We Happy Few is a bit of a downer

[Administrator]

Talk about a bait and switch: We Happy Few's prologue feels like it belongs to an entirely different game. The intro suggests a claustrophobic satire in the tradition of Portal and The Stanley Parable, casting the player as a rat caught in a violently jolly bureaucracy, somewhere in the heartlands of an alternate-history 1960s England. The Xbox Game Preview build opens, like the recent trailer, with player character Arthur Hastings busy at his desk, operating a censorship machine through a cheery haze of mood-altering drugs, till a chance article about his long-suppressed childhood dulls his buzz and slices away his allegiance to the regime.
The level unfolds like a quieter Half-Life chapter dressed up to resemble Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, with a clear main path but lots of ambient detailing to linger over. The stylings are vivid, the scripting brisk - a terrifying officer manager in clownpaint and a perky bowler hat, flip clocks and futurist ball chairs, psychedelic prints and appalling scenes in side-rooms, all of it funnelling you towards a grisly encounter with a pinata that doesn't, it turns out, contain sweets.
After 10 minutes of this, I was sold. Fair enough, the prospect of slipping through the clutches of an Orwellian state isn't that novel, but the writing and aesthetic have a distinct panache. A special nod goes to We Happy Few's lanky, sneering British bobbies - Slender Men turned pillars of the community whose helmet badges blaze like a Big Daddy's portholes. But then Arthur escapes the building after being outed as a dissident, and it transpires that We Happy Few is not, in fact, a taut dystopian labyrinth but an open world survival game with procedurally generated environments, plentiful resource bars, item crafting, day-night cycles, optional permadeath and spongy, Elder Scrolls-style combat.
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