The Good Life review – Deadly Premonition by way of middle England
Sometimes, it’s nice to allow yourself to be surprised by a video game. Heading into The Good Life, I didn’t know much beyond it other than it was a life sim from the fertile mind of Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro, the creator of cult classic Deadly Premonition and various other shabby, characterful delights, and that it’d enjoyed a couple of not-so-successful runs on crowdfunding before eventually crossing the line on Kickstarter. Beyond that there’s been little by way of previews or promotion before its multiplatform release last week.
The Good Life reviewPublisher: White Owls/PlayismDeveloper: Grounding/White OwlsPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out now on Switch, PC, PS4 and Xbox One
Which works quite well, really, given its premise: you’re a highly strung New York photographer Naomi Hayward, who’s somehow inexplicably found herself in a mountain of debt to an English newspaper and so settles down into the town of Rainy Woods (a name that’ll be familiar, I’m sure, to fans of Swery’s wider oeuvre) to unearth its secrets and earn back some of that cash by taking photos of its people and places. Why exactly are you in debt to an English newspaper, and where exactly is this village whose genesis came from a press trip Swery once made to Hitchin yet that seems to be set somewhere in the imagined ether between Lancashire and Cornwall? Why does everyone in the village turn into a cat or dog on certain evenings?
To get too hung up on certain details feels like missing the point a little bit when there are so many other details to get lost in – indeed, the most surprising part of The Good Life is how deep its life sim systems run, how vast and generous its open world is, and how its depiction of little England can be, sometimes matching the great Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture in capturing the quaint, quietly run-down villages nestled deep within the countryside.
The Good Life – Launch Trailer Watch on YouTube
The Good Life bends the quirks of country life to different ends, though, thick with the character and whimsy of Deadly Premonition but this time served up with distinctively English tics and traits. Within Rainy Woods the villagers keep to their routines as the clock turns and day turns to night – it’s a little like Animal Crossing, only instead of anthropomorphized animals there’s a boozy vicar, a deeply vain novelist, or the witch doctor who lives deep in the woods and occasionally utters ‘bollocks’ in the best reading of the word I’ve ever come across in a video game.
