And then you move on through the story and leave them behind. These will all feature in quests and sub-quests, acting like test-drives. Look, you can make dresses you can cook you can mark areas with your scent you can follow the scent of other people you can fight things you can photograph stuff and then post it on ‘Flamingo’, a social media network to get ‘Emokes’ and cash. As you move through the game, it will waft something new and glittery under your nose. We’ve never come across a game structure like The Good Life’s. Perhaps SWERY is chuckling to himself somewhere, marvelling in the irony that a dog sim has you fetching all the time. The Good Life absolutely loves to make fourth-wall breaking jokes about just how ridiculous the fetching is, but then sodding does it anyway, over and over, until you find yourself landsick from the constant toing-and-froing. Honestly, getting around Rainy Woods is a delicious mix of boring and frustrating.Īnd oh, the fetch questing.
But there are other problems too, as stamina bars throttle your ability to move at speed, and the map doesn’t adequately warn you about hulking great stone walls that stop you from getting to important locations. Part of the problem is the love for fetch quests and all the friction they bring with them: you will be going back and forth to areas on the fringes of the map, just because the story has determined that you need to inform someone in the village. The Good Life doesn’t fully resolve its traversal problems, though: even when you’re riding about on sheep (yes, sheep), the map is still a slog to get through. The story swerves through them all, not necessarily with an overarching story to tell, but with a magpie-like love for English folktales and mythology. This is SWERY after all, and he clearly has a dream journal somewhere filled with topics tangentially related to the British Isles that he wanted to cover. And in the effort to write your story, things escalate to the point where someone gets murdered.
But things don’t stop there, as you gain the same ability. You get set up and then wander back into the village where, lo and behold, everybody turns into cats and dogs at certain phases of the moon.
You’re welcomed by Elizabeth Dickens, who promises that things get interesting at night in Rainy Woods, and takes you to a ramshackle little cottage where you’re going to stay. You play Naomi Hayward, a New York journalist who has arrived in England on the faintest of leads: that there are some supernatural goings-on in the quaint village of Rainy Woods, self-professed ‘Happiest Town in the World’, and they may be worth covering. But mostly it’s a network of fetch quests set in a reasonably large open world. The question ‘What is The Good Life?’ is a hard one to answer because of the sheer ‘muchness’ of it.
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