Among Japanese video game developers, there are several individuals whose projects attract the attention of not the largest, but devoted audience of fans. Among them is the director and co-writer of Deadly Premonition Hidetaka Suehiro, better known as SWERY. Although several of his creations are considered almost cult, it was only the second time that it was possible to raise money for a new project, The Good Life, through Kickstarter.
In the role of photographer Naomi, we find ourselves in the English town of Rainey Woods, which is called the happiest place in the world. The heroine arrived here from New York at the request of a client who asked her to find out the secrets of the town, and she hopes that this order will help her pay off a huge debt. The locals look strange: one is dressed in knightly armor and never takes it off, the other looks like a ram in a top hat, the barmaid looks like a punk rocker with a multi-colored hairstyle.
But this is far from the strangest thing – at night all these people turn into cats and dogs. Moreover, a few hours after Naomi’s arrival, a ritual murder takes place, and an unknown murderer escapes from the scene of the crime. The story is in the spirit of SWERY, and his non-standard approach to design is noticeable everywhere: the characters are ridiculous and stereotyped, some accents are such that it is impossible to listen to dialogues, and the fourth wall is broken here at every step.
It’s a pity that the gameplay spoils everything so mercilessly that you quickly lose interest even in an intriguing plot. Most of the tasks here are courier quests, with the help of which the developers seem to be trying to stretch the game for a few extra hours. Approach the character – he asks to find something. You will find out from whom you can find it – and that one needs two or three items. You run, collect everything, complete quests – and in the next task you again need to find something.
SWERY understood this, so the grumpy main character constantly complains about courier quests and repeats that no gamer will like such tasks. But it’s somehow strange to talk about the shortcomings of the game, instead of fixing them and offering other entertainment. The first time the joke seems funny, the second time it seems funny, and in the fiftieth you sit with a stone face and just skip the dialogue.
What is especially surprising about The Good Life (in a bad way) is SWERY’s desire to offer not a story-driven adventure, even with stupid quests, but almost a life simulator. The upper left corner of the screen is littered with icons and scales: health, sleepiness, hunger, and mood. When you try to start running, a stamina bar appears at the bottom. But the most idiotic is the changes in the heroine’s state, the reasons for which are not explained at all until you are faced with them.
For example, a Sim might catch a cold. In my case, it happened at the same second when I left the house after a long sleep and it was raining outside. Is it connected with the fact that I was eating something wrong? Or should I have slept less? Or shouldn’t you have run so much? Why is the immune system weakened? It is unclear, but the only solution is to go to the clinic and pay an impressive amount for treatment by local standards, otherwise the scale of endurance, which is already small, will be halved.
The funny thing is that eating in local restaurants provides bonuses like increased health and decreased sleepiness, but with a cold, stamina does not increase, despite the description of the food.
You can endlessly enumerate the shortcomings in which a few pluses are drowning. For example, only one quest can be active, and even if you fulfill all the conditions of another task, they will not be counted for you. Grandpa asks you to cook a dish according to his recipe, but you had difficulty finding the ingredients? If you have completed everything, forgetting to switch to this quest, you will have to do everything again – the necessary dialogue simply will not start. There are a lot of such inconveniences here, not to mention the optimization on consoles – the frame rate falls on Switch on a regular basis, and there are many complaints on other platforms.