Microsoft have finally confirmed the games coming to Game Pass this January - and hey, it's just the (stellar) games we already knew about from announcements last year. But there is a new game among those leaving the service: We Happy Few, the creepy, sneaky survival horror from Compulsion Games - who are now a Microsoft first-party studio.
]]>You can only keep a population subdued by state-enforced drugs and totalitarian policing for so long. 60s Brit-hell adventure We Happy Few received its third and final story DLC today, We All Fall Down, and it's tearing the whole cheery facade down. Everything's quite on fire, and new heroine Victoria brings a little bit of Dishonored to the mix with grappling skills that'd make and self-respecting Kaldwin proud.
Merry old Uncle Jack might be feeling the burn, but there's still some room to squeeze those last drops of Joy out of Wellington Wells' dystopian hell.
]]>We Happy Few had a messy journey through early access and a rough launch, but today's "Arcade mode" update feels like a great excuse for me give its psychedelic alt-history dystopia a second look. The patch sells itself short with its title, as it goes far beyond 'arcade', adding three new play-modes to the game. Odder still that only one of them could be considered arcade-styled, while the other two offer more open-ended sandbox experiences. Developers Compulsion Games also mention that this patch prepares the game for its upcoming DLC.
]]>We Happy Few has an enormous amount of ambition, a game that sets out to join the pantheon of sneak-based grandchildren of Looking Glass, but in a more open world. And while it keeps looking like it's going to deliver, it really serves to demonstrate just how astonishingly good the games on whose shoulders it wobbles really are.
]]>After a long, bumpy and storied ride through early access, We Happy Few is out today. A survival-focused stealthy immersive sim, set in a bizarre, dark and dystopian alternate 1960s world. It's a bit like The Prisoner filtered through the mind of Austin Powers. While in early access the game was more of a sandbox-style affair, the final game features three intertwined stories playing out across semi-procedurally generated environments, as three protagonists attempt to uncover the truth behind the all-too-cheerful ruined world they live in.
]]>Australian censors have lifted an effective ban on We Happy Few, deciding after an appeal that its depiction of a fictional drug does warrant an adults-only 'R18+' rating but isn't so bad that the game should be illegal to sell in the country. Australia's Classification Board had objected to its drug 'Joy', which keeps the dystopian survival game's city in hallucinatory bliss so residents don't realise e.g. the 'sweeties' they're eating from a 'piñata' are actually a rat's guts. But popping Joy can help players at times, letting them pass for 'normal', and Australia does not like beneficial gamedrugs.
]]>Has it really been six months? 2018 is passing in a blur of frozen architects, drug-pushing prophets and accordion duets. Hell, six months ago the RPS Video Department was but a glint in Graham’s eye. You may also recall a gathering of the most exciting games of 2018, a rundown of the year as it looked back in January. With E3 done there’s a clearer picture of what the rest of 2018 looks like. Many games have slipped to February 2019 - the stampeding bandits of Red Dead Redemption 2 have them running for the hills - but we’ve rustled up 15 of the remaining games that fellow video person Noa and I are looking forward to.
]]>We'll be invited back into Wellington Wells, the 1960s quaint English island city where everything is lovely and wonderful as long as you take your Joy pills and horrifying if you don't, on August 10th. Developers Compulsion Games last night announced the release date for We Happy Few, their singleplayer first-person sneak-o-survival game which has had a bumpy journey through early access since 2016. But I have been keenly awaiting the actual finished game, to visit this groovy dystopia. Here, see more of its story in the new E3 trailer below. Also, meet a cute giant person-sucking hooverbot.
]]>Microsoft had a lot of games to announce at E3 2018, but it's a little murkier this year to find out what was relevant for PC users. Some games were coming to both, others only to their Xbox One consoles. You could of course watch the entire conference right here, but for some there just isn't enough time to wade through the entire show.
Not to worry though, here are all the trailers and news for you in one place. There's a surprising amount of variety in the announced titles: from an old favourite making a return, much celebrated developers showing off their new series, to even a completely free game launching very soon. The games below aren't in any particular order but you're in for a long ride.
]]>As development of swingin' 60s survival game We Happy Few takes even longer than anticipated, and with no more updates due until the game fully launches, developers Compulsion Games have announced plans to temporarily pull the game from sale and offer refunds to everyone. Complusion are not abandoning development, to be clear, but they are delaying the full launch again - until summer 2018. That'll be about a year after its last update, so they worry that people buying it won't be satisfied with that as an early access experience. So they're taking it off sale until it's done, and offering refunds to those who want 'em.
]]>As We Happy Few [official site] marches towards release, Compulsion Games have decided to reconsider the future of the dystopian survival game’s Early Access updates. Now there’s only going to be one more before launch.
The original plan included two future updates: the Joy update, and then a later one that would introduce the new Parade District. But as anyone who has had to flee from the overzealous police officers of Wellington Wells knows, plans sometimes need to change.
]]>Pill-popping survival game We Happy Few [official site] is getting adapted for the big screen, reports Variety, in further proof that the film industry has not abandoned their ill-fated quest for a good videogame movie. Producers dj2 are working on the project, a company who’ve got their fingers in many similar pies, including a TV series based on Life Is Strange and films for Sleeping Dogs and Sonic the Hedgehog. Definitely chasing that dream, then.
