We Happy Few's first DLC misadventure is out today, and it's quite the departure from the drugged-up dystopia you might be familiar with. Psychedelic fascism is out, vintage alien robots are in. There's a lot of gloom mixed in with the whimsy in Wellington Wells, but in the underground robot-infested lab, things look a bit more lighthearted. 

In They Came from Below, you'll be playing Roger, previously an NPC, and heading down to Doctor Faraday's secret lab with your boyfriend, James. Together you'll have to halt a robot invasion. The robots are also alien robots. Oh dear. Thank goodness, then, that the lab is also full of sci-fi weapons and gizmos. I'm sure at least one of them will help.

Wellington Wells is a cracking setting, even if I did get a bit sick of backtracking through it, but I'm all for the switch from one retrofuturistic setting to another. It's a shame it's not co-op, though, given that we've got a pair of reluctant heroes. 

Unfortunately, the base game was a bit disappointing when it finally launched last year. 

"The characters, the acting, and the tragedy were enough to get me to eke what fun I could out of playing the thing," Tyler said in his We Happy Few review. "We Happy Few's bugs and inconsistencies and thematic concessions make its open world tiring, survival obligatory, stealth frustrating, and combat clunky, but if you're willing to take it slow and gather lots of herbs and metal bits for crafting, it's worth exploring its mysteries."

It's seen a few updates since then, however, so it might be worth another look if it's already sitting in your library.

They Came Below is available now as part of the season pass or individually. I'm not seeing the latter on Steam, but here's the GOG version. 

We Happy Few is set in an alternate England that was conquered by the Nazis at the end of World War II, and where one town—Wellington Wells—chose to forget its role in that history by taking a heck of a lot of drugs. The result is a society where everything looks bright and cheery, full of classically English cosiness and mod cool, but underneath there's corruption and decay. It's an unusual atmosphere, one that's embodied in characters masked with painted-on smiles.

Freelance character artist Tito Belgrave is responsible for much of that, and his designs for the tea-sipping citizens called "Wellies" look like something from a particularly surreal episode of The Prisoner. The leering bobbies in their polished-button uniforms and the little old ladies who scream bloody murder if they see through your disguise are more overtly threatening, but everyone in We Happy Few is a bit disconcerting in their own way.

Belgrave previously worked on multiplayer slash-em-up Friday the 13th and puzzle game The Turing Test, both of which had very different aesthetics but were also distinct in their own ways. You can check out some of his character designs for those games below.

We Happy Few is available now. For more of Belgrave's work have a peruse of his website.

Near the end of We Happy Few's first act, I sneaked into a control room to press some buttons, as pressing buttons is how most problems are solved in stealth adventure games. As I fumbled for the correct sequence of presses, one, two, and then three whistling engineers strolled into the room, spotted me, and then bludgeoned me to death.

I reloaded my autosave a few feet away with the same sliver of health I had before and tried again. Once again, a jab to the nostril from the tip of an umbrella evaporated my health bar, replacing it with a red skull which drained slowly until death. The only way to come back from the skull icon is to use a healing item, but I hadn't bothered to craft a surplus from the herbs out in the garden district, so I just had to keep dying and trying.

If I hadn't wanted so much to find out what would happen next in alt-history '60s Britain land, I'd have hit Alt-F4 right there. But finally, I memorized the solution so that I could rapidly press the buttons in sequence and escape with just one fight, barely avoiding a hit to my unprotected skull (should've crafted a helmet, too). It's rare these days that a game punishes me so thoroughly for being unprepared, or pushes me forward almost solely on the merits of its storytelling.

Run for it

I like that We Happy Few, at least on its normal difficulty, doesn't care whether or not I choose to wander its open world crafting healing balms, grenades, lockpicks, fancy electrified weapons, distraction devices, and caltrops before walking into a nest of homicidal scientists. I don't like that none of that is much fun.

We Happy Few's characters are drugged British civilians left to rot after victorious Nazis stole their children. Nebulous hit detection, pathetic stamina bars, and lumbering swings convey their desperation and lack of fitness, but while being pummeled by a mob is thematically consistent, it's graceless and tiresome. 

