We Happy Few

“Lovely day for it! Lovely day for it! Lovely day for it! I don’t even know how to tell the truth anymore. ...Lovely day for it?” “Are you joking? It’s been shitty all day. Did you not notice the drops of water falling out of the sky? Gonna be shitty tonight too.” “You’re right. It has been a rather shit day.

A grueling 24 hours of sighing and waiting in trash cans and I’ve reached this dialogue line. And if I’m being frank, unfair, and a cruel pretentious critic, I feel a bit how I did after having finished the final episode of The Good Cop: Partly saying to myself, “wait, not, that’s not it, is it? There has to be more?” and also partly saying “thank god all of that tedium is over with.” In the end, The Good Cop, and also We Happy Few, left me a bit frustrated, sad, happy, and disappointed. The game is advertised as right up my alley: a narrative 3D puzzle platformer that requires stealth and hand to hand combat. It will have something to say about prescription drug culture, (I’m clutching my pearls over here!) mental health, the 1960s, and the dystopian collapse of civil society. Director and co writer of the game Alex Epstein cites his sources of inspiration as Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and anything from the fun bucket of british dystopian sci-fi. The title is taken from Shakespeare, and that’s about all the background information I think you’d need to get the general output that’s being dealt with here. 

Production wise, I think the timeline of this game is very important, and worth a good deal of acknowledging praise. The game was announced at PAX East 2015, and Compulsion Games raised about a quarter of a million dollars via kickstarter in development funding. In July of 2016, Compulsion opened We Happy Few to an early access release. This date is important because in August of 2016, No Man’s Sky was released (if this significance is lost on you I’ll let you google it). 

Playing the game for the first time five years later, it’s hard to say in what ways this production strategy changed anything, if it did at all. Random citizens will teleport through their houses, or get caught in a moving doorway, etc. It’s tricky looking back now and seeing these bugs, and being able to say yeah, I guess just all big open world adventures from 2016 looked like this and what’s specifically wrong with this game. Fallout 4 was released a year prior, and the last Bioshock game, Bioshock: Infinite 3 years prior (both titles the developers have publicly denied any major influences). But whatever, they play the same basically. I think a major difference between this game and Fallout is their handling of plot. In Fallout, if you’re not interested in immediately going out on a quest to find your son taken from your vault, that’s fine; there’s an obscenely american quantity of hours in other interesting quests and stories to satisfy your $60 price of admission. In We Happy Few, if you aren’t interested in getting out of Wellington Wells, then I don’t really know what you plan on doing. And despite this being an undeniable fact, We Happy Few has designed itself in such a way that it isn't true. 

I feel a bit as though I’ve shot myself in the foot by writing about the game this way. I did have a lot of fun playing it, after all. I enjoyed the aesthetics which, to their credit, render pretty well for 2016, which likely is what leads me to so much confusion later. How can something that looks and sounds this good conduct itself with such a crisis of identity? And despite this, I still return to thinking a lot about not just this game, but my feelings after finishing it. Which I think is a testament to just how rich a text this is, and how difficult it feels to approach it. Am I to be “correct?” or “ethical?” Does being correct about art even really matter? Video games, it seems to me, survive as a form of media that withstands the expulsion of art journalism that existed pre-Instagram. Like movies and television, critics can continue to express their expertise on enjoyment and importance and, through this, determine what the audience of critique should or should not spend money on. They are surrogates of the market in this way that the visual arts now is decrepit. 

There’s this movie about capital A Art called Velvet Buzzsaw, and it features Jake Gyllenhaal as this big-shot contemporary art reviewer. All of the characters in the movie act pretty ridiculous and infantile, and Gyllenhaal’s character is no exception. The whole thing is this satire on the pretension and greed of the corporate capital A Art world set inside this slasher horror world, and there parts of the movie I like alright and some I disagree with. But there’s this quote from the movie I’m reminded of, where a dealer calls Gyllenhaal’s character God, and that he can make or break anyone in their business. And while I have never considered that to be ever true in the history of art, there is definitely something to be said for this class of people that no longer seems to be around anymore (or at the very least isn’t grabbing anybody's attention) who told people whether or not they should go to a new show in New York that week. To me, this is the ultimate achievement in the arts: a form of power that is achieved by simply being cool (and I guess living in New York). I’m not unhappy this doesn’t exist at all anymore of course, because the quest in search of and retaining power (especially in the creative dynamics that visual art shows pretend to be*) goes against the two standards I set previously-- it’s obviously unethical, and impossible to ever be deemed correct by nature.

Seriously, if the people who were able to live their lives and make an ‘honest’ living doing that are complaining today because they aren’t able to write about art the way they used to, I find that behaviour confusing. That type of pamphlet, status-ogling writing is bad. It’s obvious to any smart person who is looking at the work in a show, and it’s easy to produce. If you’ve figured out the gig in the past with that type of racket, you should just use those skills you’ve apparently picked up somewhere and use them to get a new, cushy career in wine tasting or something.

I don’t think art writers should just roll over and die, though. I think there’s so much potential for meaningful work and conversation about work and conversation about conversation about work to exist. (Wayne Franits and is a good example, I think.) The issue, of course, is that writing is hard and reading about art seems to be ever harder. And rather than work on those things, I’d rather spend 24 hours playing a video game about Drugs and WWII and Great Britain and Masks and Emotion.

4/5 Stars

*Usually.