]]>We Happy Few [official site] is much less of a downer following a major update. The game, which is a fusion of crafting, survival and first-person narrative action adventure, was released into Early Access in July and my first experiences with it were disheartening. A short introduction has you control lead character Arthur Hastings at work, redacting history, and then escaping into the underground when the true nature of his colleagues and environment is revealed. He sees the truth when he stops taking his Joy, which is a more potent form of Huxley's Soma, and swiftly ends up in the blitzed rubble at his home village's outskirts with all the other downers.
On its initial release, I found the game as drab as Hasting's surroundings.
]]>We Happy Few [official site] is in Early Access at the moment. It's the dystopian survival game set in a drug-addled English city in the sixties. The trailers and concept art makes it look like something in the vein of The Prisoner, but from what various RPS-ers have played it really doesn't make good on that promise yet.
But, for those of you who did pick it up, this week the development team at Compulsion Games are deploying an update to the game which takes into account a bit of the Early Access feedback. There's stuff like bringing down the difficulty of the survival element so you go a bit longer between naps, snacks and slurps and some waypoint/map alterations. There are also combat changes, looting tweaks and the all-important assurance that "Basic rubber duck is now throwable".
]]>We Happy Few [official site] is a singleplayer, first-person survival game, set in an alt-history, 1960s-esque England in which the well-to-do all scoff 'Joy' pills to ensure an ordered society, while the less fortunate 'Downers' are locked out and left to live in squalor and madness. You play as Arthur, a clerk off his pills and starting to glimpse the stark truth of things, and cast out among the Downers as a result. There, you must craft and fight to say alive, and find a way to some presumed better place.
Strange timing. There am I thinking, "hey, We Happy Few owes quite a bit to Sir, You Are Being Hunted," and then Big Robot (headed by Jim Rossignol, formerly of this parish) only go and announce their new game. The cosmic ballet continues.
]]>We're well past the halfway point of 2016 now, and there are several games which have been in the Steam top ten for almost every week of the year so far. I feel a bit ill thinking about all the money involved. This week's - or rather last week's, this chart reflecting sales up until Sunday just gone - is a bit of a remix by recent standards, at least.
]]>Sure, you've survived the zombie apocalypse, the icepocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse, and even the mythical indiepocalypse, but can you survive in a dystopian '60s English city where everyone's hepped up on goofballs? We Happy Few [official site] launched into early access today so you can test yourself. I'm not usually one for survival-y games but I do like We Happy Few's ideas of social-ish survival, where tripping townsfolk may leave you alone if they don't realise you're not off your tits.
]]>We Happy Few [official site], you may recall, is an upcoming crowdfunded first-person social survival game from Contrast devs Compulsion Games. Besides its vibrant aesthetic, it poses an interesting premise: you're trapped in an alternate 1960s England where everyone in town is high on a hallucinatory happy drug called Joy but you're just coming off it. Problem is, this town hates "downers" and if they realise you're one there'll be hell to pay. It's sort-of BioShock, sort-of Orwell's 1984, sort-of Huxley's A Brave New World.
We Happy Few is heading to Early Access in July, Complusion announced at E3, and they've shared a look at its opening sequence too:
]]>We Happy Few [official site] is, I think, the only survival game with permadeath whose conceit has intrigued me enough that I've wanted to stick with it in spite of the insistence that humans lose water at the rate of your average sieve and that anyone can build advanced machinery with enough scavenged scrap metal. That said, I've just died for the sixth time and I'm feeling ever-more like the desperate and downcast character I'm playing.
We Happy Few is Compulsion Games' current project. Its world is the city of Wellington Wells, where a perky, authoritarian bubble called Hamlyn is separated from World War II ruins known as the Garden District by a series of bridges and security checkpoints. The checkpoints are designed to keep Downers - people who aren't taking their happy pills ("Joy" in the game parlance) - on the ruined side of the river. The idea is to find a way from the ruins where you spawn to the other side of the river and then figure out a way to escape.
]]>We Happy Few's [official site] The Prisoner-ish vibe caught my eye before but gosh oh golly, the game looks more interesting than I'd initially hoped. Developers Compulsion Games (them lot behind Contrast) have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund development, and what they're showing is awfully interesting.
It's a first-person survival game where stealth often involves being clearly visible and visibly happy. Roaming the streets of an odd '60s town, you'll greet folks pleasantly and avoid doing anything which lets on that you, unlike them, are not doped up to your eyeballs on pills that make people violently happy. So how do you intend to escape the town or get food to stay alive?
]]>We Happy Few [official site] brings The Prisoner to mind. It's set in an odd, colourful urban area where everyone is behaving strangely and some weird omniscient character sure is trying to keep you eye on you. While nonconformity in the classic English spy-fi show mostly got Patrick McGoohan a good gassing or drugging, it looks like We Happy Few's protagonist will be met with a little more violence. I'd rather be bopped with a nice big ballon than be twatted with a shovel.
It's the next game from Contrast developers Compulsion Games, the one they'd teased with talk of masks, drugs, and memory loss. Here, tell me this trailer it's not Prisoner-ish:
]]>Compulsion - the studio behind 2013's cabaret shadow platformer Contrast - have semi-announced their next project.
The details on offer at the moment are scant, with even the name a mystery, but the developers confirm that the game will not be a sequel to Contrast:
"We haven't ruled out doing one in the future, but after so long working on Contrast, we wanted to make something fresh. Something new and exciting. It involves masks, drugs and memory loss, but we swear it's not a swinger's party."
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