Instead, you can sneak. We Happy Few's stealth puzzles are best when they lightly imitate the item-combining puzzles of classic adventure games. In a newspaper office, for instance, I fixed the coffee machine to clear out an entire room of caffeine-deprived journalists. But that's not the typical experience. The avenues and buildings swarm with erratic, hyper-sensitive civilians and guards and usually only the most tedious maneuvering can avoid conflict—and even then, you may be set upon for seemingly no reason. (Unless your attacker gets stuck in the floor and can't move, which is a blessing.)

When you absolutely must get somewhere to flip a switch (a sibling of button-pressing which also shows up often), We Happy Few takes after Half-Life 2 and throws a heating duct in your path or some pipes to climb for a makeshift catwalk. The rest of the time, a stealthy approach is liable to become a Benny Hill chase, in which the best course of action is to run the mob in circles until you have enough of a lead to round a corner, hide under a bed, and wait out their rage. Cute distraction devices like rubber duckies are occasionally helpful, but for the most part I preferred to just get shit done rather than try to hide from people who walk about like miscalibrated Roombas.

Blending in

We Happy Few's central roleplaying premise and most novel idea is its least successful. The districts of its oppressed British islands are divided into two categories. In the wild gardens, desperate rejects stand listlessly in decayed roads and hide out among bombed-out buildings. In the middle-class neighborhoods, well-dressed citizens endlessly pop a drug called Joy, which inhibits memory (mainly the memory of giving all their children to Nazis) and reduces cognition to cheerful hellos. The idea is that one must blend in correctly depending on the company. Wear a fancy suit in the wastes, and the populous will tear you apart. Wear a tattered suit on the other side of the gates, and the little old ladies will scream as hordes of bobbies and civilians descend on you.

The wastrels are easygoing. Wear filthy clothes and don't get caught trespassing and they'll leave you alone. In the city streets, however, one must always keep up the appearance of Joy dependency. No running, no jumping, no staring. Pop a Joy, and the bloom effects explode, the rainbow-painted streets glow, and butterflies replace the filth. That's one way to get past the 'Joy detectors,' which raise an alarm should you pass through unmedicated. But if your Joy high runs out, you suffer withdrawal, which near instantly causes everyone in your vicinity to turn hostile. I took to hiding in trash bins while the withdrawal meter slowly ran down, using the time to get up and make a cup of tea. I drank more tea out of the game than I did in the game.

We Happy Few succeeds in making me feel self-conscious all the time—another thematic victory and a funny send-up of the absurd ways players tend to behave in games—but there is no intricate social engineering challenge to any of this, just tiring routines. As you progress, you'll unlock fast travel points and abilities which allow you to ignore many of the rules, letting you sprint around or go out after curfew without issue. Learning to craft Sunshine, a drug which imitates the outward effects of Joy without the withdrawal, is also vital. We Happy Few lifts the burdens of its own premise as you play, seemingly aware that hiding in plain sight in its oversized open world turned out to be a chore rather than a playful test of wits.

Even with fast travel, there's a lot of sprinting, allowing your puny stamina meter to deplete, then walking to refill it and sprinting again as soon as you can. Quests typically involve going somewhere to find something, and so to get anything done in a timely manner, I eventually started ignoring the civilians and Joy detectors. Let them chase! I can just run to my next destination and either hope to trigger a conversation which resets the enraged villagers, or hide and take the opportunity to make another cup of tea while they calm themselves.

A reason to go on

Had I been more content to meander, I might not have minded tip-toeing around to steal food and drink (you won't die without sustenance on Normal, but you'll suffer penalties), lockpicks, healing herbs, and Scotch to bribe bobbies with before I charged into a bludgeoning in that control room. But We Happy Few's greatest strength makes its weaknesses even weaker: I always wanted to see what would happen next too badly to putter around hiding from people who are no more than switches flickering between complacent and homicidal.

I thought I might be put off by the oh-so-British pastiche the way I was by BioShock Infinite's candied Americana: every table is littered with tea cups, everyone is delightfully repressed, and umbrellas are exclusively called 'brollies.' While it's laid on thick—not as thick as in Sir, You Are Being Hunted, but thick—it's occasionally critical enough not to feel totally indulgent and hokey. The heaps of tea, for instance, are paired with a minor side story about Britain's colonization of India. And while it begins with the most wearisome alternate history prompt there is, it's thankfully not about a ragtag team of heroes who rise up to reclaim independence. 'The Germans' are referred to often but never seen. Instead, we find people who were remade as colonial subjects and then abandoned to self-destruct. In the aftermath, they found a way to forget what happened.

