing, or again, the AA guns from the Royal Navy.
@@SImrobert2001 From the information about the game I was told the Island is A off the coast and B, it's an alternative timeline in which the war was not only completely different but Germany is apparently not even Nazi Germany (that part I looked up).
There is a bit more to the fall of Belgrade than that.
- The Nazis had prior to this subjected Belgrade to a brutal saturation bombing that had wrecked the Yugoslav military's communications and killed around 4000 civilians. This left the defenders in confusion and they were also clearly demoralized at this point. And the Mayor of Belgrade (who surrendered the city) probably didn't want another bombing. After all, when Klingenberg claimed to the Yugoslavians that there was going to be another attack by the Luftwaffe, it was not really a stretch to believe.
- Klingenberg's unit did pull off a shockingly effective bluff, but they didn't have to do so for more than about a day. More Nazi troops arrived fairly soon to join them.
- After Yugoslavia surrendered, the country went on to have what were the most active, deadly, and brutal partisan campaigns against the Nazis of the war (I use the plural because they were not united, fought against each other, and some of them cooperated with the Nazis at times when it suited them. It's really not surprising that sectarian violence continued long after WW2 in Yugoslavia and the countries that succeeded it).
Except that it rains so much over there, how did paper Mache tanks last 20 years let alone 1 week it’s a huge plot hole
One thing that weirds me out is that all of the guys are wearing jackets but not sure shirts. Wouldn't you rather have the shirt?
I never noticed but you're right
This is one of those games where I really, REALLY wish it was better than what it was.
Me too! The teaser trailer looked so fun.
You can really see how they tried to recreate Pathologic but failed
At least the extremely difficult and anxiety-inducing gameplay in Pathologic was deliberately made that way to serve its atmosphere and story even further.
I think faraday likes the leather club because leather doesn’t let electricity through as easily as cotton or wool
I hated everything in this game after deeply wanting to like it. The deal was sealed in act two as Sally, the only woman you could play and the only of any significance was given a rape baby that she needs to snuggle to replenish sanity. Like, thank you devs for thinking only rape creates strong women and that we are baby-crazed people just needing to nurture. I fucking hated that.
Feels like you’re really projecting there.
@@TheBlueLink3 Reducing women to breeders that can't possibly function without a baby and of course got sexually assaulted is not 'projection'. It's shit writers trying to justify a 'stronk wahmin' by letting her get raped. This is sick.
I never understood why people like it, it also does that plot shit where “two characters fight because they have different perceptions of what happened and they never ever try to talk about it normally”,
It’s even dumber to me that the entire thing with Arthur is he was being drugged, like everyone, it’s so contrived and stupid and irks me and the whole thing with Sally just feels tacked on like, it doesn’t even feel like it belongs.
However rape baby sanity meter is a hell of an idea 💀
@@doctorgrubious7725 Also I just remembered, this game tries really hard to shoehorn Orwell into it. There is ONE telescreen in the entire game! You never feel like you have serious problems acting a certain way and you can drug your life through- unlike in 1984 where the protagonists consider each move they make and still get observed. Like if you set the bar high up -like Atomic Heart tried with claiming it's like BioShock- you need to be able to reach it.
@@kwiiin_ fun fact: a lot of older communist systems worked by giving the lower class people the power in turn for loyalty to the state, the idea being that they haven’t actually earned anything and went form homeless to having authority and power and will be extra loyal, the game should have leaned into aspects like that, and made it clear the drug isn’t a “social class” issue because that’s dumb, there’s so much they missed on
I can’t believe you only have 3.8k subscribers! Excellent video!! Glad to have found your channel and look forward to your future content.
@@Feverm00n thanks so much!
The best solution I can think of for the story keeping in the three act structure they wanted would be to just tighten it up and cut the fat from other sections:
Arthur: His story SOLEY focused on what happened to Percy. After each quest where an original "reveal" happens, instead have him "remember" something knew about his previous life due to the lack of Joy having his memories slowly return. Building up what the masks show the player until the end where you see the train scene play out and realize Arthur is an ass who sentenced his brother to death because he was tired of looking after him.
