We Happy Few
From the independent studio that brought you Contrast, We Happy Few is an action/adventure game set in a drug-fuelled, retrofuturistic city in an alternative 1960s England. Hide, fight and conform your way out of this delusional, Joy-obsessed world.
We Happy Few is a adventure, open world and action game
developed by Compulsion Games
and published by Gearbox Publishing.
Released on August 10th 2018 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 13,039 reviews of which 10,004 were positive and 3,035 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.5 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 14.99€ on Steam and has a 75% discount.
The Steam community has classified We Happy Few into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: 64 bit, Windows 7 and above
- Processor: Triple-core Intel or AMD, 2.0 GHz or faster
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 460 GTX or AMD Radeon 5870 HD series or higher Mobile: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M or higher.
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 6 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
We Happy Few in 2024 is an interesting experience. I first played Arthur's story back in 2018, and the whole thing was a complete mess. It wasn't a question of how the game would break, but when. I slogged my way through to the end of his chapter, and never even started Sally or Ollie's. Looking at the trophy counts on Steam, it seems like most players did the same thing. Revisiting this in 2024 has left me feeling two things: A) the (mostly) fixed game was a blast, and B) most players have never seen some of its best content. To be clear, this game's biggest issue remains its evolution from a procedurally generated survival open-world experience into a narrative driven adventure game. This awkward marriage of two very different visions is in the marrow of We Happy Few, and short of rebuilding the entire game from scratch, there was no way these two visions were ever going to coalesce. The devs had one thing in mind, the players got excited about another - and thus the awkwardness was born. Compared to the broken mess of 2018, though, We Happy Few in 2024 plays remarkably well. Yes, there's still some jank - and the procedural generation of the worlds, although refined, only ever hinders the quality of the game. But - the quests are completable, the world looks gorgeous in 4K, and bugs are mostly aesthetic. The real sadness for me comes from the fact that Sally and Ollie's playthroughs are both brilliant. The latter of which was my favourite in the game. Sally's story was great, don't get me wrong - but Ollie's was just superb. It tied so much of the narrative together, and without spoiling anything, his final few quests made me smile at how thoughtfully the devs had considered the world they'd created. But only 6% of players ever reached Ollie's ending. The vast majority chose my path in 2018 and never returned. I completely understand why, but it's also hard not to feel sad about this. There's an absolutely brilliant narrative in here, buried under so much 2018 jank. If you get the chance, I'd really encourage you to give this a 2024 spin. There's some truly brilliant storytelling here, and most of us missed it after the initial launch. The DLCs are arguably even more brilliant, but I'll leave those thoughts for another day.
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I have played through this game 5 separate times, all the way through. Even touching night watch and survival mode. I have played through so many times on two platforms and it's to the point where I'm fairly certain that I don't even care how buggy this game is, it's a mess, there's no way around it. This game is not finished. And yet, it's so charming that I keep coming back to play it over again. Would I recommend this game to you? Probably not, the story? Amazing. The gameplay? Well, if you like a walking simulator that has you watching your typical survival game cores like hunger and thirst, then you'd probably like this game. If you can stand the hilarious bugs and sometimes even gamebreaking ones, you have a game here that is just ok, with amazing story. I'm gonna play it again, it's just what I do now. This game is my guilty pleasure, and I don't care anymore that it's kinda terrible.
