We Happy Few

Keep calm and carry on

- Martin Kitts

A vaguely familiar sight from the Xbox homepage during its protracted early access period, We Happy Few is a uniquely styled, sadly flawed adventure with an interesting concept.

It’s set in a retro-futuristic vision of the 1960s in which Britain surrendered to Germany during World War II. The occupying German forces departed some years later, taking with them a whole generation of British youth, while the remnants of the country became a totalitarian state, its population kept happy and obedient in a hallucinatory fugue by mandatory addiction to psychoactive drug Joy.

Arthur, the reluctant star of this tale, works in some sort of Orwellian ministry dedicated to rewriting the past by redacting contentious content from old newspapers. An article referencing his abducted brother stirs up some repressed memories, and when he decides to stop taking his Joy he sees the world as it truly is. There’s an office party scene at the start where his colleagues are busting open a piñata and cramming their faces with sweets, but as the Joy wears off Arthur realises they’re feasting obliviously on a dead rat.

His evident horror at this sudden exposure to grim reality marks him out as a Downer, a Joyless pariah, subject to immediate arrest and re-education. Pursued by the Bobbies, enforcers of Britain’s faceless masters, Arthur flees into the sewers and emerges in the countryside, beyond the city’s fortified walls and its regimented community, in the land of the outcasts – those who have abandoned Joy or become immune to its effects.