Sally: Her story is focused on the baby and learning that Joy isn't working anymore. It makes sense for her since she has the Blackberry Joy. Please, oh gods, change her backstory for the baby. Like, she was in a CONSENSUAL ADULT RELATIONSHIP and dumped the guy when she realized she was pregnant because panicc. Keep at least the location cutscenes with Arthur the same. If you wanna run unreliable narrator, you can adjust what is said and done in the scenes, but the locations need to be the same. At the end, you learn as Sally that Joy isn't working period, only your Blackberry Joy is actually working. Thus leading to Sally NEEDING to escape with her baby otherwise someone will find out about her baby due to everyone going to her for the Blackberry Joy. This can also work with the baby mechanic in the game. Where you have to go back to feed your kid, sure, but also to distract those addicted to her Joy to keep from breaking in. Enough "bad mother" cards and a cop or downer breaks in and you get a game over because they found your baby.
Ollie: His story is solely focused on the island falling to pieces and the food shortage. Keeping, obviously, the epic reveal that Margaret is Jack's daughter and not his.
It seemed like the writers put all the reveals in Arthur's section because they were paranoid that people would stop playing after Act 1 and wanted to make sure all the reveals got out. Ironically, due to that decision bloating the game... Yeah, it at least made a bunch of Let's Players drop the game after Arthur's section. But if they had teased the twists in Arthur's section, it'd draw people in to the other two in order to learn the answers.
Side note: Arthur is an even worse dick when you consider that Sally was literally asking for a night to pack up her baby's stuff so she could go with. I'm disappointed there was no pay-off for that. Like, he never learns she had a literal baby to worry over and just goes off thinking she was this sl#t who screwed about with older men just for the thrills. (In a negative sense, no shade to anyone who enjoys sleeping about with older men for the thrills. You do you.)
Adault Arthur is a massive asshole but kid Arthur didn't rat his brother out to the Nazis, he swapped with him. Saving Percy would mean sacrificing himself which is a really big ask for a 12 year old.
@@NeoHellPoethe didn’t save Percy the kids got shipped off to die. If not it’s a massive pothole bc why wouldn’t they just come back home after become adults 20 years later
The art direction 10/10 gameplay 2/10 story 8/10
After reflecting I changed my story rating to 8/10, it actually is really good. The finally bridge scene? Gets me every time. And what’s to say about Uncle Jacks last broadcast? It’s brilliant
This game could be fantastic if they designed the map and levels instead of generating them
"the worst game" is kinda far man i like it alot
Thank god opinions are subjective
@ConversingGames you said you won't play the dlc's which is sad because I assure you they are very good
@@holybombo6521the DLCs are like what the game could’ve been :) I like how it’s very straightforward
They needed to
1) make the map smaller - 9/10ths of it ends up walking
2) make the map static, not generated - allows for better layout of quest points and keeps it consistent between characters, as well as tightening the content more and maybe making the map feel like a real place instead of some circles with bridges
3) Make the social aspects of Joy consistent - a lot of the 'rules' surrounding joy use and behavior are counterintuitive and/or contradict what people say about it and how it functions as a plot device. It's confusing from a narrative perspective and makes the gameplay tedious.
Great video! Glad I discovered your channel. Looking forward to the next video.
Oh hi there. Two hour game review/analysis? Don't mind if i do!
This was a good two hours - great work. Have a wonderful, joyful day.
23:30 we actually did do that. US/UK forces set up a “battalion” of a bunch of inflatable & paper maché tanks, planes and soldiers to scare off any Germans doing air reconnaissance
See thats cool. But why are they still there decades in the future in a camp now occupied by the Germans enemy
This is a great video. I loved watching streamers play the game but never knew how tedious it actually was. Very interesting video, I like how calm you explain things. It's like listening to a mate talk about his interests. Keep it up
Got like an hour into the video before I checked the channel and saw that your not huge, that's surprising this was really good.
I love having long videos of people complaining about bad games to listen too while I work. keep it up!
Right?
I got we happy few for the plot, and stopped playing cause of the gameplay.
The best part of the game was the linear part right at the beginning. If they had just kept the entire game like that I imagine it would've been one of the best games of 2016.
