Since its Kickstarter campaign, We Happy Few has been a roller coaster ride for developer Compulsion Games. Out of the gate, it enjoyed success thanks to support from YouTubers and the gaming media. It was deserved too, because the game sounded – and looked – great.
Now the Early Access version of the game is considered a bust, and totally irredeemable depending on who you talk to. What happened to this promising game? Watch this week’s episode of Kicked! to find out.
We Happy Few is a survival game, but not in the traditional sense. You aren’t trying to survive in an empty, post-apocalyptic world. You won’t find any zombies here. Instead, this was to be a story driven, psychedelic look at survival in a world gone made. There are drugs too, because why not?
Your goal was to survive and escape Wellington Wells, the gorgeous town modeled after Super Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road. Everything from the aesthetics, the drug mechanic, the equally funny and creepy narrator character all made We Happy Few so much more than just a survival game. Where the game tried to be different and engaging, it succeeded. It’s the genre standards, of constantly managing your character’s well-being, and the randomly generated elements which brought everything crashing down.
Compulsion Games clearly care about what they’re doing, and they’re seeking opinions, however bad, and they’re taking them to heart. There’s a lot of promise here in both them and the game itself, but as it stands, We Happy Few isn’t very good. Keep an eye on the updates, see what people who already have the game think of it, and wait.
