People talk about how We Happy Few got turned around and turned into what people wanted, using the feedback when the game initially hit Early Access. That they turned it around from a boring crafty sandbox and turned it into something closer to the Bioshock-esque intrigue that the initial trailer proposed. I'm here to tell you that is wrong. The game isn't TERRIBLE but it's barely above mediocre. The writing is.. mostly decent, but the gameplay doesn't lend to it that well. It's still a mostly empty world with gameplay that ranges from too slow to poorly designed. There's never any real threat to you, as outside of specific chokepoints there's no way for the game to realize you haven't been taking your Joy. Sure, the monitors and stuff will start screaming about how you need to take it, but nobody reacts to that. The guards don't care, and the enemies that CAN detect you're off your Joy are comically easy to avoid. One walked up to me and I just walked away, just fine. And even if you DO alert the authorities (and literally everyone in town is ready to kick your arse) you can just.. run away. Literally just leave the area, go into a trashcan or a shelter, and they just magically forget what you did. You could kill swathes of people, leave their bodies in the streets, and there's no real reaction other than maybe someone looks at the bodies. Then we get to how the quest system works, where it just points you to your destination. But several quests will make you turn around and go do a thing to progress, but the quest doesn't update to tell you that. The game just gives you an entirely new quest, leaving major story quests just sitting in your journal for no reason. I'm going to finish the game, because the main story itself is interesting enough I'd like to see it play out, but man is the journey not any fun.
