We Happy Few

Arcade Mode was added as part of the 1.7 update and added three new game-modes: Survival, The Night Watch, and Sandbox. They can be accessed on the new tab on the main menu named Arcade. The player can save Survival and Sandbox (unless permadeath is on, in which case you cannot save), but not The Night Watch.

Survival mode focuses more on the game's survival features and requires close attention to the chosen character's physical needs. The player spawns on one of several islands of different sizes (the player can choose from a small, medium or large island) with different layouts; the islands are a mix of the Garden District and Hamlyn Village. The player can choose one of the three characters from the campaign to play as they progress through the campaign. On each Island there are two notable locations (a black circle with an eye on it) which each contain either a bridge key-card or a boat capacitor, and they have to use the key cards to unlock the bridges to the other islands. The player's score depends on how long they survive and if they managed to escape by collecting the five boat capacitors located around the map and repairing a boat in the boat house. The player has to find safe houses on the island, but they cannot sleep in an occupied house (the occupants will awake immediately). They can also fast travel to any safe-house that they have located, from anywhere on the map (unless they are in combat). The player must explore others houses and buildings around the map to find food and water to avoid starving, which will end the game.

The Night Watch mode focuses on the game's combat features and instead of being a downer, the player plays as a Bobby named John Constable (or "Constable Constable" for short). The player spawns on a randomly generated island in the Village of Hamlyn and there are no bridges off the island. The mode is round-based and to advance the rounds the player must eliminate all enemies that spawn in until the rounds timer ends in which the player can use a Bobby Popper to end the round. The player earns money (pounds) by eliminating enemies (including Wastrels and Downers, Headboys, Ploughboys, Plague Wastrels, and Plague Soldiers) to get a various amount of it. Witches can spawn, serving as mini-bosses are the most dangerous of all the enemies and deal the most damage but also give major rewards when defeated. As well as spending their money on the vending machines, players must spend their money on Joy which they need to do regularly as their Joy Meter goes down and if they run out of Joy the Game ends. Joy starts at £20 but the price goes up every round. The player always takes Blackberry Flavour of Joy, a rarer version of the drug which is made by Sally Boyle who left Wellington Wells which meant production of this flavour would have stopped. This could explain why it cost money to buy it in this mode while in the main campaign it is free. As the player kills enemies, their rage meter fills up. If they get three consecutive eliminations they can enter rage mode and not lose stamina and their Joy would not go down while it is active. Spankers are located around the map which can help the player by electrocuting enemies that are near it.

In Sandbox Mode, the player can do whatever they want, there is no goal. The player can choose how they want the island to be by changing the height variation, layout, size, and the island composition. They also can choose their character out of the three from the campaign, what they spawn with, and NPC density. They can also choose if permadeath is on or off.

The character Uncle Jack, played by Julian Casey, is depicted in live-action scenes

The game takes place in an alternate historical timeline, in which Giuseppe Zangara assassinates Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, allowing Senator Huey Long to become President of the United States. Under Long, it is implied that Japan did not attack Pearl Harbor, but if they did, it would not give the United States a reason to fight against Germany, leaving the United Kingdom to defend itself from the German forces alone. The Battle of Britain was lost, allowing the Germans to invade and occupy the entire country. Most of the volunteer forces of the Home Guard became complicit in helping the Germans, with only a few attempting to resist.[7]

At some point during the occupation, the population of the island town of Wellington Wells did what is initially only alluded to as a "Very Bad Thing" that caused the Germans to voluntarily leave their island, allowing the British citizens there to live free. However, the repercussions of the Very Bad Thing left the citizens with immense anguish and guilt over their actions, leading to the invention of a new hallucinogenic drug called "Joy", which suppresses all unhappy memories and leaves its user in a chemically-induced euphoria, while also brightening how they perceive their environment. However, its many adverse side effects include addiction, short-term memory loss, loss of appetite, nightmarish hallucinations, and being susceptible to manipulation.