Hey, this is a really cool video and analysis! I just randomly stumbled upon your channel thanks to the algorithm, looks like you're just coming back from a break and I think you smashed it. I'm curious to see what you put out next, good luck on having this video and your channel blow up. :) As suggested by some other comments, I'd also like to see a follow-up video on this game's DLC and how it compares to the base game. I think We Happy Few is really fascinating to look at for its sheer, stunning amount of unused potential and I'd love to see if the DLC could make better use of it. Cheers!
I have 46.3 hours precisely on my Steam account in this game and I finished the main story and I actually loved the game and voice acting and many of The Mechanics.
granted I haven't played the game since 2021 which I can also see on my Steam account and stuff you are bringing up I definitely agree with.
but I cannot shake that I actually love the game for what it is, I think it also helped that I managed to buy the game for 60% of maybe more?
anyway I can sadly not finish this video because this might be false memories but your video is tainting my rose colored glasses from when I played.
but I did like your video👍
Hey there! (long comment incoming sorry about that)
I got this recommended to me randomly, well maybe not completely randomly, I've been getting into WHF. I was really hesitant to watch this, because I LOVE this game. I've played the main game and DLC and I plan on making at least two video essays on two aspects of the game. But I didn't want to jump to conclusions right away, so I gave it a watch.
Every single thing you said about the gameplay, I agree 100 percent. I have to fight for my life to try to get through that. Which, I know is a MAJOR part of the game, so it may seem wild that I love WHF.
But I love the story. Its writing, characters, plot points, for me it's all worth it to push through the gameplay. So, needless to say I didn't agree with the comments you made about the story or how the game tells it. But I get that the gameplay will interfere with the story, it may not be a compromise some people are willing to make. And you do make points I agree with, like how there's no logical way for the tanks to have survived that long, or how joy will affect some areas but not other areas that could be just as important. And that some ways they tell the story could have been better fleshed out, like the unreliable narrator.
I do think you were a little unfair with the dev team in terms of what work they had put in. It's clear that they had gone through development hell to get this game out and make sure that it was in some way successful. Honestly I wouldn't put it past if some of the core problems came from Gearbox themselves. Not only that, prior to WHF, the dev studio, Compulsion Games, only made one other game with their small team. With how much hype WHF quickly got I'm sure there was this new pressure that they hadn't felt before.
It's clear that the dev team were aware of the criticisms that came with the release as its so apparent with the direction they took for the DLC. I don't blame you for not wanting to give Gearbox more money, honestly I just waited until there was a sale to buy them. But, I hope you give the DLC a chance one day as it really shows they listened to the players and really improved as a dev team. It also gives you the vibes that you were looking for in your video and uniqueness in gameplay/combat/not randomly generated and not open world.
We obviously have different opinions on the story and if its worth playing the game for that alone, but I respect that you feel so passionate about how much you hate this game. I feel that it's always best to feel strongly about something rather than feel nothing. And I do agree with your complaints about the gameplay. Honestly I think every WHF fan agrees with that, we know its bad LMAO.
This video clearly took time and effort and I like that. It's my first video that I watched from you and I definitely wouldn't mind giving your other videos a watch.
I don't know much about this game but from the clips in this video Sally's VA is doing a stand-out job, she does a great job delivering some incredibly clunky lines in pretty natural ways. Arthur's voice makes me want to tear off my ears.... and since he's a shame on my name I reserve the right to kick in his teeth
The reason why the Police are nicknamed Bobbies in Britain is because the British Metropolitan Police Force (the oldest modern Police Force in the world) was set up by Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel.
What a perfect time for this video. I bought the game on sale years ago, finally started playing it a few months ago. It’s.. hard to play. I barely made it through Sally’s play through and once I got to the next part.. I just got tired. Glad I can watch someone else suffer through it too!
Just found your channel through the algorithm on a random Tuesday night, I will definitely be subscribing with the bell and everything. Videos like these are perfect for my commute to work to just listen along
Have you considered reviewing any of the AC games, or do you only review traditionally bad games? As fun as being an assassin is, I’ve always felt the AC games to be terribly boring and over fluffed with unnecessary back and forth between objectives, much like this.