BioShock Infinite's Columbia is a far better put-together dystopia: We Happy Few consists largely of a handful of awkwardly animated character models, repetitive, procedurally-generated city streets (though there are some great details in interiors, especially the notes), and weird bugs like fires burning in the sky. But it outclasses Infinite's storytelling with every line of dialogue.

Across three surprisingly-long acts you'll play as three connected characters. First is Arthur, who's so petty and self-serving that he continues to moan about his old coworkers even after discovering that he's a human test subject in a fascist prison. Then there's Sally, a chemist with a secret, and the supplier of the best Joy in town. And finally there's Ollie, a diabetic soldier who has inconsistent memories about his life's tragedies. Much can be gleaned before it's revealed—it's obvious that Arthur is misremembering his past, for instance—but the flashbacks and conversations are spectacularly voiced, funny, and often heartbreaking. They drew me through a game I otherwise didn't like much at all.

I've also never played as a character who needs to monitor his blood sugar. While Ollie having diabetes and other surprises don't make for especially exciting problem solving (in Ollie's case, collect honey to craft glucose syringes), the focus on human bodies and their needs and limitations bridges the play with the non-interactive acting. It's not We Happy Few's defining success, but it adds to the characterizations in a way I haven't quite experienced before.

Fallen empire

The performances are We Happy Few's great strength, blending comedy and tragedy with calculated balance. The three lead actors, Alex Wyndham (Arthur), Charlotte Hope (Sally), and Allan James Cooke (Ollie), talk to themselves so naturally that I almost don't notice they were doing the videogame thing of saying everything out loud for no reason, and that even goes for the repeated contextual barks. While there is some exaggeration of character archetypes—Ollie's trauma causes him to hallucinate a child in a manner invented for fiction long ago, Arthur is the quintessential self-serving dope—they are superbly-crafted versions of those familiar characters, with enormous personalities that intensify as they uncover their pasts.

The odd character out is Sally. Her story leads her toward a heroic stoicism that clashes thematically, casting her as the great hope while Arthur and Ollie quest for personal truth—it's unfair and outdated and corny, and can be read as equating her guilt after being abused by men to Arthur and Ollie's guilt after actually fucking up. Taken that way, it's awful, but she remains defiant while suffering that undeserved guilt and a few moments do seem to recognize that she's done nothing wrong. It's confused, at the least. (If it's a sensitive topic for you, note that themes of sexual abuse are prevalent in her story.)

Other characters and metaphors flounder as well. By being so literal with Joy as a drug, We Happy Few suggests that the 'true' self disappears when medicated, playing into the stigmatization of antidepressants. And the recasting of history's victims is ironic, as the theme of We Happy Few is the rewriting of the past to absolve oneself of guilt. The alternate history setup can be read as a meta-commentary hinted at by the text-driven asides about colonialism—an admonishment of Western revisionist history—but it's a soft jab if anything, not some powerfully radical framework. Readers of New York Times op-eds won't feel out of their elements.

Even so, the characters, the acting, and the tragedy were enough to get me to eke what fun I could out of playing the thing. We Happy Few's bugs and inconsistencies and thematic concessions make its open world tiring, survival obligatory, stealth frustrating, and combat clunky, but if you're willing to take it slow and gather lots of herbs and metal bits for crafting, it's worth exploring its mysteries. And there's no shame in playing on easy to quiet the mobs a little.

Dystopian survival game We Happy Few (the one with the eerie masks and the drugs that make people happy) will be getting a season pass, developers Compulsion Games have announced. Three things will be included in this DLC, separate stories called 'Lightbringer', 'We All Fall Down', and 'Roger & James in: They Came From Below!'

Some pretty cryptic explanations of what those three things will be have been given by Compulsion. Here they are:

Roger & James in: They Came From Below! Precocious Roger and Impetuous James set off in search of adventure and love, only to uncover bizarre technology and a terrifying new threat. All is not as it seems. Or is it exactly as it seems?

