8 Video Games That Wasted Genius Ideas
6. We Happy Few
For a while, the hype for Kickstarted indie project We Happy Few was nothing short of immense. Its sinister setting of Wellington Wells, with its downtrodden inhabitants kept blissfully ignorant thanks to a hallucinogenic named Joy, was starkly reminiscent of dystopian works like Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Brave New World and Brazil.
The phrase "The New Bioshock" was thrown around by many, and given the game's period setting and exploration of a drug-induced nightmare city, this seemed pretty apt.
From almost the moment We Happy Few was released on early access, however, that good will basically dried up. While its visual design, voice acting and audio rightly received praise, the game itself played extremely poorly. It was rife with bugs and glitches, and the gameplay and plot amounted to little more than a generic stealth/survival game.
Also featuring completely unnecessary procedural generation, which only served to remove any sense of authorship or flow from the narrative, the whole experience was joyless and dull. At an unacceptable standard even for even an early access title, We Happy Few was a huge disappointment to everyone, most notably its Kickstarter backers.
Considering the game we could have got, having to manage the trade-off between the relative safety offered by joy and the chance to achieve our goal of escaping Wellington Wells, it's safe to say that very few were left, well, happy.