By the 1960s, Wellington Wells' isolation led to resounding advances in technology, including Tesla-styled weapons, portable power cells, and automated security systems. Its inhabitants—referred to as "Wellies"—wear white "Happy Face" masks, which were created to forcefully mold the wearer's cheekbones into a smile, resulting in the wearer permanently smiling. Joy is freely dispensed in pill form and is also laced into the city's water supply. To encourage the drug's consumption, the media is tightly controlled and centers on "Uncle" Jack Worthing, a friendly MC whose voice and image widely broadcasts government propaganda over the city's televisions and radios.

Some Wellies developed immunity to Joy—partly due to ingesting bad batches of the drug—and subsequently became depressed or insane from remembering the Very Bad Thing; these people were then driven out of Wellington Wells and came to be known as "Wastrels". Others who voluntarily refuse their Joy are known as "Downers" and seen as a threat; if caught, Downers are either force-fed Joy, are taken to a Joy Doctor to get a potentially lethal liquid injection of Joy, or are outright killed on the spot. As a result, Wellington Wells has become a dystopian police state on the verge of collapse.

The game features three different playable characters, each with their own story arcs that intersect throughout the game:

Arthur's Story: Arthur Hastings (Alex Wyndham) works as a censor approving or redacting old news articles from Wellington Wells' Department of Archives, Printing, and Recycling. While working, he comes across a news clipping of him and his older brother Percy (Bradley Henderson) after World War II. At this point, Arthur can either take his Joy (which ends the game) or refuse it, wanting to remember Percy. If the latter choice is taken, Arthur attends an office party with his boss, Victoria Byng (Katherine Kingsley), and watches in horror as Victoria and his co-workers consume a rat that they hallucinate to be a candy-filled piñata. He is then called out as a Downer and chased by the police, ending up in the Garden District, now populated by Wastrels. Arthur resolves to escape Wellington Wells and find Percy.

With the assistance of various characters, Arthur works his way through the districts uncovering certain truths along the way. It is eventually revealed that the "Very Bad Thing" was when the population of Wellington Wells turned over all children under the age of 13 years to the Germans in exchange for their freedom. Arthur discovers that the German tanks used to threaten the town into compliance were actually dummy tanks made of papier-mâché, and that while the populace could have resisted, they did not out of fear. He also learns that Wellington Wells is slowly falling apart; the city's infrastructure is failing, an unspecified disease outbreak has occurred, and Joy is becoming less effective, with scientist Anton Verloc (Michael Shaeffer) researching a new version of Joy to permanently lobotomize the populace and keep them in a never-ending state of euphoria. Eventually, Arthur reaches a railway bridge leading out of Wellington Wells, and recalls that he swapped his identity card (which stated his age as 12) with Percy's (who had just turned 13) before the children of Wellington Wells boarded the fateful train to Germany, effectively sacrificing his brother to save himself.

Sally's Story: The creator of a new brand of Joy, Sally Boyle (Charlotte Hope), works as an experimental chemist in her laboratory after being kicked out of Haworth Labs by its director, Anton Verloc. The police threaten Sally into supplying them with her Joy and are forced to scrounge the city for new ingredients to create a fresh batch.

Sally is secretly a mother to the first baby born in Wellington Wells in fifteen years: Gwen, who Verloc fathered. When Gwen becomes sick with measles, Sally asks Arthur, her childhood friend, to find a bottle of cod liver oil. Arthur, not knowing it is for Gwen, agrees in return for a Letter of Transit from General Robert Byng (Stephen Boxer), Sally's most prominent patron and on-and-off lover. Sally eventually remembers how her mother poisoned her family when she and her siblings were to be taken to Germany, leaving Sally as the sole survivor. Arthur delivers the oil and considers having Sally join his escape, but he changes his mind and leaves when she tells him about Gwen.

