Famiboards

This is a shambolic RPG barely held together by an underutilised photography aspect and an entirely inconsequential shapeshifting ability, wrapped in the familiar trappings of a rural life simulator. The Good Life is tonally stupid, structurally broken, surprisingly deep and occasionally self-aware. It is a confusing and strange and mostly horrible experience, which I feel personally worse off having been through, but am somehow glad that I did.

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The Good Life is a peculiar and endearing game that some will love and others won’t. I quite like it, as the setting, characters, and various activities are as pleasing as they are immersive. There are a few frustrating parts and performance issues, but they can’t hold back my overall enjoyment of The Good Life.

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The Good Life comes with excellent narrative elements, but the entire experience is damaged by some weird design choices that result in mediocre gameplay. While this is hardly surprising for a game directed by SWERY, some of the ideas featured in The Good Life, like the cat and dog transformation mechanics, deserved a much better execution, as they feel shallow and not particularly interesting. With such flawed gameplay, only die-hard fans of the Japanese director will truly love The Good Life.

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In spite of its lack of polish, I enjoyed The Good Life. It has some rough edges, but these can contribute to its charm, and it’s undeniably entertaining when the story is purposely silly or when I had time to just breathe in the world. The Good Life has heart, even if its features don’t always work together and its design holds it back.

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The Good Life knows where its strengths lie. Its functional open-world model and mostly-dated gameplay systems sit quietly in the background and allow its quirky charm to take the spotlight. That charm is piled on thick, with absurd characters (and absurd accents), a plot that digresses so wildly it seems unable to remember where it started and, lest we forget, the whole dog/cat transmogrification thing. The charm and atmosphere have to be seriously compelling if they are to excuse the well-worn mechanics, repetitive tasks and frequent slowdown and pop-in. If Japanese old-school gaming whimsy × twee Englishness isn't for you, then neither is The Good Life. But if you're a SWERY fan and that sounds like your cup of tea, get dunking.

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At its core, The Good Life is a celebration of all things SWERY for better and for worse. Whilst a player completely unfamiliar with the auteur’s esoteric design decisions is unlikely to find anything of value on the surface of this rather haphazardly constructed RPG, lying beneath, for those who know where to look, is a compelling life simulation filled with memorable characters and idiosyncratic systems to explore. There are persistent annoyances for sure, but any grievances are quickly overshadowed by the rural charm that The Good Life carries in spades.

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When everything is flowing in The Good Life, it feels like a touch of Animal Crossing with alternatingly quaint and irreverent British pastoral television, all with a burgeoning murder mystery underneath. Unfortunately, some of its rougher edges seem possibly related to the Switch itself and, although loading times are usually on the shorter side, their frequent appearance interrupts the flow even more. The Rainy Woods residents are charming and strange and there’s a numbingly pleasant feel to smalltown life and chores, but stiff controls and muddled design make it hard to find a good rhythm in The Good Life.

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The Good Life does many things, but they never felt like they coalesced together into an experience that could stick with me. I certainly enjoyed parts of it, and some of its stranger moments really do land as big, enjoyable peaks. But there’s a lot of valley in-between, and while I arrived in Rainy Woods eager for a pleasant countryside escape, I didn’t feel like making a return trip after the credits had rolled.

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The Good Life is Swery's first take on the Life simulators genre. While it incorporates all the features that made him a cult creator it also shows a disorienting mix of elements and mechanics that just don't work well together. The thin narrative line and the histrionic cast of characters fail to fully flesh out the social commentary that the creator intended to convey. The whole experience ends up feeling more like a list of chores rather than a smart and enjoyable experience in Swery's characteristic Troma-like fashion.

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The Good Life tried my patience the entire way through, and I pretty much never enjoyed anything it had to offer. It’s dull and often devoid of much that’s compelling or interesting. There could be some enjoyment for people who just want to collect items and do fetch quests in an idyllic English town, but this was a truly disappointing experience that ends up feeling pointless.

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There is just a lot to do in The Good Life, which means that players can potentially sink upwards of forty-plus hours taking pictures or running mundane, everyday tasks. And while I like life simulators, I don’t like them when they can barely run at over 3 FPS. With a story that lacks focus and with these elements largely feeling like padding, The Good Life doesn’t stand out in any significant way.

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The Good Life is a bit of a mess, trying to be too many things and getting very little right, with weak characters and an unpolished plot.

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Despite having some interesting moments, The Good Life feels and plays like a crazy mess.

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I wanted to like The Good Life, and for fans of previous titles from Swery and his collaborators, there’s some of that familiar cornball energy to soak up. However, the user-unfriendliness here surpasses any kind of charm and plunges into an antagonistic drive to keep you from having fun. There’s a willful obtuseness and a perverse glee with which The Good Life wastes a player’s time. Side quests refuse to resolve. Main quests morph into endless daisy chains of item collecting and tedious crafting. Naomi keeps getting the cold, and I’m running out of money from all the meat pies I bought just so I could eat one. And through it all, in the back of my head, is that terrible, mocking fact: I asked for this.

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The Good Life is a product plagued by major problems on the playful and structural side. A title extremely lacking from a technical point of view, which brings to the screen a series of decidedly questionable game design choices, at the basis of an adventure that, while trying to tell a story in its own way mature, often ends in boredom and struggles to support the player's interest.

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Glimpses of SWERY’s janky charm do occasionally shine through – such as Naomi’s first encounter with a badger and Nerlock Homeless’ parrot – but they’re drops of water in a desert of bad game design, broken gameplay, and missed opportunity. The Good Life is a bad game and, unlike Deadly Premonition, we don’t think it’s going to polarise opinion at all.

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