A torn suit in a fancy area reminds citizens that something is wrong, and a fancy suit in a wastrel district reminds outsiders of what they’ve lost.
Wellington Wells’ repressive oligarchy runs the town from a handful of brutalist monoliths, but the most common threat is random citizens who will spontaneously attack you for things like wearing the wrong clothes in the wrong district. The characters’ stories intersect, but each is seeking redemption for a different all-consuming regret, while trying to survive a world where regret is a mortal sin.Ĭharacters treated gravity as more of a suggestion than a law It ends with the story of his old neighbor Ollie Starkey, a military veteran who prefers brute force and hallucinates the ghost of his young daughter. After starting with Arthur, it shifts to his childhood friend Sally Boyle, a stealth-focused chemist who is secretly (and illegally) raising a baby. But it’s divided into acts featuring three protagonists with different gameplay styles. The game’s primary character is a weedy censorship bureau employee named Arthur Hastings, who goes off his Joy when a newspaper story dredges up old memories of his long-lost brother. The town’s infrastructure is falling apart, a plague is infecting residents, and the outskirts are filled with Joy-resistant “wastrels.” But nobody is rude enough to mention all that, if they notice at all.
A couple of decades later, Wellington Wells is a groovy, rainbow-hued high-tech police state where being a drug-free “Downer” is illegal and every respectable citizen sports a permanently smiling mask. While under German occupation, the people of Wellington Wells did something terrible - so terrible that they chose to erase their memories with a euphoric hallucinogen called Joy. The colorful, creepy We Happy Few is set in a British town called Wellington Wells in an alternate 1964, where a non-Nazi “German Empire” won World War II after America chose to remain neutral. It’s also frequently confounding, occasionally miserable, and eventually lost within its own ambitions. We Happy Few is a unique piece of dystopian worldbuilding. Less impressively, I was so obsessed because I just wanted the game to be what it had promised, not the thing I’d been playing for the last 28 hours.
So I’m impressed that We Happy Few, the second game from Canadian studio Compulsion Games, kept me obsessively hooked to the last moment. I usually don’t finish games I start because the ending often feels like a culmination of something I’ve been working toward for hours and consequently already understand.
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