Hidetaka Suehiro, better known as SWERY or SWERY65, is one of the few people in game development that one can honestly call an “auteur”.
His work is immediately recognisable and well worth exploring — and like all good works of art, it doubtless has a different impact on different people, ranging from enthusiastic adoration to outright disgust. While his most famous work to date remains the wonderful Deadly Premonition, the title which made him a (sort of) household name in gaming, his other work is just as intriguing.
Which, of course, brings us to The Good Life, a 2021 release for Windows PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. It’s a game that actually has a fair bit in common with Deadly Premonition, so if you enjoyed that you may well dig this — but it’s also very much its own beast. So let’s delve right into this goddamn hellhole.
The Good Life casts you in the role of Naomi Hayward, an American journalist who has somehow found herself $30 million in debt to her employer, the cheerfully named but clearly exceedingly unscrupulous Morning Bell News. We’re never given the details as to how or why Naomi ended up in so much debt, but it is the driving force behind the story, leaving us free to draw some of our own conclusions as to what have might gone on prior to us joining the action.
Naomi has been dispatched to the little Lake District hamlet of Rainy Woods in the UK, ostensibly to discover the secret behind it branding itself “the happiest place in the world”. Not long after arriving, Naomi discovers that this little town has a rather peculiar secret: for the three nights around the full and new moon each month, all the inhabitants of Rainy Woods turn into cats and dogs.
What’s more, Naomi discovers that she, too, has a mysterious power: she can also turn into an animal, though unlike the inhabitants of Rainy Woods, she can do so at will, and can choose whether to be a cat or a dog at any given moment.
The game then unfolds as an open-world adventure in which Naomi gets to know the inhabitants of Rainy Woods and attempts to get to the bottom of the strange happenings — which include a murder, once you get a short way into the main narrative thread.
I’ll refrain from spoiling too much about the story in this piece for the benefit of anyone who feels like they might want to experience The Good Life for themselves, but rest assured that SWERY fans will be right at home. That is to say, there are a lot of seemingly nonsensical things going on, but there’s also an undercurrent of real heart and soul with a valuable and modern message about misinformation, fake news and the exploitation of people by the media.
I’d perhaps argue that the main quest escalates a little too quickly towards its climactic conclusion — the latter half of the main scenario felt like it was rushing through plot points a little hastily — but to a certain extent you are in control of how quickly the narrative unfolds. Outside of specifically marked “Urgent Quests”, which appear as part of distinct threads in the main scenario and require you to drop everything you’re doing to complete them (usually against a fairly generous time limit), you are free to simply live The Good Life as you see fit.
But what does that mean? Well, The Good Life is essentially, at heart, a life sim with a few RPG elements. Naomi has several vital statistics to keep track of, which include her hunger, stress, tiredness and physical wellbeing, and she also has a conventional “health bar” that determines how much injury she can take before keeling over dead. (Not that dying in The Good Life is a major issue; indeed, some sidequests and achievements/trophies even encourage you to get a Game Over!) She also has a hidden “Charisma” stat which is essentially her cleanliness; if she’s taking good care of herself, people will like her better, while if she’s got flies buzzing around her stinky ass, people will want to avoid her.
These vital statistics tend to interact with one another. For example, when Naomi gets too hungry, her physical wellbeing starts to decline, and this can leave her open to ailments that reduce her other statistics until she has them cured at the local medical practitioner — who, of course, given the nature of Rainy Woods, is both a vet and a doctor.
There are other effects, too — many of which are quite surprising to see in a video game, given the inhuman feats we see even “everyman” protagonists typically performing in the medium. Using the game’s fast travel system to teleport between mysterious shrines in the countryside while too tired will leave Naomi with a headache, while attempting to lift heavy objects when she’s not feeling her best will give her lumbago. She can even become an alcoholic from drinking too much — and believe me, this not a situation in which you want to find yourself.
For the most part, managing Naomi’s overall wellbeing is a simple case of making sure she eats when she’s hungry, sleeps when she’s tired and doesn’t get into too many fights with badgers. If you’re playing the game “well”, then chances are you’ll never see many of the ailments that it’s possible for her to come down with — although one of the sidequests does task you with deliberately catching all of them in sequence so the aforementioned vet/doctor can practice his treatments.
The game has a time system, including a clock that passes at a roughly 1 second to one minute rate, and a moon phase tracker that lets you know when the town’s mysterious “transformations” are going to happen. There’s also a meter that determines whether you lean more towards “Team Cat” or “Team Dog” in your loyalties; chances are, this will remain near the middle for much of the game, as you end up balancing out its advances in either direction by completing sidequests for various characters, but there are ways of manipulating it more drastically, and you may find it helpful to do so, as it affects shop prices.
The game time is important because each of the inhabitants of Rainy Woods have their own distinct schedule that they tend to follow, and this isn’t necessarily the same every day of the week. For example, you may find some characters head off into the wilds of the Lake District for various reasons midweek, but at the weekend, they stay around the town, or pay their respects to their ancestors in the church graveyard.
The early stages of the game’s main quest give you the opportunity to get to know all the named characters around Rainy Woods. Some don’t appear in the game until a particular part in the main scenario, while others are around from the outset.
