We Happy Few was an early access flop, but it's finally brilliant

"Wait, it's a survival game?" That was the prevailing question surrounding We Happy Few when it launched in early access in 2016. Having lowered jaws industry-wide with the rich world and narrative clout it demonstrated in previews beforehand, it felt almost like a bait-and-switch that Compulsion's hype magnet was not, in fact, from the Bioshock mold, but more of a DayZ-alike in Andrew Ryan's clothing.

Here was a game pulled straight from the sort of books you'd expect to find on Ken Levine's bedside table: Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984, novels rich in social allegory and poetic resonance, distinct from the pulp of Tom Clancy or Warhammer that other games unduly lean upon. It had found a genuinely fresh setting in alt-history 1960s Britain, where everyone takes psychoactive drugs to suppress the terrible reality that would otherwise confront and consume them.

We Happy Few's literary clout and mid-century aesthete, crafted by a studio founded by Arkane alumni with formidable immersive sim chops, was as close a throwback to Bioshock as we'd ever seen before. Except, oh, it's a survival game. "That's disheartening," I said in 2016, having tried and largely failed to hurdle the hunger and thirst meters with some enthusiasm intact for the fantastic premise.

It isn't that survival games are bad, or that they don't deserve nice things like a story. It was that We Happy Few's best qualities just weren't suited to the survival genre. The story in a survival game is - if you'll stifle a yawn - written by you as the player. It's a tale about how you built a luxurious dwelling out of worthless scrap and tamed the local wildlife to your needs. As such, the best survival games need a premise. What is this world I'm in? What are the forces working against me? What does it mean to stay alive? The plot is provided by the player's continued interaction with the game world.

We Happy Few is, and always was, a game with both premise and plot. The premise is fantastic alone, but it's also full of character development. It plays out from the perspective of multiple protagonists and contains numerous juicy NPC plot arcs. At its heart, it's a slowly unfurling mystery about the true nature of the world and the grim reality everyone's hiding from.

Marrying all of that to the survival game that presented itself to us for WHF's initial early access release felt like overkill. It was like hearing that Hideo Kojima and Warren Spektor have teamed up to form a new studio working on Fortnite battle pass cosmetics. Ironically, the reason Compulsion released an early access build in the first place was to avoid any confusion about what its game was and was not, having seen the mess that No Man's Sky had gotten itself into recently beforehand.

In reality, it only compounded the confusion. Players were presented with a tightly scripted intro to a game that appeared to be a first-person story game with triple-A production values, and then minutes later found themselves scavenging bobby pins out of old lockers and wondering where that game had disappeared to.

The truth of the matter is that Compulsion had developed not just one, but two concepts for a game. One about a world where everyone was high on drugs and in denial about the brutal reality around them, and another about a procedurally generated roguelike that came about during Contrast's development. It wasn't clear that these were two separate entities until the early access build went live.

The rest is history. We Happy Few never really capitalized on that early hype, because its earliest playable forms were so different from the game people expected. Crucially, it didn't let its finer qualities shine. Like No Man's Sky, it's also undergone a quiet and well-judged metamorphosis.

If you haven't played We Happy Few since 2018, I've got some news: it's bloody brilliant now. Not as a Bioshock beater, or an immersive sim, you understand. It's still not those things, but neither is it a punishing, DayZ-style, meter-filling snooze fest. Instead, Compulsion minimized the more laborious aspects of survival like hunger and thirst, creating less friction between the player and the game world.

And, honestly, what a world. If all the 'failures' in 2025 were this good, we'd have an embarrassment of riches in PC gaming. You wander its bucolic idylls, unsure whether to feel relaxed or horrified, confronted one minute by a gorgeous meadow and the next by a young couple who've hanged themselves in the attic of their cottage after killing their own children.

There's still a lot of searching around for bobby pins, bottle caps, and other deeply unglamorous inventory slop that you can turn into useful items. The combat and stealth systems still feel flimsy and boil down to using X-ray stealth vision to move past guards undetected. When it all kicks off, you swing some DIY melee creation at the enemy until they go down. Adam Jensen, Arthur is not.

However, like his fellow protagonists, Arthur's a strikingly human character. His under-the-breath mumblings convey real pathos, and voice actor Alex Wyndham delivers them with such a winning mix of guilt, humor, and optimism. The overall experience might not be polished to a triple-A sheen, but very few games turn out with central performances this good.

In the end, We Happy Few's best asset is its setting. In its (more or less) final form in 2025, it's allowed to shine. The dystopian island of Wellington Wells evokes Aldous Huxley and Doctor Who; 1984 and 1945, all in the space of one walk from a Downer's shack to a picture-perfect village full of Joy addicts.

Compulsion Games chose wisely between the two opposing game concepts it had at once in We Happy Few's earliest form. It's a shame that greater numbers of players haven't noticed, and that it now serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of early access. By all means, use it to develop collaboratively with your community, but don't use it to refine the fundamental concept - or the players who sample its roughest sketches might never come back.