SWERY's The Good Life out tomorrow

Joined
Jul 28, 2018
Favourite title
Shenmue IIx
Currently playing
Ghost of Tsushima
PSN
mjqjazzbar
This has given me MILD Shenmue vibes since it was announced. Looks like it's getting pretty mixed reviews, which really isn't a bad thing in my view since we're all posting on a forum devoted to a pretty MIXED kind of game. I backed it years ago, so I'm getting a copy tomorrow. Let's see how it is...


The gameplay is likewise puzzling as it haphazardly mashes together genres and mechanics. The Good Life is a murder mystery. It’s also a life simulator with collectible resources for making meals, fabricating clothes, concocting potions, and upgrading your dwelling. At times, it’s an action game with button-mashy combat, a survival game that asks you to consume food or starve, and a photography game with camera-based challenges to earn money. I enjoyed some of these elements, but they don’t build on or support each other very well. For instance, I was initially excited to learn different recipes, which Naomi collects by purchasing the same meal at a restaurant several times. However, money can be tight, so I felt like I needed to stop in order to spend cash on more crucial things, like fixing my camera when it inevitably breaks.


Yikes...

In Short: A hugely disappointing mess of a game that magnifies all of SWERY’s worst tendencies and fails to compensate in terms of the unengaging characters and script.

Pros: There is a certain amount of absurdist charm to the whole concept and it’s nice to see a game set in the UK that isn’t based only in London.

Cons: Terrible graphics, shoddy performance, and half broken controls. Disappointingly half-baked script with few memorable characters.

Score: 2/10


Looking past the obvious flaws in The Good Life, players will find a very unusual and engrossing mystery, with a lot of depth to the gameplay and witty characters. It’s a very personal game that presses the player to slow down and take it easy; to chill out and enjoy life.

The game is about appreciating the simple things; like a pair of worn-out but comfortable socks that you keep anyway. Not everything makes sense, but what is life without a little whimsy now and then?

Seems like the perfect title for Shenmue 3 Dojo to try out.
 
I mean Swery in general is kind of a hit or miss guy.
Sometimes i dont know if his vision is really special and thats just how he wants to tell things
or if he just makes it special on purpose by force to make it look like its special.

I love Deadly Premonition 1, i'm not kidding, that game is in my Top 10 Games of all time.
I like Dark Dreams Dont Die because its over the top but not in a annoying way.
Deadly Premonition 2 ... hmmmm kind of unnecessary if you ask me.
It kind of downgrades the whole Deadly Premonition universe for no reason.

And now The Good Life. Well, i dont have anything against the graphics or artstyle
but i do think that the trailers have kind of a weird vibe ... like overall it looks way happier and friendlier,
its even rated 12 here instead of 18 and 16 like his other games
and it seems like this game has everything. A bit of Harvest Moon, a bit of Pokemon / Monster Hunter,
a bit of Animal Crossing, a bit of Deadly Premonition ...
which already makes me wonder if all of that is really needed in a indie kickstarter game.

Is it truly his vision or did he just say oh well lets put in everything, its gonna be cool.
Its kind of the same as with Suda 51. Some of his stuff is weird in a cool way that just works on its own,
you now the weird part is not the main part, theres more to it.
But then sometimes he makes games that feel like he tried to make it weird by force
so it wasnt his true vision, he just made something weird so that he could sell a weird Suda 51 game.

I'm probably gonna test The Good Life at some point because i like 'weird indie / AA games'
and i dont care about big gaming site reviews
but i'm a bit cautious.
 
Well, I already bought my copy four years ago so I guess I'm in either way. I do kind of wish developers would get away from throwing the kitchen sink at these low budget games. We don't need all these systems. Perfect your story, develop your world, then include some additional mini game-esque systems. On the other hand, it seems that's just the way guys like SWERY and YS are. I find the setting charming, but don't really love the art style.

During the campaign, we promised for the game to have the subtitles in French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Time passed, and we focused on making the games, and along the way we made the decision to focus on the Japanese and the English versions of the game, and have both of them supported with voice-over. But we failed to communicate this change of plan along the way - and with the extra efforts we are putting with the launch, we only realized that this had never been communicated to you.

Let's see if this leads to Shenmue 3-esque bad publicity. From today;'s update.
 