Lightbearer Heartthrob, artist, and personal trainwreck, Nick Lightbearer is Wellington Wells’ most celebrated rock star—but what truly makes him tick? Tune in to Uncle Jack’s late show to find out.

We All Fall Down Much like any well-worn happy mask, all societies develop cracks in their veneer. But that doesn’t mean you should go digging up dirt from the past. Right? *pops a Joy pill* Right!

As well as the season pass, We Happy Few will receive a free update adding a sandbox mode. It should be launching on August 10.

In anticipation of its launch next month, Compulsion Games has released a lengthy new trailer for We Happy Few, which provides more details on its newly designed structure.

The video, which is difficult to follow thanks to its kooky narration and choppy editing, introduces the three playable characters who form the backbone of the game’s story. Players will start out as Arthur Hastings, who plans to escape the city of Wellington Wells into the slum-like “Garden district” in search of his missing brother.

Later on, you’ll assume the role of Sally Boyle, an “experimental chemist” who can use her concoctions against the city’s oppressive police force. Last up is Ollie Starkey, a Scottish former soldier reminiscent of Groundskeeper Willie having a particularly bad day. The three characters are clearly built around different play-styles, with Ollie favouring aggression and Sally emphasising stealth, while Arthur sits somewhere in between.

The second half of the video demonstrates the various systems at play, such as weapon-crafting, stealth, character upgrades, and side missions. There’s plentiful footage of the game’s pugilistic melee combat, and a neat clip where the player vomits butterflies.

All-told, the trailer suggests We Happy Few is now far more closely aligned with a game like BioShock than it was during its Early Access period, something which James Davenport discovered earlier this year. Although the striking style and subversive tone suggested a story-driven experience, the game originally played out as a procedural survival sim. In the last year or so, however, the developers have significantly changed the game’s direction, introducing a far stronger narrative thread revolving around the three characters shown off in the trailer.

Either way, there’s certainly plenty to be intrigued about, from how the world-state will change when players ingest “Joy”—the drug used to control the populace through a constant state of euphoria, to the rictus-grin doctors who remind me of Timothy Dalton as the shopkeeper in Hot Fuzz.

We happy Few launches on August 10. The trailer is below. Make sure to pay attention.

Australia turned the thumbs-down on We Happy Few in May, citing the game's incentivized drug use—players take a faux-narcotic called "Joy" in order to blend in with society and avoid being murdered—as too far over the line for approval. Last week, however, the Classification Board announced that it would reconsider the ruling, and today it revealed that the appeal has been successful. 

"A three-member panel of the Classification Review Board has unanimously determined that the computer game We Happy Few is classified R18+ (Restricted) with the consumer advice 'Fantasy violence and interactive drug use,'" the Classification Review Board said in its decision.   

"In the Classification Review Board’s opinion We Happy Few warrants an R 18+ classification because the interactive drug use is high in impact. The overall impact of the classifiable elements in the computer game was no greater than high." 

"We are extremely pleased with the decision of the board and excited that our Australian fans and new players will be able to experience We Happy Few without modification," Compulsion said in its own announcement. "We want to thank everybody who got involved in the discussion, contacted the board and sent us countless messages of support. Your involvement made a huge difference." 

The R18+ rating means that adults will be legally allowed to purchase the game without having to horse around with proxy servers, overseas shipping, or whatever other trickery gamers down under are forced to fall back on when confronted with this kind of nonsense. We Happy Few is slated to come out on August 10. 

We Happy Few was refused classification in Australia last month, meaning it was effectively banned in the country. The game's pill-habit was the source of the trouble: We Happy Few is literally about a society that scarfs truckloads of drugs to maintain happiness (and more importantly, conformity), but Australia's National Classification Code states that games depicting "drug misuse or addiction ... in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults" will be refused classification.   

It might seem a bit silly for a country that does actually have an R18+ classification, although its introduction in 2013 doesn't appear to have had much on-the-ground impact for Aussie gamers. But the Classification Board announced today that it will consider an appeal of the RC next month, and extended an invitation to individuals or organizations to "apply for standing as an interested party."  

"The closing date to lodge your application for standing as an interested party and any submissions is 29 June 2018," the announcement says. "Please note that the Review Board can only consider submissions about We Happy Few itself and not any other matters relating to computer game classification policy or issues generally." 

