The Good Life is the newest game from White Owls Inc., and of course the wonderfully weird mind of SWERY, the man behind Deadly Premonition, which I have yet to play. This is only my second SWERY game, the first being D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, which I enjoyed how bizarre it was despite not having a proper ending. I intentionally went into The Good Life knowing as little as possible to be surprised and, while there’s a lot to unpack, the simplest description would be that it’s an open-world lifesim game of sorts. You play as Naomi Hayward, a photojournalist from New York, sent to investigate the quaint British village of Rainy Woods, regarded as the “Happiest Town in the World” but is hiding some sort of secret.

My first impression was that character models are rough, very plastic and blocky looking. The environment isn’t much better, just visually very flat and feels lacking in flair for detail. Some of the character designs are inventive enough but overall the visuals are not this game’s strong point.

As far as what you do and what this game is, that is an entire can of worms in itself. It’s a third-person, open world, life simulator complete with a rural town full of NPC questgivers and animal wildlife. Your ultimate goal will be to complete the main quest and unravel the town’s mystery, however, there is a surprising amount of depth to the game, and that’s not necessarily for the better. You will be keeping track of various stats such as health points, hunger, sleepiness, stamina, stress, charisma, and hygiene. There is also an additional overall health system, which is different than your hitpoints, and an illness mechanic. Low health means you’re more likely to contract an injury or illness and this system works with other systems, for example having low health and high stress can give you a headache, or staying out in cold or wet weather for too long can give you a cold. There is a crafting and cooking system complete with resource gathering, recipes, and of course altering the aforementioned stats. You also have a garden that can be used to grow food and a wardrobe for collecting clothes, both of which can grant stat-altering benefits. You can also remodel and decorate your home and garden. Alas, Naomi is a photographer, so there is a photography system complete with upgradeable equipment in the form of new lenses as well as a tags system for buzzwords and an in-game social media service for uploading your photos with certain tags and earning money. Getting into minor spoilers now you gain a faster means of travel at some point in the game, there is a stat and progression system behind that. Lastly, you will gain the power to transform into a cat and dog, which offer unique abilities as well as a town-wide faction divide over the two complete with an alignment system that will alter shop prices and whether or not certain NPC’s will even talk to you depending on which team you currently align with. If it sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. The game has an astonishing amount of depth and even an interplay and synergy between its systems. But this is ultimately the biggest problem I have with The Good Life and it’s this scattershot approach to just pumping the game full of “stuff” and not truly giving any of it enough thought or time to fully develop into something tangible. Sure, there are a ton of systems but many of them are so shallow or broken it often feels like they’re fighting each other for attention. NPC’s have schedules, but they can get caught on terrain and run late frequently. So, if you’re trying to buy materials from Douglas, whose sign says he’s open from 7 am to 7 pm, sometimes he won’t show up until 10 am. Combat is incredibly mindless, simple, and rarely relevant other than being an inconvenient annoyance. I think the illness mechanic is brilliant, but it’s weirdly punishing and out of place for a game where you do odd jobs for silly characters and unravel various hijinks. At one point I forgot Naomi’s prime occupation because the photography system feels so unrewarding and tacked on. I’m already not a fan of survival games, so having to watch a painfully pitiful hunger meter empty so frequently was maddening and felt like a chore I had to work my way through constantly. There is warming food for a cold temperature zone that I used exactly once as a requirement for the main story. I truly believe that if several systems were cut and more focus was placed on the more interesting systems, the game would be better for it. Unfortunately, this scattershot approach to game design isn’t solely restricted to the game’s numerous gameplay systems, but it affects the story as well.

I was enjoying my time with The Good Life for the first hour or so. The writing can be crude and kinda funny at points, as hearing uptight city-slicker Naomi curse and argue with “country bumpkins” who live in a “goddamn hellhole” can be entertaining. The mainline plot was even intriguing at first, trying to wrap my head around what could be lying beneath the underbelly of a seemingly picturesque town. Unfortunately, the writing and story wears itself thin over time, often under the weight of itself, and Naomi as a character is aggressively unlikeable and rude. They’re going for this stick in the mud of a person who can’t kick it out of their comfort zone thing but she has zero redeeming qualities other than some of her jibes towards the townsfolk got a laugh or two out of me. Also, one of the key plot points is that she’s in a massive amount of debt but I just can’t root for her or connect with the plight of a protagonist when they’re the worst part of the story. Then there’s the overall plot, which starts intriguing but explodes into a mess of bloat and too many ideas fighting each other. I’ll spoiler tag this but here are some out of context themes that this story attempts to cover: historical British figures real and fictional like Charles the 2nd and Britania, people transforming into animals, time travel, vampires, ritualistic murder, fairy tales, UFO’s and alien abductions, a Sherlock Holmes knockoff, Arthurian legend, a mad scientist, and the bonkers finale which crams in a hamfisted critique of social media, the responsibility of the media, and fake news. Many of these are dropped as quickly as they are brought up and beg the question why do they exist within the game in the first place? One thing I’ll give the story is that it’s unpredictable, but it bounces from absurd concepts or dropped subplots so fast that it just never truly focuses on the major points at hand. I don’t know what this game wants to be and sometimes it seems like it just wants to be weird for weird’s sake or maybe because SWERY has this reputation for being “wacky”. This game just leaves so many unanswered questions in what is set up to be a mystery that ultimately had a supremely disappointing ending that I can’t help but talk about. MASSIVE SPOILERS The first hour or so is hunky-dory, it’s a quaint British town and they can turn into dogs/cats, neat! Then, in an effectively shocking twist, one of the characters ends up getting murdered and you become the chief investigator. Except, you never find out the true murderer but not that that matters because the game ends with a slightly altered version of the murdered character not being murdered but replacing the murder victim with another character’s body who was just added literally within the last 30 to 40 minutes of the game’s story? Look, I get that SWERY's stuff is loved for being off-the-wall and out of left field but the climax has little through line to anything else leading up to it and the stuff that I was interested in gets so dashed off in a half-hearted and inconclusive way that I was genuinely disappointed by the end.

Unfortunately, I don’t think The Good Life is a good game by any means. The gameplay is pretty generic albeit having a surprising amount of depth. While the writing, characters, and story are certainly unpredictable and occasionally funny or interesting, the game misses far more than it hits. The more I played, the less I liked it as I just became inundated and overwhelmed by a scattershot lack of focus in its gameplay and story. It’s a game that feels like so much effort was put into and like there was just so much being thrown against the wall to see what stuck. I love games that try to step out of the box and do something different to try and break the stagnate mold of most open-world shlock that exists nowadays, and this game attempts that but I think it just bites off far more than it can chew. I personally haven't played it but SWERY's Deadly Premonition is regarded as being "so bad it's good" but I just can't give that label to The Good Life as it seems to be lacking charm and coherence. I enjoyed D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die but gave it a lot of benefit of the doubt knowing going in that the game was unfinished, so in essence, The Good Life is my first "complete" SWERY game and I just don't think it sticks the majority of what it's going for. I think it’s trying to spin far too many plates and ends up making a mess of any good ideas that it may have. I wanted to like this game more than I did so I did manage to see it through to the end because I wanted to see what happened next, and I think playing this finally gave me the urge to play through Deadly Premonition and keep exploring the strangeness of SWERY's games, because they surely are unique and there's nothing in games quite like what I've played thus far, for better or for worse.

Playthrough Stats: Main + Extras - 15 hr. 38 min. 27 sec.

Score: 4/10 (Subpar)