The Good Life Review (Switch eShop)

White Owls Inc. really buried the lede in its Kickstarter description of The Good Life. We’ll do the same here and see if you can spot it: The Good Life is a “daily life debt settlement RPG” in which you play as an American woman in an English pastoral village, enjoying everyday activities like taking pictures. , run errands, go shopping, chat with villagers, pay debts, comment on the weather, go to the pub and pee on the streetlights when you turn into a dog to solve mysteries.

Does anyone take it? It was the last, about transmutational criminology.

The good life was Started in 2018, with some impressive resumes: In addition to director Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro’s Deadly Premonition games, his team members have worked on Panzer Dragoon, Rez, Hatsune Miku Project DIVA, Final Fantasy XII and much more. Reaching 135% of its funding goal, it has taken Switch on a quantifiably impressive wave of fan support. And all that money has gone to produce something big. The setting places New York photojournalist Naomi Hayward in a sprawling open-world mosaic of the English countryside. Centered in a small town of stone-built houses, it covers rolling fields with dry stone walls, farmland, stately homes, and a variety of sights in the middle of nowhere, to be explored with Naomi as a human, cat, or dog, with associated balances. stamina, speed, acrobatics and special abilities.

Although the fascination with Britain is clearly authentic, its recreation is more whimsical. The crazy story begins by pondering the whereabouts of Dick Whittington’s cat, veers off in the direction of Excalibur, and somewhere along the way misplaces the decimal point in the sterling debt that supposedly justifies Naomi’s involvement in the whole thing. £ 30,000? £ 30,000,000? Who is counting?

Alongside the trip are a wacky brigade of bigmouth acquaintances, a supermarket brand compendium of Classic British Isles Accents, and a slew of British UK references to “to see you nice!” to “soaked bottoms”.

There are two main aspects, when playing The Good Life, that show real potential. The first is its strange retro feel. Somehow it’s just plain old-fashioned: the animations are screeching and unfold without question in the scenes, the cinematic context highlights shortcomings that we most easily overlook when we’re in player mode; Naomi or her feline / canine counterparts will unconsciously charge against walls and continue to run slippery, as was the norm before. But with all the flair and quirk on top, especially the deliberately large polygon art and well-crafted but repetitive music, it feels like a hidden gem exclusive to Japan from the PS2 era, discovered in a bargain box at a few. vacation in Tokyo. It sure sounds like a SWERY game, then.

It is also retro in its version of the open world game. For example, at one point in the game, you hear a strange sound and are instructed to follow your ears. Navigating audio signals isn’t exactly a new idea, but that doesn’t even happen. The source of the sound just becomes yet another point on your mini map, inviting you to completely close the 3D game world and look at your little version of a Petri dish in the corner of the screen, the opposite of the attention that the situation. seems to ask. This is pure open-world thinking as a genre – the same rudimentary mechanics that made GTA 3 function 20 years ago.

The second aspect that shows some potential stems from that point: there are new opportunities in how different this is from the GTA series. Set in a rural English town, there is a quiet daily routine, rather than a city that never sleeps, some local residents versus a metropolis of strangers, and of course no cars or guns.

And that’s where things get interesting. Having fewer people populating the game world means that more of them can be real characters. Most of the people you meet have routines, jobs, homes to go to, relationships with other villagers, and basic character arcs that you can join on side quests. Oh, and they turn into cats and dogs. (It turns out that actually it is Easy to forget!) The rural setting justifies the very small population, allowing people to be more real and making the world more meaningful. When you put it like that, a city is a crazy idea for an open world game and yet the focus of this game is the exception.

In addition to the feeling of a meaningful world, there are a variety of options for interacting with it. Instead of object type A you can steal and object type B you can kill, The Good Life invites you to have conversations with important people, photograph your surroundings and share your images online (in game), run and jump . and jump Around the world, forage, craft, cook, decorate your home, dress up, and at the same time solve the strange mysteries of Rainy Woods. You are participating in a rural British community and appreciating the hills of England around you.

AND guy Did they beat the British out of the park in this one? The cricket park, obviously. We have Scots Eggs, John Peel, Downton Abbey, “bloody” this, “bleeding” that, Marmite, Stonehenge, and hedgehog stir fry for breakfast. (Country people eat sautéed hedgehog for breakfast, right?) real money From the UK: buy a pair of running shoes for 90p, refuel with a cottage cake on a bar counter for £ 25, then go home a stomach medicine for £ 90. Yes , the economy is everywhere. Ah, Blighty …

As all these elements come together, some unfortunate collisions occur. Those retro game ideas manifest as quest quests galore. Naomi herself comments, “Ugh … this is really starting to feel like a decrepit old RPG now …”. Pleading guilty may reduce the sentence, but it does not reduce the crime. You will need a very high tolerance for walking from one side to the other. Despite the potential masterstroke of limiting the world to fewer characters and making all of them more fully realized, there remain some wobbly mannequin types who simply recite ad nauseam a couple of lines on mushroom varieties or whatever.

The performance, which players of previous SWERY Switch titles will no doubt be looking for in this review, isn’t great. It’s not Deadly Premonition 2, but there are frequent frame rate drops, some low-res renders, and recurring pop-ups while running the fields. These usually impact in specific areas or in certain weather conditions. It’s completely bearable if you’re not a fan of fluid motion at all times, but it reminds us once again of that Tokyo PS2 bargain bin.

conclusion

The Good Life knows where its strengths are. Its functional open-world model and mostly outdated gameplay systems quietly sit in the background and allow its quirky charm to take center stage. That allure is thickly packed, with absurd characters (and absurd accents), a plot that rambles so wildly that you seem unable to remember where it started, and, so we don’t forget, the whole dog / cat transfiguration thing. The charm and atmosphere have to be really compelling if they are to excuse the spent mechanics, repetitive tasks, and frequent slowdowns and spawns. If the Japanese fantasy of old school games × English twee isn’t for you, neither is The Good Life. But if you’re a SWERY fan and that sounds like your cup of tea, get wet.