8 "Awesome" Video Game Mechanics We All HATED
2. Don't Forget To Take Your Joy! - We Happy Few
I don't think I've ever been as disspointed with a video game than with the version of We Happy Few that hit storefronts back in 2016, as before it got all its tweaks, fixes, and admittedly brilliant DLC expansions, this was a game that promised so much and yet delivered so little.
Its concept was a stone-cold killer, of a society held in a perpetual state of drug-addled repression and backed up with brutality. It told of a town divided by those who took their Joy Pills to forget and "downers" those who rejected the fantasy to live out in the wastes. As such a lot of expectations were built up around the process of taking Joy in order to fit in with the other pill junkies and how these mechanics would affect gameplay.
Would you be caught short at a desperate moment and be chased out of town? Would you have to scavenge for them in order to stave off a beatdown? Well, the answer on paper was a definite "yes" but in practice was a resounding "no". For you see while Joy dosage was important to get through certain gates and bypass Doctors, that was the exent of it's implementation, and the sheer abundancy of the pill meant it was never hard to acquire.
What was once an amazing piece of world-building just became a chore with all of the tension of the situation dissipating almost entirely. Hell, you could complete the game without taking Joy once outside of the story beats, that's how little it was used.