Determined to flee Wellington Wells with Gwen, Sally plans to steal General Byng's personal motorboat hidden near his military base. She convinces Dr. Helen Faraday (Samantha Lee) to create a new engine for the boat but fails to steal the key, getting knocked out by a sleeping dart trap. She awakens to find herself with General Byng in his safehouse; Byng intends to keep Sally imprisoned there until the problems in Wellington Wells are resolved while sending Gwen away to the mainland. Sally refuses, fights Byng, takes the key to the boat, and locks him inside the safehouse. Sally sneaks Gwen to the boat at night and rides it out of Wellington Wells.

Ollie's Story: Ollie Starkey (Allan James Cooke) is a former British Army soldier, who lives as a recluse at his fortified hideout in the Garden District. His only company is a talking hallucination of his daughter, Margaret (Eloise Webb), killed years ago during the Very Bad Thing.

After helping Arthur along his journey and having his hideout destroyed by Wastrels, he finds his former commander, General Byng. He informs him of the papier-mâché tanks Arthur had discovered. Byng reveals that he knew about the fake tanks but remained quiet to avoid a rebellion, which he doubts would have been successful. He also reveals that Ollie knew about the tanks as well, having served as Byng's orderly at the time. Unable to remember, Ollie leaves to confront Byng's daughter, Victoria. Ollie captures her and withholds her Joy, forcing her to remember that she had helped the Germans during the Very Bad Thing. Both aware of the city's true history; Ollie informs her that the city's food has run out and implores her to help him reveal these truths to save the people. Victoria agrees, but when Ollie releases her, she attacks him and escapes.

After finding the town's executive committee too addled on Joy to pay any mind to the tanks or the famine, Ollie decides to confront Uncle Jack (Julian Casey), Wellington Wells' friendly celebrity propagandist. Ollie infiltrates his broadcasting studio above City Hall but finds Jack is missing. He plays a tape of his final but unreleased broadcast, in which Jack suffers an emotional breakdown brought about by resurfacing memories of his daughter Margaret and despairs over the town's hopeless situation. Ollie finally realizes that his Margaret was actually Jack's daughter; Jack had tried to hide her from the Germans, but Ollie (who was their neighbor and hated Jack for being a collaborator) informed on them, and she was shot trying to flee. Overwhelmed with guilt, he eventually had Sally Boyle make him a potion a year ago to scramble his memories. Ollie broadcasts the unreleased tape to the city, awakening the population. He then bids farewell to Margaret and builds a hot air balloon that he rides out of Wellington Wells.

After Sally and Ollie's chapters have been completed in the epilogue, the player can choose one of two endings: either Arthur departs Wellington Wells for the mainland and continues his search for Percy, or takes the memory-destroying drug Oblivion and rejoins the populace in their ignorance. If Arthur continues to the mainland, he encounters an impoverished young child complaining about the rainy weather, indicating other towns in England did not follow the path Wellington Wells did.

Influential works of fiction, such as Doctor Who, BioShock, V for Vendetta and The Prisoner, provided inspiration for developers with shaping the retrofuturistic, dystopian world of "We Happy Few"

While Compulsion Games are a Canadian studio based out of Montreal, many of them are fascinated by British television and film, which formed much of the influence on We Happy Few. The 1960s British setting was found to be ideal for the game and concept; according to Compulsion's COO Sam Abbott, this was "a great period with lots of relentless optimism about the future, while also at the same time ignoring a lot of actual problems that existed in the society of the time".[9] Dystopic fiction was a common influence.[10] Provost stated that a primary influence was the 1985 dystopian film Brazil.[15] Other influential works include The Prisoner, A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, V for Vendetta and Doctor Who, along with the humor of Monty Python and Blowup for the game's aesthetics.[10][16][17][18] Some of the Compulsion team, including Provost, had been with Arkane Studios during a time where they were secretly developing an episode for the Half-Life series, also set in a dystopian world, which carried into We Happy Few.[10]

Provost felt the belief of citizens that they were in a utopia and the darker reality "under the hood" formed the "basis" of dystopian fiction.[10] The idea of the Wellies wearing masks was seen as flipping around the use of Guy Fawkes masks in V for Vendetta, that instead of being a sign of resistance, they would be "a symbol of the psychological oppression", forcing their wearer to be smiling all the time, according to Provost.[10]