Rather delightfully, each character is distinguished not only through their appearance and voice, but also through the way their text is presented — not only do the fonts and font size differ from person to person, but so do the animations for how the text appears in the box. The perpetually yelling Thomas Berryman has a bold typeface twice the size of any other text in the game, for example, while his refined and rather posh wife speaks only in italics. Meanwhile, the relatively youthful post office clerk, seamstress and streamer Virginia has text that appears in a somewhat jittery, clipped manner, reflecting her blunt nature, while the glum hotel operator Morris has text that appears smoothly and slowly, demonstrating his somewhat cautious personality.
While there’s no obligation to complete any sidequests in the game at all if you don’t want to, chances are you’ll find that you just naturally want to help out the residents of Rainy Woods, because for all their quirks, they’re a pleasant, likeable bunch who appear to care very much about creating a close-knit community. Not only that, but they’re immediately welcoming to Naomi, an outsider who is, to say the least, less than enthusiastic about the position in which she finds herself.
Outside of the aforementioned Urgent Quests, you’re free to spend Naomi’s days in Rainy Woods as you like. She can grow plants in her garden, gather materials from the surrounding countryside to bring to various artisans around the village and have equipment and decorative items crafted for her, work on odd jobs for the inhabitants, or just explore the countryside.
One thing I feel that cannot be said enough about The Good Life is that it absolutely nails the feeling of small villages and rolling countryside in England. While the Unity-powered visuals aren’t anything to particularly write home about compared to bigger budget, more technologically advanced titles, the atmosphere the overall look and feel of the game creates is wonderful. Within Rainy Woods, you can feel the close-knit nature of the community, and while you’re in the surrounding countryside, you feel wonderfully “free”.
That said, the game does constrain your exploration to a certain degree with stone walls just like those seen in the real Lake District. This isn’t a game where you can just pick a direction and run off in a straight line towards something; more often than not if you want to get somewhere, you’ll need to follow the roads and paths, and perhaps pay a toll to a few gates along the way. The cat transformation does provide you with the opportunity to hop over lower walls, but for the most part it’s a good idea to explore along the roads and head into the fields only when you really need to — much like you would if you were wandering around the real Lake District.
Getting around initially seems to be enormously cumbersome, because Naomi’s default movement speed is an incredibly sluggish jog, and her “sprint” can only be used for a short period at a time before having to recharge. The dog and cat transformations initially seem like they will help — the dog can run for longer, while the cat can run faster and jump higher — but you still probably won’t want to stray too far from Rainy Woods in the early stages of the game.
Thankfully, help is at hand in the form of the game’s sheep-riding mechanic. Partway into the game’s main scenario, Naomi befriends Lonette, a local farmer, who introduces her to the concept of “sheepmanship”. This involves catching a sheep by barking at it as a dog, then riding it around to your heart’s content. Once caught, a sheep can be stored at Lonette’s farm, and you can brush and shear them to obtain wool, which can be used for crafting or simply to sell for profit. Your sheep’s handling and power level will also increase by you simply riding them around and encouraging them to charge at breakable boxes, so there’s a progression mechanic you can engage with if you see fit.
Like most elements of The Good Life, though, there’s no need to bog yourself down with that side of things unless you really want to — or, indeed, if you’re enslaved by achievements and trophies. Some of the sidequests and achievements/trophies in the game specifically feel like SWERY is taking the piss out of those who don’t consider a game to be “complete” until they have “Platinumed” it.
On the one hand, these tasks can be looked on as Naomi being willing to “muck in” and do things “the hard way”, as those living out in the sticks often have to do. On the other, the game is effectively saying that the player only has themselves to blame if they insist on involving themselves in tasks that end up being tedious or cumbersome. None of the potentially “annoying” elements of the game are mandatory to succeed, so if you get bored doing something, it’s entirely on you to say that enough is enough — just like real life.
One should also consider that different people enjoy different things in their games, too, and The Good Life actually caters to a variety of different play styles.
Those who feel like playing the game as a bit of a sidelong glance at the “cosy” and “wholesome” farming sim genre can do so; you can actually play indefinitely and completely ignore the main story if you see fit (though it’s a good idea to progress far enough to unlock a couple of initially inaccessible areas), and indeed one of the endings allows Naomi to continue living in Rainy Woods, doing as she pleases.
At the same time, the story-centric part of the game is quite focused, with each distinct chapter of the main story taking Naomi to different parts of the map and sometimes involving completely unique mechanics that you don’t see at any other point in the game.
Those who enjoy exploration are well catered to with a large but not overwhelming open world to explore, and plenty of things to discover around the place. There are materials to find, dog “marking spots” to pee on (which can, in turn, lead to additional materials), interesting things to photograph, merchants to trade with (usually via barter rather than simply handing over cash), other settlements besides Rainy Woods to discover, and just an overall pleasant vibe in which to run around and have fun.
And those who enjoy crafting or character progression have a lot of equipment items, house upgrades and garden furniture that one can create — and hunting down the items required for many of these can be an epic sidequest in itself.
The Good Life, then, is aptly named, because it really does allow the player to enjoy a good life out in the countryside. Sure, chances are most players will probably want to see the main story through to its conclusion, because it’s intriguing — though I will note it leaves a fair few dangling loose ends up to the player’s own interpretation by the end — but it’s also entirely natural to just feel like the game is inviting you to have a pleasant virtual Lake District holiday. Engage with it as much or as little as you see fit; there’s plenty of value to be had from The Good Life, regardless of how you approach it.
And, as much as Naomi insists that Rainy Woods is a “goddamn hellhole” compared to her precious New York City, one can’t help but feel like she warms to the place a whole lot quicker than she might care to admit. Chances are you will, too.
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Looks like good escapism!