Wait, what? A survival game set in a quaint English town full of bobbies on the beat, bunting, and people having a jolly good time, you say? Oh wait, now we see the creepy masks, rampant drug addiction, and corpses among the flower beds. Never mind. Welcome to the not-so-sleepy, and really quite unsettling, Wellington Wells in 1964. It’s broad daylight, but we’re still afraid.
Unlike other games in the genre, We Happy Few has you trying to stay alive in what, on the surface at least, looks like a content, civilised world. “I think that was exactly what attracted us to the idea,” considers game designer Guillaume Provost. “We wanted to get away from the traditional wilderness setting, where you break rocks and chop down trees, and get rid of some of the more dull tasks we found at the beginning of many modern survival games. Surviving in We Happy Few means drinking and eating, but also staying off the drugs, which permeate certain more abundant sources of food and water in the world. Gathering the basic resources you need to survive will force you to ‘break’ the rules of the society you are living in, which will naturally bring you into conflict with its inhabitants.”
Drug life
Oh yes, its inhabitants. Clad in white masks, the good folk of Wellington Wells are all high as kites on a drug known as Joy. taking place in an alternate universe where the Germans managed to occupy England in WW2, these pills are what the people took to cheer themselves up. Yes, it’s just as unnerving as it sounds. “Joy is that beautiful thing that makes the world shiny and pretty. We didn’t want to make a world where the people were on a happy drug without allowing the player to experience it for themselves,” explains Provost. “Taking drugs helps you blend in better in certain parts of the city, but it comes at a cost as well. If you take a little bit, you’ll eventually crash from it, and that tends to have adverse effects on your health. If you take too much, you run the chance of overdosing. In essence, it’s a short term gain for a mid-term loss in the game’s structure.”
While there are story elements to be discovered within the world, this is a survival game at heart. It’s a procedurally generated roguelike, so perish and you’ll respawn in a reconfigured version of the environment. “You’ll die a lot in We Happy Few,” says Provost, almost gleefully. “And each time you die, we generate a new city. You bring the knowledge you’ve gained (and a few other things we’re not quite ready to reveal yet) from playthrough to playthrough, but we wanted the experience to stay fresh and different each time. And then there are certain encounters or situations that will appear only in certain playthroughs, revealing additional world lore and history.”
Just mask
It’s not quite Assassin’s creed, but you’ll need to blend with the crowds as you make your way through the city. While Wastrels on the outskirts will pick on you if you’re wearing a smart suit and not torn rags, your behaviour, as well as your threads, triggers reactions from NPcs too. They don’t like you breaking into their house and stealing food from their fridge for one thing – go figure – but the discovery that you haven’t taken your Joy is also a no-no.
“It’s an area of the game we’re still actively working on, but at the moment just about every action you take in the game will generate a response of some kind,” Provost explains. “Different areas of the city have different types of citizens, who respond differently to what the player does. Crouching, jumping, and sprinting might be highly suspicious in one area, and accepted in another. It’s part of the natural learning curve for the player to learn the rules that govern the different areas of the city.”
Crafting tables are scattered around the world – in our playthrough, there were two stationed in the vault we spawned in (where we’d have been quite happy to stay). “Crafting is at the heart of the player’s progression in the game,” says Provost. “Finding and accumulating the right ingredients in the world will ultimately let you escape the island, and it helps you graduate into areas of the city that you might not otherwise be able to survive in. there are three axis to crafting in We Happy Few: survival items, mechanical crafting, and, of course, drugs. A cunning player uses all of these to survive in the game’s world. My personal favourite is a psychotropic drug which negates Joy in your body. If you happen to use it on a regular Wellie, he becomes a ‘Downer’ himself. It’s a great way to distract a crowd.”
It’s the atmosphere that’s so striking here. While the visuals might have you screaming bioshock from the rafters, the feel of the world is very different. Compulsion recorded a full television and radio schedule for the ever present smiling head of the city, Uncle Jack, and it adds yet another layer of scary Doctor Who episode to proceedings.
“We always wanted to make a darker, dystopian atmosphere around the project, but the mood and tone of the world really crystallized when we cast Julian in Uncle Jack’s role,” Provost explains. “In terms of influence, we had a lot. Brazil, the Prisoner, brave New World, and A clockwork Orange just to name a few. Uncle Jack, the main figure you see on all of our television screens, is actually inspired by blackmail, a Monty Python sketch featuring Michael Palin. We wanted Uncle Jack to be all-pervasive, a kind of oppressive, creepy-happy presence that follows you throughout the game.” Well, it still looks like a lovely place to visit to us. Positively… joyful.