I have wanted to do a retrospective kinda thing on the AC games for a while. They're kinda interesting as a time capsule for ubisoft as a company
AC 3 Remastered would be the perfect backdrop for that@@ConversingGames
1:00:40 "She's going to FUCKING KILL US if we keep FUCKING UP!" 😂 Okay the panic screaming was funny. James and Roger were my only two favourite side characters (apart from the dude in the treehouse who has dolls and is a little kooky bastard)
Funnily enough I didn't find out about this game through its marketing or anything like that, but from the VR game where you can watch uncle jack tapes. I was so mesmerized by the aesthetics of it I knew I had to get the game. I just wished the actual game lived up to that. I think if they did away with all the survival stuff and focused only on making a compelling story, I think it would have worked so much better.
I love watching videos on how bad this game is, I've been super into it since 2016 as a sort of guilty pleasure, I know its bad, but I'm still obsessed with it.
These types of videos help see a perspective of people who have just played the game, and not have dug into research on why specific aspects of the game work the way they do. Things like all of the key locations like Dr. Faradays house being in wildly different areas, or cutscenes playing differently with more or less dialogue (Reasons being that joy fucks with all their memories, some characters can't tell exactly where they are so some locations are scattered, even off of joy it still permanently fucks up your brain). When you've liked something so much, even if you know its bad, you'll dick ride it like crazy still over time because you're looking for something to continue liking it. So with the example given, I'd explain to people that sure, the gameplay is terrible and some places are different or characters are there when they had just died or disappeared a while before, but its because of the effects joy gives and it totally makes sense and its cool story wise! And I feel like in concept it can be cool, but when it's actually clear what they're doing and whats intentional, and when it feels more like a purposeful and not just because they forgot or whatever else the production hell the game is.
Watching this video, I had moments being like "Hey! I know what that's about and the reason for that!" But it isn't actually explained in the game. You have to play the dlcs for some background knowledge on things in the base game, and scroll through the fandom wiki for hours to know why certain things work in certain ways, or why some characters do some things. I love this game, its a major guilty pleasure of mine and there are some genuinely good things about it, like a lot of the art and cutscenes and voice acting, but it is so confusing to play when your just trying to learn about the game from the game, because nobody wants to google why specific things happen and work and find reddit posts of people theorizing or click through a wiki article inside of a wiki article. The game doesn't make the message its trying to convey clear at all, or even make it seem like it was intentional.
It sucks because the dlcs are a lot better, less survival and more linear story, but they're so buggy that 2 out of the 3 dlcs you can play (excluding the bobby minigame) just don't work for me, I can't proceed through because I'm softlocked, and even restarting it, I get softlocked again. I think its just a me issue but still.
AND. With the dlcs, spoiler warning I guess, Nick Lightbearer (my favorite) and his dlc "twist" is complete ass. I thought the concept of Foggy Jack being Night Lightbearer when he's all fucked on drugs was cool, it shows how he truly has no control over his life ever, it played out till he died and he had to suffer from his regret of never truly living life. But they made the big plot twist for it to be Uncle Jack instead. Which also felt like it had less meaning in Ollies ending, where as you mentioned, it felt cool confronting a killer till it turned out he wasn't actually a killer. Now you do confront him as one, but it would've been better the opposite way. I feel like if Ollie didn't kill Margaret all those years ago and knew it was Uncle Jack, while Lightbearer did kill his biggest fans and thought it was someone else, that could've been cooler. Like a role swap kinda.
I'm rambling at this point but I just do enjoy videos like this. It makes me realize how hard it is to like this game when you don't put in unnecessary effort and delusion to like it.
But then again BAH i love the concept of Ollie actually killing Margaret too, because the whole cutscene is really cool and really well written. But it feels lessened knowing the Lightbearer dlc, I dunno :/
I hate how this game is basically just the Giver. In fact don't waste your time playing it just watch and/or read the Giver.
@@venicewright7126 YOU'RE RIGHT.
Doesn't the whole conversation with Arthur from Sally's point of view have different dialogue, not just a different setting? Def some attempt at unreliable narrators.
A common theme on this channel seems to be "super cool concept, super bad execution." I remember seeing ads and thinking this game would be so fun to play and explore. The rat piñata in the beginning showing the effects of joy was one of the first things I saw and I was so ready for it. It was screwed up in a "show me more" kinda way. Never had the money for it and kinda glad now.