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MINIMAL SPOILERS (only about gameplay no spoilers for story) This game is mixed. The story, world, characters, actors, etc are all absolutely fantastic, I love it so much and I can't overstate that enough when speaking to others. Also, you should get the dlc because the gameplay is better in those 3, specifically the best being "We All Fall Down". But when it comes to gameplay, int he base game, it just kinda sucks. The ideas for the gameplay are good like having to wear certain clothing to "conform" to different areas and having to take Joy (or alternative stuff) to blend in and not get detected by machines as being a "downer" survival mechanics like thirst which risks stuff like drink potentially drugged water are all good ideas. But that's about it, this game has procedural generation in it and while that could be good for replayability, it's only good for the "sandbox" mode and that's it. What it does is pretty obvious when you play, when in the Garden District (Outside of the "Joyful" society) there's a lot of nothing, some kinda big islands with a few repetative houses and streets with only very few sidequests scattered about randomly. In the Village its less obvious until you see postboxes in front of benches and stuff like that out of place but it all kinda looks the same too. The Parade district looks good though but I only spent about an hour there my entire playtime of the game and most of that was inside buildings. Most of the quests too are fetch quests; go here do that, go there get me that etc. The survival system is just a bit of a hassle, the combat is mediocre, stealth is really challenging in the way it looks like you are supposed to be able to stealth but it just kinda doesn't work. And then there's the bugs too, most are visual but some not just that, the 2 prominent ones that I can think of are the NPCs being placed incorrectly (sitting on a bench, backwards or to the side hovering in front of it) and when you're "stealthing" behind some enemies, they'll just disappear, you'll hear you've been spotted only to find they've teleported behind you and are calling attention to you. Yes, I have wrote a lot of negative things but if you can get past all that (play on Easy, there's no difficulty related achievements), maybe use some console commands to make it a bit easier, I used "DemiGod" a lot. This can be a really good story and setting, get it on discount too and definitely get the dlc if you want some good/better gameplay alongside the base game. Plus the last dlc "We All Fall Down" kinda felt like what the game should have been, a handcrafted world with good imagery and stealth/combat. Be aware the dlc however removes almost all of the gameplay features of the base game and are completely separate from the base game in terms of accessing them (from the menu, autosaves only, not accessed in world), there's no blending in, no requirement to consume anything but for health and no procedural generation. I wish the actual game was like the last dlc mixed with some of the ideas of the base game (needing to blend in and no procedural generation), it could be so good. If you somehow read all my rambling, wow thank you I guess. I hope this gives you an understanding of the game. Seriously the story is SO GOOD, that and the dlc, the only reason I'm giving this a thumbs up, everything else gameplay-wise, just wasn't implemented well enough, take a look at the percent of the achievements too, when I wrote this, only 6.5% of players actually finished the main game and about 9% got halfway through unless a lot of people were doing something that disabled achievements, that says something (I used console and still got 70% of the achievements, including dlc).
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TL;DR: We Happy Few is worth buying on some sale, and playing it with console cheats to skip the boring repetitive parts and experience the well-written story. OK so this thumbs up was the toughest one I have ever given. And that's because it's under certain conditions. Let's clear this up. The game is the essense of "great concept, poor execution". It has great story, dialogues, humour, graphics and in theory good gameplay. And by "in theory" I mean it has great game mechanics ideas but they fail to be fully fleshed out because of poor implemenation. The main factor attributing to this is the bad bad bad AI of the enemies. For a game focused on stealth approach, it's insulting seeing enemies acting so erratically. They either see you performing unaccepatable actions (like jumping and running in public) from 3km away, or you could be sneaking in their home and hiding behind a chair and they literally don't notice you are there. Their patrol patterns are also really odd, making you usure of the available windows to make your next move. Even out of stealth, the pathfinding of all NPCs is terrible, making them walk up to walls and stumble on eachother in the street etc. But the main gripe I have with We Happy Few is its biggest gimmick which I think it's also its greatest weakness: The procedurally generated map. It causes so much trouble and unnecessary walking between randomly placed points of interest and spreads thinly all the otherwise interesting and well-crafted content, while also making all areas look the same and depriving them of any sense of character and memorability. If instead, the map was hand-crafted, smaller and denser, it would make for a wonderful experience. And it would make actual sense between the 3 acts (yes, the map changes in each act, for some reason, which makes zero sense in-game). I am not proud to admit this, but in order to overcome all this and save me several dozens minutes of pointless walking, I enabled the in-game Console and used cheats (infinite Stamina and no-clip) in sections between quests where I only had to walk. I highly recommend it to everyone. On the good notes, as I already mentioned, the story, characters, dialogues, voice acting are all perfect. They all have depth, the attention to detail in environmental storytelling is equal to a AAA game. The game mechanics are mostly ok (inventory management, crafting system, combat, conformity in different areas etc) and the 3 characters offer a somewhat challenging and interesting playstyle by having different "builds". Give it a chance, while being prepared for its many issues.
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TLDR: Worth your time as long as you wait for a sale (80% minimum) Go in with an open mind and you wont be disappointed and don't let the 2018 articles dissuade you. A reviewer said it best however: "its a game with a great story/world building that is hiding within a basic and sometimes glitchy game". PROS: Really engaging story imo that motivates you to finish the game. The characters are believable for the setting (though they're terrible as individuals) and the writers definitely knew what they wanted to do with the ending in mind from the start. LOTS of inspiration from the book Brave New World. Also the sound track is memorable and I sometimes listen to it in the car as it is quite nostalgic inducing. CONS: My biggest complaint was how much of a repetitive running simulator it can be at times. Plus lots of open areas that are empty of structures and NPCs, especially in the garden district, which makes side quests not feel worth doing. The fast travel helps but you have to explore them to access points. If you stick to the main story-line, the game does finish quicker (positive) but you do miss some of the world building events I feel.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 18 November 2024 19:09 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 18 December 2024 06:10 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:44 |
| Steam reviews | 22 December 2024 17:58 |
Online players
73
Developer
Compulsion Games
Publisher
Gearbox Publishing
Release
10 Aug 2018
Platforms
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