So, We Happy Few finally came out and Matesprit kickstarted it so I'm borrowing it from her Steam library to see what it's like. This will be where I dump my thoughts and ramblings about the game as I play through it. Since the game just came out (it came out yesterday), and it's also dark as hell with the "psychological horror" tag on it for Damn Good Reason, and it's set in an alternate universe where WW2 went...differently, I'm going to be tucking everything behind spoiler tags. (The premise is that Britain surrendered to Germany, and the game is set in the early 1960s. I don't think that counts as a spoiler, since you can find it out in the first five minutes of the game.) That said, let's dive in. Spoiler: Happy Is The Place With No Past So, opening bit, we're Arthur - an archivist working at City Hall in Wellington Wells. He goes through a bit of his job, which involves reviewing old news articles and deciding what's safe to remember and what needs to be censored. One article - about a friendship garden a little old lady grew, in the colours of the British and German flags - gets approved and the next one - about how it's not safe to swim in the river (or fish from it, or drink from it) - gets redacted, with everything but the headline being blacked out. And then another article gets put into the redactor, and Arthur sees a photo of himself and his brother, Percy...and apparently goes into a flash-back, where he hears his brother calling for him. I then get a choice: take our Joy, or remember. Apparently if you choose to take the Joy, it just cuts straight to credits; I haven't tried it. Anyways, Joy is a drug. What exactly it's made of or does is still a bit of a mystery to me, but it's supposed to "turn that frown upside down" - basically, it's a mood-booster, artificially inducing euphoria. It also seems to be hallucinogenic, and an amnestic - that is, it makes it hard or impossible to remember things. Specifically, it seems to be intended to make it hard to remember unpleasant things. The people of Wellington Wells have a lot of things they'd really rather not remember, after all. I won't go line-by-line in what happens during Arthur's intro, since Jack Septiceye is doing a playthrough too and the very beginning intro sequence is on rails. Arthur's boss (?) comes in to ask what's going on, because he's been cooped up in his office all day with no sounds to indicate that he's working (she says there hasn't been a single whoosh since 10 am, and the time that displays when you walk out the door of his office for the first time is around 4:30 pm - so he dissociated for a while there), and is concerned that he hasn't been taking his Joy like he ought to; the bottle he tossed into the garbage was apparently empty, so that doesn't tip her off that he hasn't been, but the spilled capsules are worrying her. He puts in a new battery for the redactor and gets back to work, promising he'll be along shortly to Deirdre's birthday party. I do the rest of the articles in his queue and read through them before treating them like he would if he actually wanted to keep his job; one is about the requirements for registering - it's really vague, and the guy being interviewed says he doesn't have a lot of details and hasn't been told anything more but is hopeful that it'll have to do with making sure the children get properly fed. The last one is about the promising new drug that's ready to go into trials for human testing, having finished being tested on rats and performing wonderfully at improving "despondency" in the rat subjects. I then poked through his co-workers' offices - both of which give us more articles to read, including ones about an art exhibit intended to show the links between Communism and a bunch of other nasty things and the warning signs, and one about "another 'Breeder' riot" where a visibly pregnant woman was attacked and a police officer interviewed victim-blamed the woman, saying that he's not surprised people were upset at being reminded of what they can't have when they see someone else in the family way. So. That implies that the people of Wellington Wells are having some pretty serious fertility problems. Does the Joy make them sterile or reduce their sex drive? Or has something else happened? Joy certainly seems to make people act more childish; the missing colleague's office has "My Summer Holiday" up on one wall, with hand-drawn smiley faces and rainbows. The office has gotten a pinata (which is...actually a rat, which was probably dead and hopefully cooked at the time) for Deirdre's birthday, there's mention of playing Simon Says with Uncle Jack in some of the trailers...it's really, really odd. (Clive's office suggests he's exhibiting a lot of paranoia. And that he really doesn't like Arthur for some reason.) There's also teapots everywhere, which is...interesting. Brits loving their tea is definitely a stereotype for a reason, but why does every office have its own teapot? Anyways, there's an escape scene (Arthur gags at the sight of the dead rat as his co-workers start eating it, which tips off his probably-boss that he has gone off his Joy and she offers him some of hers and then goes "oh shit, he's a Downer!" when he hesitates at taking it) and he gets chased down into the underground and locked in when the police officers smell gas. Then he goes through the underground area, finds a way out and a bunch of supplies and the crafting tutorial and combat tutorials happen, and the first fast-travel station gets unlocked. And then I go on to the next section, where I spent a large chunk of time just