Another great video!
Also I had no idea who Randy was but Randy if I see you it's on sight I have nothing to lose
@@LazyLoungingHippo love me some deeply flawed but hopefully okay games!
@@ConversingGamesJedi Survivor
It’s amusing to me that the primary prison here in Dublin, Ireland is called “The Joy”. It’s name always brings this game to mind.
Binge watching most of your channel, it's fantastic. Thanks for taking the time to create and share this content!
This game was the last straw for my decision not to pre-order anymore. It also soured my mood for any survival games. I'm sure I'm not the only one either, so congrats dev, you ruined an entire marketing strategy and genre for a few people who are not unhappy.
Would have happened eventually. For me it was Starforge.
This game’s story had potential, especially with the arthur side of of the story. The gameplay is just terrible though. I played through like half of it and I remember clipping through the map repeatedly
We Happy Few always felt to me like someone tried to make 'The Next BioShock' as their first big project. The story and world feel promising, and like they could be very interesting and engaging, but the gameplay feels like a beta version of a procedural generation tech demo. All it ends up being is a bunch of very promising cutscenes floating in a sea of sloggy quests and potentially-beautiful but thoughtlessly-thrown-together levels. I can imagine a much better version of this game, but I can't imagine a series of events that would allow it to exist.
I frankly never noticed that anything was procedurally generated in all the gameplays I watched of the game, but some of them edited the grindy bits out of the videos, so maybe didn’t catch on to the fact? (Shrug)
Interesting video, and hope that they do a better version of the game. I really liked the story elements, and though Arthur was a p.o.sh to his disabled brother, him going through all that trouble to only later not be able to get closure for it was good. You hope he gets redemption, but I got the feeling that his brother was dead long before the game was over and it was futile for him to look.
Would have switched the stories around and mixed them up, where you go through their stories more or less simultaneously as you play. 2-3 cycles though, no more than that. This would take care of the issue of padding and get rid of the procedural elements to focus more on the story and survival. Sharing supplies between characters maybe to emphasize the quickly shrinking necessities, and only certain characters can find certain items because of how Joy affects them?
Thanks for the discourse dude, and have a great day.
great video, the quality of a much larger channel. Wish you all the best
@@kipandcop1 thank you!
Jesus that's dead right?! I've just come near the end of the video and looked at the comments and up until now if assume that he had millions of subscribers, the passion and time it must take to make a video with this kinda quality is insane,
@@vinceycenz552 I'm so happy that you think that though! It's nice to know its not all for nothing
I love "British noises".
Loicence to choon, innit!
I was a backer for this. I was a teenager when I did so and I got beta testing. Watching this bc I never actually played bc beta was so incredibly frustrating lol. It’s been like 10 years. I’m almost out of my 20s 😢
So glad to see you're still posting because though I just found your videos, I love em. Great creator, can't wait to see what you do next. Also glad to see you getting more recognition, a lot of the older videos don't have as many views as they should for the quality you provide so it's good you're finally getting discovered.
the cyberpunk respect Let me know Your Opinion is Valid
The reason why Sally wasn't able to get the drugs 1:36:10 was because she had slept with the clerks husband, so she refused to sell her anything. It even says it in the subtitles
Can't wait to see the next video whatever that may be. This was really well made, hopefully dont habe to wait 9 months for it like the distance between the last two videos
@@insertgenericusernamehere2402 thank you! It shouldn't be such a long time between videos. This one just had so many problems during editing and was a massive effort. Next video is smaller and already well underway!
@@ConversingGames Well worth the wait though if you ask me. Love the long form content myself. Great to listen to when walking the dog (although I do look like a psycho laughing at some of your quips)
@@insertgenericusernamehere2402 nice to know I'm funny sometimes!
I watched the whole thing, you saved me $60. I just wanted to comment for the engagement
it always goes on sale, it’s worth picking up when it’s 70% or more off
I dont know why the comment section is so anal about your cynicism, I live for negative criticism in shitty games. Keep up the good work. Subscribed.