I honestly would have preferred The Good Life as just a murder mystery in a England scenario.
I dont know, just by looking and hearing at what kind of different mechanics there are in the game
i feel like i dont really need any of that. I mean you can make really really cool story focused indie games,
you can make really cool big budget open world games with a lot of content.
But all of these things at the same time in a kickstarter game ... its simply a pretty challenging mission.
I dont know, wouldnt it be better to focus on a smaller scale?
Maybe it works in The Good Life, i dont know. It just sounds suspicious.
 
I think he designs games the way Yu Suzuki does. "Wouldn't that be cool?" then they kind of just go from there. It probably worked a bit better when they had big budgets. Honestly, I sometimes wish the Yakuza games lacked some of these extras as well. While many times the extras are totally optional. it's hard to feel like you're not missing something when you see your game progress at 15% when you're almost finished! That always leads to me doing some mini game/mini games I'd rather avoid.

I'm 35. It's hard enough to play LOOOOOONG GAMES, then they throw all these other things at you. I guess it's a defensive measure against multiplayer, too, which seems to have endless value, versus single player where there's always an end in sight.
 
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I personally can’t wait to try it out, but then there hasn’t been a single game by Swery I haven’t enjoyed in some way. But the main thing about this one in particular for me is how similar it feels to Wind Waker in certain ways. Guess I’ll see how it’s actually executed but at least from the style it has a ton of things I will probably like and it looks like it will all flow together pretty well.
 
I’d post impressions, but apparently early backers get treated worse than everyone else. :(
 
Yeah it seems things are not going too well. I’d preordered on Switch because I figured my physical ps4 version might not come on time as it is, but this has been the only time I’ve ever backed a game so I wasn’t quite certain what to expect.

A few hours into the Switch version, it’s a bit hard to describe but mostly enjoyable so far for the most part and it shows some promise despite a few odd nitpicks. I’m coming off of just finishing Deadly Premonition 2 for my second time last night so that may be effecting my judgment somewhat, but it seems to be less jank in some ways, more jank in others, but it is a little difficult to discern what may simply be aesthetic or design choice.

World seems very well designed and interesting to explore, food system works well, npcs have schedules like usual but time moves at a good pace and many are never too hard to find, and now they’ve got it so they seemingly go by whatever you’ve chosen as your active quest which is nice. The one thing that feels really odd is the voice acting, but it almost feels like the stuff from Silent Hill 2 or 3, only it really doesn’t take itself very seriously at all.

Hopefully I’ll get to play more over the weekend before I go back to work. After how anxiety inducing Metroid Dread was for me, I need something to relax a bit.
 
Nice. It's good they support each other. Swery promoted Shenmue 3 when it was new.
 
SWERY games might be a good test case for highlighting the pointlessness of reviews, besides telling us whether a game is outright broken or not.

Kitsch and weird jank is what made him a cult favourite, and by god does he mean to continue as he started.
 
Man, the game is something... It starts strong, it shows you many mechanics and interesting stuff, a pretty interesting premise, a comfy setting.
Then everything seems a chore, the game is mostly a fetchquest but with boring traversal, trying to be quirky or something, the main "mystery" never pays off, I was expecting something very different.
I wouldn't say I don't recommend it, hell, the amount of subquests and random checklists you can do maintain you occupied for long enough, but never I'd say I have been entertained.
I was expecting a mystery game set up in a rural place, and I got... not sure what, some clunky lifesim.
 

Ouch.
 
It has a score of 64 on PC based on 11 reviews,
Steam 87% based on 40 user reviews.
Its just very "special interest" and it doesnt even have the same language support / options as Shenmue for example.

Deadly Premonition has a 68 Metacritic on Xbox360
D4 Dark Dreams Dont Die 76 / 67 (Xbox / PC)

So i think in this kind of special interest indie / AA case,
it doesnt really say a lot between like 50 or 70%.
A lot of it really depends on what type of entertainment you want, if you like or dont like weird characters and so on.

This stuff, Shenmue, Killer7, Deadly Premonition and so on doesnt really fit into the
normal game review template. Part of why Shenmue was able to 'stay alive'
is because Shenmue never was a indie or AA game.

Guess which one of Swerys games has the most gaming website reviews? D4, because it was published by Microsoft.
The hype for Deadly Premonition came way later too.
So pretty hard to tell whats really good or really bad by a score.
 
D4 and DP had interesting story.
This one doesn't.
Go play it, it's free on gamepass.
The first 2/3 hours are great and full of promise, then the endless fetchquests start.
 
Yeah so far I enjoy it a lot. Sometimes there’s more to games than the sum of their parts…it’s about the experience and the feel and how immersive it is.
 
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