fucking around and finding bushes to forage from, and digging through abandoned houses. Things I learned: Arthur isn't the only one who's remembering "what happened" (and this is apparently to be expected, since everyone outside the village is off their Joy), and apparently something happened to the kids of Wellington Wells. All the kids. Also, Arthur's brother Percy was put on a train with a lot of other kids and...I'm not quite sure what happened, but probably not good things; the stuff Arthur is remembering about Percy really strongly indicates that Percy was autistic with interests lying towards "be helpful to support the war effort", and definitely clever enough to notice that people treated him differently because he was considered 'slow' and willing to use this to his advantage sometimes (one of the memory snippets involves Percy informing Arthur that he lied to a neighbour, telling her that he was the one up in a tree outside her daughter's window "because she wouldn't get me in trouble, because I'm slow. She told me not to do it again, and I promised I wouldn't"). Also, everyone outside the village is...just as thin as everyone inside the village. Now, that could be an aesthetic choice, but Arthur does have a little aside in the "what did I just do" note to himself: "PS: How long have we been eating rats?" And the "Well Well Well" segment with Uncle Jack in the opening bit has Uncle Jack talking about Vitamin C and where you can find it, and recommending that everyone make sure to eat their vegetables (and, of course, take their Joy). And the whole office has a bit of an air that suggests things are decaying and people just don't want to admit it. There's also a bit about some people having been hung for trying to burn the children's register - a book listing children, I'm guessing from context. With a letter to the editor saying that it was a good thing that the vigilantes did that, because the parents were trying to keep their kids from being hostages. And there's a poster, right after we get out of the first safehouse, picturing children coming off a train and reading "In Peacetime, They'll Come Home Again" with "LIARS" scrawled over it in red. Arthur seems to believe he'll find Percy. I'm...not so sure, honestly. I'm actually going to be very surprised if Percy turns up alive at all. It's also frankly concerning that everyone outside the village seems to be in rags and all the women seem to be in summer-weight dresses. According to Arthur's clock, it's mid-October. (Pru's clock says it's September 4th - but that's probably just the last day she touched it - meaning she's been missing for a month now.) So we're in autumn, and the weather's typical English weather (it started raining while I was derping around). How has no one died of exposure yet? ...or have they, and the game just hasn't dropped that anvil yet?
Spoiler: More thoughts from the escape and the first area outside the intro and the safehouse So, Pam escaped on purpose. Her diary suggests she just...walked off, and arranged something with someone who's supposed to get her to the mainland. Which is interesting and suggests that there's an underground railroad or at least the appearance of one. A lot of the diaries I found, and the comments from the NPC who saves you from the Wastrel mob, suggest/state that there's a lot of people who're Downers because they can't take Joy any more - one diary states that the guy wants to take Joy, but it keeps making him throw up every time he tries, and another implies that the guy is taking it and it's just not working properly for him any more. And the NPC says "you get a bad batch, and it flips like a switch in your head, and then you can't take Joy any more. Been a lot of people getting bad batches lately". And one of Arthur's comments is that they put Joy in the water (and I found some tea, which apparently has Joy in it?!), and one of Uncle Jack's comments during his show is "if you're feeling like your Joy isn't quite what it should be, just double up on your dose!" So there's the implication that people aren't really regulating their dosages, they're just taking however much they feel is 'right'...in addition to whatever dosage they're getting from the tap water. And one of the things about antidepressants is that sometimes if you take them for too long, your brain will adjust to them and they'll stop working as effectively. And it's not like there's an alternative to Joy in the village... How many people really got a bad batch, and how many just have taken so much that their bodies are filtering it out or rejecting it entirely now? Also, everyone around seems to react violently if you don't fit in. Why? I mean, sure, from a meta standpoint, Nazis and enforced conformity - but there wasn't even a choice to reject the offered Joy, Arthur just hesitated for a few moments and that was enough to flip everyone around him into "oh shit, he's a Downer, call security and then let's start pounding on the door of the room he's fled into while we chant for him to take his Joy" mode. And the Wastrels react just as violently if you seem like a tourist/villager, and the Headboys are....well, I haven't actually gotten into the Headboy camp yet, but I've seen the Jack Septiceye video and 'lord of the flies' seems to fit about right. Is it the Joy, or withdrawal from it, or is it something else? Because one of the NPC's comments if you keep talking to her is that "we did things the Germans never even asked us to". I have a very bad feeling about what I'm going to find out, in regards to what everyone's trying so hard to forget.