It's people who played the game when it came out and enjoyed it and now can't look past their nostalgia (or alternatively they watched their favourite youtuber playthrough it). Appreciate the kind words!
We Happy Few more like Me Awful Game
game had a very compelling start but kinda trailed off and stopped making sense. I never finished this game and I don't think i'll bother after watching this haha
We thought it was going to be bioshock, and..
Most of the mechanics concerns you mention are not there if you play on higher difficulties. Playing on easy nerfs allot of the mechanics
Hooked by the opening already and excited to watch this, the production quality is really good but I'd like to ask if would be possible to please add captions to furure videos? I ask not because of audio quality as delivery is really clear so far but because would personally help a lot, although i understand this can be a large task especially after youtube removed user submitted captions.
Thank you for hearing me out and excited to watch the rest of this
I used to do them for every video but I will moving forward again! Only stopped as it was taking days to do it but if there's a want then I'll make it happen!
If i remember correctly, the game doesnt take place in our universe. So, the invaders werent Nazis, they were the imperial german army, similar to something we saw in WW1. I dont think WW1 happened in the ingame universe.
The wiki states that Hitler was the Fuhrer until Rommel took over. Alternate history after a point in the 1940s I guess?
Oh really? Wow. Didn't realize that. I thought the deviation was much earlier in time than that. I'll have to check out the wiki to see where that note is from. I couldn't be fucked to pick up every scrap or memory, because the game really drags when trying to be a completionist 😂
so, I feel like you don't know that inflatable decoy vehicles are still extremely effective as deterrents today. They were used toward the beginning of the Ruso-ukranian war, and are still being used to make the ruskies sweat any time they want to launch jets over the border.
@@redjack2629 the issue isn't that it's decoy vehicles. The issue is that it's really dumb to use them as a dramatic narrative reveal and that better options existed
This game had so much potential and fell beyond flat. I was SO disappointed
Why was Arthurs interaction with Sally different to hers? Like... the area and dialogue was different
@@phelovepokemon unreliable narrator I guess? But it legitimately never comes up so honestly who cares
@ConversingGames Could be. It's such a vital part of the game though (first main character vs your second playable character) and because it is a main quest on both, a cutscene and then it was just like... forgotten? It doesn't get answered or a full circle moment. Always found it frustrating and confusing.
I love this game (flaws and all) but that bit always irritated me because it never gets answered
Enjoyed the video. Good luck with your new career. 😎
Great video! I was honestly surprised to see your channel is so small, this was really well done! Definitely subscribing to see future reviews like this :)
I followed We Happy Few's development like a hawk since it was first announced because I fell in love with the art direction, and I played it as soon as it came out... And it had just as many game breaking bugs as you can imagine :').
(I usually don't mind bugs and glitches but I remember I had one sidequest where the npc I needed to talk to was unmarked on the map but would teleport to a new location everytime I left the city, so I had to sweep the whole city until I found him 🥲)
Honestly, I agree with every point you made here- the gameplay and tone was scattered and the game was so artificially padded I actively groaned when it was revealled that there were two more acts to go. That being said, I think We Happy Few is the best worst game I've ever played- positively terrible gameplay and questionable story choices, but it clearly had a lot of heart put into it, so I don’t regret my time playing it! I still listen to the soundtrack all this time later lol.
The background track sounds like the ambient music from Theresia, and that makes me very happy :)
I honestly played through the whole game just to figure out what Jack was all about. After the opening sequence, I was so curious as to what his story was, because it seemed so obvious his fake persona was hiding something big.
I’ve seen plenty of videos about this game and I must say, your one is the best one!.
if this game had better writers it could have been so good. the story and set up is so interesting and has so much potential and these characters have so much potential to be great morally grey characters too - selfish ppl doing desperate things to survive.
i just want to say something about the running(if someone hasnt said this before) there is a Perk you can get called "Oh you", but i can understand why its easy fo miss since the game makes the perks really really annoying due to a certain path you can follow and the amount of side quests you need to do over the game to the point when you do get it. Its basically not even useful anymore
Other than that!, This video is basically perfect and as someone who played we happy few multipr times and began to see the flaws on my second playthrough, So yeah Great video! subscribing to see what other great videos you got in store!
i really love this game, and i havent watched the vid yet but my only critique right off the bat is how quickly becomes a walking sim. It had great potential but turned into a bunch of fetch quests. Once you have the upgrade that allows you to run in the city without it affecting others, you've beaten anything hard about the game
I play 90hrs , it was pretty fun although does have its up and downs , the rng sometimes is very painful, super buggy cam break, walking sim and tp npc etc etc.
