The Good Life

released on Oct 14, 2021

Enjoy everyday life while solving a murder mystery in Rainy Woods - known as the "happiest town in the world" - in this all-new "Debt Repayment RPG"!


Reviews View More

The Good Life was a Kickstarter title headed by Swery. The story follows Naomi, a journalist deep in massive debt. She was sent to investigate the mystery of a small British countryside town dubbed, "The Happiest Place on Earth." Early on in her snooping, she stumbles into a murder mystery and then from there, proceeds to solve the the mysteries of the murder and the town.

Unlike some of Swery's past games like the Deadly Premonition series, the murder mystery element isn't a strong focus. It's not even a serial killer on the lose either and it's just that one murder. The tone is also a lot more lighthearted too. In typical Swery fashion, the story gets crazy at times, but overall, it's not that fascinating. The climax in particular was weak.

The graphics aren't very good. Despite the cartoonish art direction, the character models look like they came out of a PS2/PS3 era game. The same goes for the environment textures.

The gameplay has left me a lot of mixed feelings. There's some interesting ideas like taking pictures and uploading to an Instagram-esque website to earn Likes and money.

Like Deadly Premonition, the townspeople live on a life schedule so they will do certain things on certain times/days. However, I don't think their schedules are as dynamic enough since it's fixed for most of the time with very little variation. It's not interesting enough to follow characters' lives.

One thing I'll mention though is that the townspeople can be pretty quirky, but fortunately, it's not all of them. It was an issue I had with Deadly Premonition 2 where everybody seems to have some quirk that's dialed to 10.

The map is fairly large with a lot of space, but it's not very condensed with unique content. The town's center is where most of the activity occurs and it's somewhat small. The outskirts consists of mostly open fields, random houses and unnamed NPCs.

For reasons I don't know why, Swery took Deadly Premonition's character health status conditions and added even more of them. Things like catching cold, throwing your back out or getting a toothache can be randomly inflicted and will last forever unless treated at the medical center or ingest the proper medication. Realism aside, this just isn't very fun to deal with.

The core gameplay involves completing main and sidequests which feels excessive at times. Most of them fall within the categories of taking specific pictures or crafting certain items. They get boring after a while especially crafting. The world has a ton of items and you need large quantities to make quest related items. Most of the rewards just consists of money and aren't worth the hassle.

The main standout gameplay is the ability to transform into a dog or cat. Dogs can dig up treasure in the ground and dig through trash for item. Most importantly is the ability to track people and item scents. It's annoyingly the only way to track people in this game since only one scent can be memorized at a given time. Dogs can also defeat medium size animals, but combat is clunky here.

Cats are mostly known for jumping higher than the dog and being able to climb certain walls. They can also instant kill small rodents and animals.

The Good Life has some nice novelty to it especially with the countryside setting and the life-sim schedules for the NPCs. You even get to transform into animals and ride a sheep as a mount, but the overall gameplay feels clunky and dated. There's also too many things padded out which makes completing quests a chore to do. The story is serviceable, but not really a hidden of gem of sorts.

Eu não consegui me acostumar com as demandas do jogo, e eu fico muito triste com isso porque eu acho que esse jogo é morbidamente fascinante.
Eu preciso ver uma gameplay no commentary desse jogo...

i adore this game, the nostalgiac style - the feverdream like missions and just the campy story of this.

the controls in this game are horrible, i suffered

The Good Life is a rather odd game. It sets itself in a small British town with a mystery to solve, while also attempting to be a “life RPG” similar to games like Stardew Valley and My Time At Portia. It describes itself as a “Debt Repayment RPG”, which doesn’t really fit the game at all – the debt is a reason for your character’s motivation, but it doesn’t have any relevance to the gameplay.

Naomi, a journalist from New York, is sent to “the happiest town in the world” to try and figure out the mysteries and secrets the town holds. Early on you discover that the residents can turn into cats and dogs, then gain the ability yourself to turn into either as much as you want. As you’re getting used to it, a murder happens and you try to solve that.

