I suppose I’ve officially finished We Happy Few now that I’ve made it through act 3, which follows crazy Scotsman Ollie Starkey as he looks into something Arthur Hastings brought to his attention early in the first act. Still, there are a whole bunch of sidequests that I ended up ignoring in acts 2 and 3, which makes it surprising that it took around 32 hours to reach We Happy Few‘s epilogue. Obviously playtimes don’t reflect quality or value—and one positive aspect of the backlash against this particular game is that consumers are finally recognizing that—but I can’t help but think that I’ll look back on We Happy Few fondly despite how much padding there ended up being. Ollie Starkey’s campaign is easily the least padded one present here, too, and it was nice to blow through it in 5-6 hours instead of spending hours looking for elusive ingredients (which is very much a thing in Sally’s campaign).

Semi-connected stories

Ollie only interacts with Arthur at the very beginning of act 3, and he never seems to run into Sally. Acts 2 and 3 share a handful of characters anyway, though, and while Ollie’s story is more standalone and big-picture, you can see the results of some of the things you’ve done in previous acts. For example, the parade district has plague victims wandering around and complicating your ability to blend in by attacking you on sight, and all because Arthur shut down the quarantine. Little things like that and an epilogue that shifts back to Arthur make clear that all of these stories are occurring around the same time, which further suggests that some of the inconsistencies between how things play out in different acts come down to drugs messing with memories. This is never really explored, though, with most of the finer details being left to the imagination like in Contrast. It really does work better in We Happy Few, but I nevertheless found myself wishing for a little more interaction between the characters near the end. After all, three characters who know each other narrowly escaping from a city on the precipice of collapse makes you think that they’ll join up at some point on the other side with clearer heads. Avoiding that feels in keeping with the spirit of the game, but it’s also not a very fulfilling resolution.

Buggy Ollie Starkey

I managed to avoid a bunch of bugs in the first two acts, but things got pretty weird for Ollie’s act. A dead character was perpendicular to their coffin at one point, hostile characters would sometimes disappear mid-attack, there was a weird outbreak of bees that distracted a whole bunch of bobbies in the city despite it not being clear where said bees originated from, and I had another crash. There was also a fast travel point which could be traveled to from a hatch before the story unlocked it, which didn’t really affect anything negatively, but it was confusing being able to fast travel to a point I hadn’t discovered yet. It also dawned on me that I’ve been overlooking a major bug, that being unconscious characters never waking up and eventually dying. To be honest, I noticed this at one point during Arthur’s playthrough, but like Sally’s weirdly ineffective atomizers, it’s a bug that becomes easy to overlook when you take a murder-everything approach to We Happy Few.

Another thing you may notice in the video above is that red icon where status effects are. That’s Ollie’s Blood Sugar, and having it too high or low negatively affects him. In theory, at least; I didn’t notice any obvious penalties to having high blood sugar, while low blood sugar eventually cuts his health and stamina in half. Early on, a quest tasks you with finding honey to craft a glucose syringe, and I was dreading the possibility that I’d be engaged in constant, Sally-esque hunts for the weirdly rare honey resource. As it turns out, blood sugar can be raised by simply eating food, which gives food much more of a purpose than it had in the first two acts. This blood sugar mechanic seemed like it’d be a huge liability, but ended up being an enjoyable little reminder to eat a slice of pie every so often to avoid penalties. At worst, it’s a system that’s tacked on. At best, you find yourself smiling as you’re breaking into houses for the sole purpose of stealing pie from the unaware homeowners.

Ollie moves slower and can’t run without quickly depleting his entire stamina bar, which makes the early part of the act where you’re running around the worst part of it. Once you get into the city and unlock a handful of fast travel points, however, things really start going, and the only real limitation at that point is his complete inability to use chemistry sets. They’ll explode if he tries. He can still craft a small handful of things like healing balms and such, but he’s pretty much the polar opposite of Sally gameplay-wise. Ollie takes a little getting used to (going from quick stamina regeneration to slow stamina regeneration is very jarring), but once you do, it’s business as usual. Especially if you’ve opted for violence, which is his forte.

The AI isn’t very smart

It could be argued that having NPCs rush to their death makes sense given how hopped up on drugs most of them are, and I do have to admit that watching them damage each other while trying to hit me with a grenade is hilarious, but it’s far more likely that characters act simply to keep from overloading players’ CPUs even more than We Happy Few already does. There’s nothing inherently wrong about an open-world game having characters incapable of fighting intelligently (let’s face it, no one’s ever had a genuinely good fight in anything Bethesda has ever made), but I still found myself wishing they did a little more than brainlessly diving into my weapon. The closest anyone here ever got was to move behind me to get around my block, and even then, I’m pretty sure it happened more for pathfinding reasons than strategy ones. Again, I can’t really hold this against the game, but the sameness of every fight, combined with the occasional bugs and fetch quests, can make the gameplay deeply unpleasant at times. It’s a good thing, then, that We Happy Few‘s story, soundtrack, and art design more than make up for its gameplay deficiencies.

[Click here to go to We Happy Few: Let’s talk about Sally Boyle]

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