We Happy Few is a very interesting, visually beautiful and atmospheric story set in a dystopian and surreal setting that didn't make a good game.

The game is positioned as a "stealth action", but the stealth is implemented very mediocre, and the action is extremely monotonous. It's kind of like survival, but there are so many resources that you can "even eat them with your ass", so the real danger is not enemies or exhaustion, but technical problems and game conventions-nonsense. At the moment, although a bunch of patches have been released, everything is the same as a couple of years ago, NPCs get stuck in textures, look anywhere in cut scenes, quest chains get confused with each other, and so on. The game forces you to constantly collect everything that is bad and craft from it what will be a dead weight in your inventory. To smooth the problem, there is an infinite safe, in which consumables "available at any time" are available only for crafting and do not work in quests.

Quests, by the way, are notorious "bring-give" quickly tire of monotonous walking from one edge of the location to another. Although the open world is large, but since there is no conditional "roach", you have to walk huge distances and here the most annoying feature of the game comes into play - you can't run! This ban, due to lore, they say, it annoys the inhabitants, only the player is annoyed in the end, and in fact it was created only to stretch the timekeeping already stretched by insipid quests.
The intellect works in a very strange way, if it can be called intellect. NPCs can sometimes run through with impunity, start bludgeoning each other, and so on, but no one will care until the player is noticed in bad behavior. And as soon as at least someone paid attention to the player, EVERYONE becomes aggressive and even the old woman from the other end of the location will be unhappy that you decided to press the Shift a little.

Setting features also suffer. Pop a Joy (the drug around which the entire plot is built) does not change anything except gait and colors, as well as an overdose of it, which the game scares. The idea of ​​differences in events for the three main characters of the game, due to the distortion of memories, is good in words, but the implementation does not work, since the game takes place in real time, thus desynchronizations only add unnecessary conventions during their appearances.

However, the story tries to save the game, and each of the three main characters has their own well-developed stories that are easy to get into. Each character, like each act of the game, catches in different ways. For me personally, the best narration is the story for Arthur in Act I, the best ending is the epilogue for Sally in Act II, and Act III for Oliver, firstly, gives the most charismatic character presented, and secondly, quite successfully tries to make the above described meager the gameplay is much more interesting. Uncle Jack deserves special attention - the only character played by a live actor, whose performance is delightful. If you start following Uncle Jack, you will notice how amazingly his arc develops over the course of the story, and the emotions from the end of the game's story will be much brighter.

It was the story and visual aesthetic that allowed me to play this game a year and a half after I quit it for the first time halfway through the first act. Maybe the authors should have made a movie, not a game?