We Happy Few has been said by some to be a cross between video games series BioShock, Fallout and Don't Starve,[19] and novels Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.[20] The main characters were also seen as amalgamations from these types of works: Arthur as a mix of Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four and Sam Lowry from Brazil, while Uncle Jack is seen as a mix of Jack Nicholson's Joker from Batman and Lewis Prothero from V for Vendetta.[10] The developers commented on difficulties distinguishing the game from BioShock in the public eye,[9] and though Provost said he was "flattered" by the comparison, he argued it was never a "prime influencer".[10] Describing the meaning behind the story, Alex Epstein was quoted as saying "We Happy Few is inspired by, among other things, prescription drug culture — the idea that no one should have to be sad if they can pop a pill and fix it. It's also about Happy Facebook culture: no one shares their bad news because it would bring everyone down. As a culture, we no longer value sadness."[21]

We Happy Few was revealed on 26 February 2015, and publicly debuted at PAX East 2015, allowing attendees to go hands-on with a very early version of the project.[22][23] During June 2015, Compulsion Games ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, raising US$266,163 of the target US$200,000 to fund the development of the game.[24] About 2,000 of these supporters backed at levels to participate in the game's alpha-version testing alongside Compulsion's dedicated play-testing team of five, but Compulsion found this did not provide them enough feedback to know which way to take the narrative elements within the randomly generated world.[9] Instead, Compulsion opted to open the game to an early access release in a playable state on various storefronts for Windows and on the Xbox One Xbox Game Preview program starting on 26 July 2016 as to be able to gain much more feedback.[25][26] Part of their choice to use early access was to provide transparency of what the game was actually to be, wanting to avoid the pitfalls that happened with No Man's Sky on its release in August 2016. Compulsion found many were anticipating a AAA gaming experience from their small team, and thus wanted to make sure players were clear on what their goals were for We Happy Few.[27]

One issue faced during development in early access was managing the expectations of what We Happy Few was meant to be. The first trailers Compulsion released as well as the early access version, featuring a short narrative sequence introducing the playable character Arthur, created the impression that the game would be a first-person action-adventure game with a linear narrative. These early versions of We Happy Few were frequently compared to BioShock, a first-person shooter with a strong narrative produced by Irrational Games on a triple-A budget, and well outside the class of game that Compulsion was seeking to make.[14] Compulsion maintained it was aiming to produce a roguelike survival game with some light narrative elements, which was meant to be played repeatedly, with a complete playthrough taking only three to four hours.[28] Compulsion was aware that early access had worked well for games that lacked a strong narrative, and thus focused the initial development within early access on the survival elements, planning to hold back on the narrative development until late in the process as they did not want to reveal the full story until late in development.[29] Compulsion also found it difficult to convince players that story elements were coming for the game's final release.[30]

Compulsion learned that players from early access were much more interested in the game's narrative over the game's survival or roguelike mechanics. At one point, the studio tried to remove the survival elements leaving only the action-adventure gameplay, but felt this affected the balance and flavor of the title, since Wellington Wells was meant to be a society on the verge of collapse due to dwindling resources. Instead, they added in some of the basics of survival gameplay: instead of potentially killing the player character, factors like nourishment and rest will buff the character if satisfied or debuff them if not met, and the permadeath facet was taken out, made as an option for more hard-core players.[29][31] Some issues arose from Compulsion's onboarding of new staff as the game grew. While the experience these new developers brought to the game ultimate improved it according to Provost, their initial contributions shifted the direction of the game and created instability in the development process.[14] In retrospective, Provost stated that they likely would have dropped the procedurally generated elements once they had focused more on the narrative, as the combination of the two "doesn't make any sense".[14]