The biggest plot hole for me is why would this one island be left abandoned for 20 years after the war? No one tries to buy it? Take it over? They’re just like oh you lost all your kids, and then went drug crazy. But no one? Not a single politician or rich person or someone even in the town tries to intervene? I mean I guess it’s realistic considering the current geo political state. But why don’t more people leave? Like I don’t understand this story line honestly and I played this game to completion. They gave them the kids to make them leave… and then what? They really just kill the kid’s and leave? I don’t understand lmao
Like ppl could’ve just had more kids if they wanted to ??? They didn’t have to go infertile ?????
Comments are wild, video is fine
The soundtrack was fire tho
Truly
The songs are ironically great during trips
@@zalybrainlessgenius503 songs are great no matter what 🤑
WHF is one of the best games i've ever played. It has flaws but you can't say it's a bad game
I would buy the lightbearer or They Came From Below DLC, but that's it.
It's waaaaay too expensive at $85.
I havent really played this game, only seen a bunch of videos about the story, cutscenes and what went wrong, so take this with a grain of salt. Would the acts be better if information was cut up between them? Like, arthur is the regular man, he knows as much as everyone else, just a bit more from being off joy and remembering the horrors, so it makes sense if the knowledge in his story is all about the basic bits, there is no more food and the city/town is crumbling down, meanwhile sally is a higher up, she makes the only good joy, she would already know there is no food and wellingtonwells is doomed, the stuff we learn there could focus more on the medical effects of joy and the children after the war, the contraceptive effects of joy, why the remaining kids after the victory/train stuff are gone and stuff like that, while ollie's could focus on the war and the lies surrounding it, since arthur meets all of them we could get a glimpse at that new knowledge but not the whole picture, as a sort of hype for the next acts maybe? It wouldn't fix all the problems obviously but for the repetive information learnt throughout each act it might be a good idea, it can't really happen now obviously since its already out but its just a thought i had
It literally could’ve been it’s own Bioshock Infinite but they put WAY too much in it and just extended the story with an open world
Fantastic video! I knew you were going to bring up Pathologic 2 when you played some of the OST in the background, I just had a feeling.
I'd read a book based on this story or something similar. I'm a habitual cut scene skipper, I don't read anything or pay attention to dialog when playing games. I have no idea what's happening, and I don't really care to know if I can't read the lore from an outside source like a book. It's the only reason i know halo lore lol
The story looks really interesting. Do any of yall have recommendations for similar stories?
A couple hours ago from me posting this, there was an announcement/leak that claimed that the next BioShock game is going to be an open world game. And I have absolutely no idea why they would ever do that because an open world BioShock game is what We Happy Few is. And it sucked.
@@alexanderchippel I mean hey it could be good! But I very much doubt it
@@ConversingGames I don't think anything they can make now could top BioShock 2, which is the best one.
I'm glad other people share my feelings towards Bioshock 2
@@ConversingGames 2 is the only one that has meaningful story choices. In BioShock, there's no reason not to take the good ending because the "difficulty" of saving the little sister barely there. And Infinite doesn't even have choices, which I guess is the point. But BioShock 2's morality system is all built around what kind of person you raise Elenore to be.
@@alexanderchippel yeah that's a good point actually. It's the only game that even somewhat feels meaningful in the series to me
04.00 - The dates weren't wrong. The idea was that you were editing the past like it never happened.
I don't get why this game gets so much hate, it was a fun quirky story. Maybe it's because of what they said during development that changed expectations?
It's amaizing how much worse the game was on release then it was in the little preview demo thing I played at some point. The overly big boring open world is just the worst. Of course pretty much all the mechanics suck, one of my bigger disappointments as the game had such potential as an idea and the little demo thing felt pretty good as a starter.
Well i loved it personally