There are basically only two episodes of The Prisoner: the one where Number 6 tries to escape the Village and fails, and the one the Village’s shadowy overlords try to break Number 6 and fail. If either succeeded, the show would be over. It was still a great program even though it only had two formulas to work with most of the time, but a video game has the option of ending whenever it feels like it. It can break you or let you escape as it will. We Happy Few will probably break you.
Compulsion Games’ follow-up to Contrast (which is currently on Kickstarter) is set in a dystopian alternate 1960s England where citizens are kept under control with a drug called Joy–apparently the most efficient opiate of the masses is an actual opiate. Those who don’t take Joy are called Downers, and nobody likes a Downer. It casts you as a Downer trying to escape the town of Wellington Wells, with Bobbies out to get you and even ordinary citizens liable to turn on you.
The backstory is imparted through radio propaganda from Uncle Jack, a Big Brother who speaks pure Received Pronunciation, broadcast into the tiny underground chamber I’ve woken up in. In this bunker there’s a bed, some lockers I don’t have keys for, and crafting tables. Yep, crafting. We Happy Few is a survival game, in which you need to eat and drink and make your own lockpicks, as well as a stealth game in which you need to not be beaten to death by Bobbies.
Aboveground I find a ruined, overgrown Garden District full of “wastrels”, people who had a negative reaction to Joy and were segregated on the outskirts of town. This is an early, pre-alpha development build so things like the combat and AI are forgivably rudimentary. “What are you lurking there for?” a wastrel asks, the eye above his head showing an increasing state of alertness. “I’m playing a stealth game,” I reply, crouch-walking back out of his hovel with the metal bits I’ve stolen.
With those I make lockpicks to gain access to my underground lockers, which contain apples–the first food I’ve found–and homemade grenades called bangers. After looting several piles of rubble and stripping leaves off plants to make health balms I’ve exhausted most of the options in this district, a small island surrounded by water that kills you if you touch it.
A bridge leads to the next district, a nicer one where the buildings don’t have trees growing out of them. The two Bobbies guarding it chase me back off the bridge then suddenly get distracted by wastrels. I watch them club one with their nightsticks before I work up the courage to take them on. Throwing bangers doesn’t seem to cause much damage–they’re better used as distractions–but a branch turns out to be a good enough weapon to defeat them, especially when one Bobbie gets stuck facing the wrong way and can’t turn around. Like I said, it’s an early pre-alpha. At the moment there are block and shove buttons, and combos if you time your attacks right, but combat is one of the things they’ll be working on in the months ahead.