The gameplay itself is a “crafting” type game. You find items by scrounging around the map (a lot are gained by going through bins) or killing animals. These can then be turned into other materials and then those materials can be used to construct things like outfits or garden furniture. Unfortunately, the drop rate for a lot of things is extremely low. It’s the kind of game where you need (for example) rabbit fur, but only get rabbit meat from the first 20 you kill. Gathering materials is not fun at all, and as it’s only required for a small amount of main missions, you’ll likely just ignore it altogether. I spent most of the game wearing a ruffled dress that was needed for a mission.

You have multiple stats to keep up, like HP, health (this is separate from hit points and determines vulnerability to things like colds), hunger, charisma, stress. Some of it is always on the HUD while other times, it’s completely hidden. Most of this is managed by eating food. You can cook, but the amount of time required to get the resources means you’ll just buy it.

The rest of the gameplay is mainly fetch quests, and the gameplay itself isn’t really fun, it’s just really slow and clunky. Turning into a cat or dog sounds great, but the cat form is barely used (you can jump up buildings but it’s used around twice) and the dog is mainly used for tracking scents. The cat can jump higher than dog/human, but it’s very wonky.

Photography is another important aspect, you start with a sepia-toned camera but can buy a better one, along with a telescopic or wide angle lens. Objects are highlighted so you know what you’re taking a picture of. Some quests will ask for photos of certain objects or people. There is also a “social media” app that you can upload photos to, where your photos will get likes. If your photo matches any of the current hashtags, it will get more likes (and likes translate directly into money).

What makes The Good Place interesting is the intrigue and mystery around it. Something I kind of like is that it’s a view of the UK from a non-British developer. As a result, things are a bit off. The food available in the game included things like hedgehog pie, red squirrel stew, red deer burgers (which some people might have, but it’s called venison), and pork scratchings are described as being great when you bite into them and pork juices flow out. I’m not sure if the food is stuff they think we eat, or if some are there purely as a use for the in-game animals. I also found it fascinating that they added models for grit bins, but seem to be unaware of what they are as they’re marked up as “rubbish bins”.

Then there’s the mystery of what is going on. The story just gets crazier and crazier as you progress, with some amusing moments. For how the game looks, there’s also a surprising amount of swearing. I was a bit let down by how it’s resolved, but the ending was entertaining enough that it didn’t really matter.

The Good Life is a rather frustrating, slow and clunky game that just had an intriguing vibe to it that makes you want to see the story through to the end.

Had very little idea what to expect from this one besides the game breaking the fourth wall frequently to apologize for the monotonous design choices, which was super annoying but thankfully I found… something to like, although I’m still not really sure what that something is. The writing is predictably weird for a Swery game, not particularly sharp or clever but it’s somehow incentivizing enough in its oddity to make me want to carry through with the main story. Somehow it’s fallen into the well of huge, empty open-world games with mindless checklists that plague the industry currently, but it also emulates some of Shenmue’s life-sim-RPG mechanics, which is not a bad thing to crib from. Kind o a shame they’re shallow but it was at least appealing for a few hours. “Charming” may be too strong a word for all this, but it’s… quaint? It’s got that PS3-era C-list Japanese dev feel to it, which makes sense given Deadly Premonition.

I dilly-dallied with some sidequests while doing the main story at my own pace, but I checked out pretty quickly after seeing the ending. The main quest is bonkers enough to give the illusion of life to the town, but without it you realize just how banal the game world is. The sidequests are frustratingly dull and the writing isn’t strong enough to make them worth it. There also isn’t much of in the ways of rewards to incentivize doing them, the prizes are usually ass and not much to spend your money on either. Don’t even get me started on 100% completion, which involves dozens of hours grinding on menial tasks with nothing to gain besides saying you did it. Kind of bitterly ironic that the game’s story is meant to persuade Naomi of the value of the town and then when the curtains fall - you realize it really is just a goddamn hellhole.