From the creators of Contrast comes We Happy Few, an action adventure game that takes place in a retrofuturistic society based on 1960s England, where almost everyone relies on a drug called Joy to numb them to how truly awful their wonderful dystopian world is. If this Orwellian nightmare sounds like the beginning of a lost script for an episode of “Black Mirror”, then you’re on the right track. The quirky charm of its world and the characters who inhabit it makes for an easy comparison to BioShock, but it earns the relation by being just as frightening to contemplate.
The game takes place in the newly rebuilt city of Wellington Wells after it was devastated by a war that left much of its population high, literally, on synthetic happiness. At the center of it is Arthur Hastings, an employee at City Hall’s Department of Archives, Recycling and Printing, who’s deemed a Downer by the deluded the moment he stops taking his Joy.
We Happy Few heads to Steam Early Access and Xbox One Preview on July 26.