Compulsion also put more effort into creating narrative encounters with unique characters, and level spaces for these to occur within the procedurally generated world.[29] Feedback from players were positive about the unique characters they had made to support the shorter form of the game, so Compulsion had to spend more time in creating backgrounds and stories for more unique characters, which tool away from some other story aspects they wanted to tell.[12] They also had little time to make new cinematics to help explain some of these backstories, and instead resorted to using audio recordings to help flesh out the characters.[12] Narrative director Alex Epstein felt the added time to make the changes helped to make the game more cohesive, making it felt that the main story and the various procedurally generated side narratives were part of a wholly singular game rather than disparate pieces.[12] Community manager Naila Hadjas stated that with these changes, they estimated the full game now was about 20 hours long, but still offering replayability through the procedural generation aspects, different playable characters and difficulty modes.[28]

In January 2018, the studio announced that while the game was now "content complete", they needed to polish the game further, and pushed back the game's release towards mid-2018. This move was also aimed to avoiding having to provide regular updates to early access purchasers, allowing them to finish the game without external pressure from fans.[30] Alongside this, in response to complaints regarding the price change, disabled the ability to pre-order the game and offered full refunds to anyone that had bought the title earlier regardless of playtime.[32]

Microsoft has been a major supporter for Compulsion Games in backing We Happy Few, leading to the game having its console debut on the Xbox One. Microsoft announced We Happy Few as part of their press conferences at Gamescom in August 2015,[26] Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016.[33] and Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018. This last presentation was accompanied by the news that Microsoft Studios had acquired Compulsion Games as part of their in-house studios.[34][35]

In August 2017, Compulsion Games announced that they have partnered with Gearbox Software for financial support to expand the game into a retail-length title, planned to release on 13 April 2018. Compulsion's Provost had known Gearbox's Randy Pitchford prior to their release of Contrast, and Contrast's visual style had caught Pitchford's attention, but the studio lacked a publishing arm at the time.[27] By E3 2016, where Microsoft presented We Happy Few as part of its press event, Gearbox operated its Gearbox Publishing division led by Steve Gibson. Gibson, also interested in what We Happy Few offered, invited Compulsion to their offices to discuss financing and publishing opportunities for the game.[27] Gearbox's funding helped Compulsion expand their team four-fold and expand the scope and narrative of the game. With Gearbox's help, Compulsion was able to develop We Happy Few for the PlayStation 4, while Gearbox will publish retail versions for all platforms; Microsoft's acquisition of the studio did not impact this publishing deal.[36] However, Compulsion also said that with this expanded title, the price of the game will be increased from $30 to $60, with those that backed the Kickstarter or purchased the early access versions getting the full game and some of the downloadable content that is planned for free. Compulsion plans to offer a season pass for additional content that will be developed after release, enabled by Gearbox's backing.[37] Compulsion's community manager Nadia Hadjas said that neither Microsoft nor Gearbox provided oversight on the game, allowing Compulsion to develop the title based on their own goals and the community's feedback.[14]

In May 2018, the Australian Classification Board had refused classification for We Happy Few, identifying that gameplay mechanics around the use of Joy pills was problematic, which would prevent the game from being sold in Australia. The Board stated in their refusal that because "the game's drug-use mechanic making game progression less difficult constitutes an incentive or reward for drug-use and therefore, the game exceeds the R18+ classification that states, 'drug use related to incentives and rewards is not permitted'".[38] Compulsion Games said that it was working with the Board to challenge their ruling and make the game appropriate to be rated, stating that they believe that the use of Joy was part of the game's themes, "It's a society that is forcing its citizens to take Joy, and the whole point of the game is to reject this programming and fight back", and compared this theme to that of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.[38] Compulsion Games said they were prepared to offer refunds even to Kickstarter backers from Australia should they be unable to achieve a rating.[38] The Australian Ratings Board agreed to review their classification, offering interested parties to also reply in standing for reclassification of the game during the month of July 2018.[39] On 3 July, the Board announced that they had reclassified We Happy Few with an R18+ rating, still warning consumers of its drug-use mechanic, but otherwise clearing the title to be sold within Australia.[40]

The full game was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One on 10 August 2018.[41] On 27 November 2018, Dark Horse Comics released a 192-page book titled The Art of We Happy Few.[42]