We Happy Few: An Amazing Story Weighed Down By A Bad Game

After receiving numerous comments, I'll have this comment pinned to clear some things up. - Yes, Brave New World is an infinitely better comparison than 1984. I hadn't (and still haven't) read the book when I wrote this script. - It was stupid of me to leave Sally's situation as ONLY "cheating". She was taken advantage of. That was an honest mistake, as it somehow slipped my mind her age when it went down. - I made a statement saying it would be cool to have a fake Joy pill really late into the video. This exists. It's called Sunshine, and I feel like a complete moron for forgetting about it. - The dialogue changes between act I and II were made to highlight the fact that both Arthur and Sally are unreliable narrators. I somehow did not realize this. I still think they're stupid and don't flow very well, just acknowledging the fact that I didn't include that information in the video.

It kills me hearing Percy calling for his brother on the train. KILLS ME. Hearing this poor kid scream hurts my soul.

cant blame them too much, making a modern day britain simulator is no easy feat

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 an artist's arsenal. A game like We Happy Few would've benefited greatly from BioShock's map design philosophy. Large, open hubs. Unfortunately it was developed at a time where games were touting "unlimited replay potential" thanks to procedural generation.

“ I wish I still believed in some sort of mercy” “Life goes on, that IS the mercy” CHILLS

Arthur says in his letter “what lies will I tell myself about her” and her POV in their conversations is different then his, because he IS an unreliable narrator. That’s the point. Arthur was so caught up with himself and his delusions.

If they made hunger more of a pressing issue you could resort to Joy to eat stuff your character couldn't stomach while sober, like that rat at the beginning. If reality and inventory objects looked different on Joy, it could've made some puzzles really cool and helped the player get into the mindset of why not taking Joy is a struggle

The village being named Hamlyn immediately set my brain off; brilliant detail for the writers to include. 'Hamelin' (pronounced the same way) happens to be the name of the village in the Pied Piper story, AKA the one where a man plays a tune that lures away all of the village's children and drowns them in the river.

Instead of remaking old popular games, we should be remaking games like this that would’ve been phenomenal works if certain changes had been made to them. We Happy Few would be seen as an amazing game if the gameplay was linear, the combat was refined, and the story matched up properly. This game was a victim of the open-world craze of the late 2010s. Yet another game that was open world despite having no reason to be.

I kinda thought the dialogue changes were cool, if a little mishandled. The idea was there, painting the both of them as unreliable narrators. Sally seemingly unable to understand why Arthur is so upset, so she remembers him as being completely unreasonable, and Arthur ignoring important details such as the baby just because he's so self-centered and whingy. Maybe they changed too many unimportant details, but maybe that was just to let you obviously know that things were different.

1:31:20 Fun Fact: There is an actual "fake joy" in the game. It's called sunshine and is actually what Sally has been taking alongside the blackberry she makes herself. It's a pill in a similar shape to ecstasy but with a sun symbol stamped on it. If you use it instead of Joy, people will still think you're on Joy (i.e, detector booths, bobbies, wellies) but you'll have no withdrawals and the filter will be different from the normal pink Joy.

Aurthers ending, after the whole story just makes sense. He was a terrible person who did terrible things and now, he gets to properly feel terrible. It isn't a good or bad ending, it's a new beginning. A time for him to see himself for who he is and too at the very least never do it again. The choice is a simple "good" vs "bad", to forget and too regress into a child or to grow and become an adult.

The point of Arthur’s dialogue changes in Act 2 is to show how he mentally erased the things that are unpleasant and inconvenient to remember. It’s exactly like the way he forgot about what he did to his brother, even after he became a “downer.” Arthur’s coping mechanism is denial, and it makes him an unreliable narrator.

Arthur doesn't shrug off Sally's line, he doesn't hear it, he doesn't even think he's in the garden district, he's taken joy too often to notice stuff like that. Arthur's effectively delusional whereas Sally isn't

Honestly Sally’s story should’ve touched on the so called “cheating” more. She was taken advantage of but they both refer to it as cheating and is subsequently the reason why Sally can even get Arthur what he wants.

As someone who has struggled with addiction for much of my life the description of joy really hits home. That guy saying “it doesn’t make you forget, just fuzzy around the edges so you can pretend it’s okay” is a pov I am very familiar with

It’s interesting to analyze this story, especially cause I realized Arthur’s thoughts about sally are similar to a kids. He doesn’t think of the negative experience for her, he cares that he was hurt by it. In a way. This is similar to how some less developed teenagers may think of this situation. Personally I think it may imply that joy stopped him from maturing past this mindset, refusing him the opportunity to grow and realize how much it hurt her too. He simply doesn’t. Because joy didn’t truly let him become an adult.

"Life goes on. THAT is the mercy." That line caught me really off-guard, wow.

the reveal that she had been assaulted by his father and he considered that cheating put me permanently on the Arthur hate train

I'm absolutely obsessed with the "They Came From Below" DLC. The relationship between Roger and James is so realistically bickery yet strangely endearing and I adore it.