We Happy Few was refused classification because players are incentivized to take drugs in the game world. "A player who takes Joy can reduce gameplay difficulty, therefore receiving an incentive by progressing through the game quickly. Although there are alternative methods to complete the game, gameplay requires the player to take Joy to progress," the board said in its original ruling. 

"In the Board’s opinion, the game’s drug-use mechanism of making game progression less difficult, constituted an incentive or reward for drug-use. Therefore, the game exceeded the R18+ classification because of the drug use related to incentives and rewards."   

Hopefully the board will look more deeply into We Happy Few's narrative themes in its re-review, rather than just the basic mechanics of getting high to get by. The Classification Board's re-review is scheduled for July 3. 

Thanks, Kotaku.

We Happy Few, first released on Steam in Early Access in July 2016, is out on August 10, Microsoft showed at its E3 2018 press conference. It's actually been awhile since We Happy Few was available for purchase on Early Access, as the developers removed it from sale after increasing the scope and price from $30 to $60. We played it recently, stating that its world is fascinating but its survival systems don't quite work.

Perhaps the bigger news is that Microsoft has acquired developer Compulsion Games. It's too early to say what that means for their next game, other than that it's most likely arriving for Xbox and PC.

Since We Happy Few was removed from Early Access earlier this year, it's undergone a major transformation from a survival game with touches of story to a linear, story-driven game with touches of survival game mechanics. After spending an hour with the latest version of We Happy Few, I worry the changes are still not enough. Its alt-history take on 1960s England is so stylish and well-realized, especially with all the new characters and quiet set pieces, that the remaining survival game systems feel like leftovers from their own alternate history. 

Small town life 

I wade through the tall grass of the slums, a community left to its own devices on the outskirts of the fictional English city of Wellington Wells, where a society lives on hallucinogenic drugs in an alt-history take on the outcome of World War 2. But out here, if I'm caught wearing a nice suit or taking Joy (the drugs), the locals will chase me down with sharp sticks and poke me to death. I actually have to tear my clothes up via a crafting menu to placate them. The ruling class isn't a kind one, I'm thinking.

One abandoned, dilapidating home—they all look this way out here—glows in the low evening light. Inside I find toys piled on rotting mattresses. Three floors of shrines, and no sign of life. The kids are gone, it seems, likely in a camp or school dozens of miles away. Another home, this one without light, is somewhat intact. I find letters to the editor on each floor expressing disgust with an increasing presence of authoritarianism, the state of affairs of this empty village clearly the product of a militarized force tightening their grip. On the third floor I find the authors hanging from the rafters.

We Happy Few is overflowing with these quiet (and grim) storytelling touches now, filling in the history of its world while characterizing the small people and big powers at play. The three playable characters are fully voiced, and regularly comment (a bit too often) on how they're feeling or what they see. Floating gold masks are hidden in some areas, and when you approach a small black and white vignette plays out from the lead character's perspective as a child near the end of World War 2. The Germans win in this timeline, but don't expect the usual Nazi bad guys.

Hungry man 

Think of the new structure of We Happy Few like this: what was initially a roguelike set in procedurally generated survival game biomes is now a linear adventure game strung out along a series of connected, procedurally generated biomes. 

The slums is one such area, a sprawling meadow with overgrown houses nearing collapse, and a few corners of the area populated by locals. The suit-haters didn't mind me much, but an outpost in the northwest corner carries far more threatening occupants. Surrounded by a spiked wooden fence, I need to infiltrate the outpost and steal some supplies in order to get help from a fellow among the suit-haters. If I find his old war medals, he's promised to help me get closer to Wellington Wells.

I sneak around the back of the outpost only for a guard to take me by surprise. I wake up in the fighting pit, a crowd of bandits that look something like spiked-everything Mad Maxers with an insistence for nice haircuts and clean trousers. A gate separates me from Danny Defoe, who I recognize far too long after he recognizes me. Apparently, before things went to shit, he plagiarized something my character, a former reporter, had written and I told on the guy. He has some grievances to air, and I have some forgiveness to find.

I'm offered two tools to complete my task, and the same goes for Defoe: a club wrapped tightly with soft cloth or a very pointy stick. I grab the pillow club and Defoe grabs the spear. I must've been a real dick back when. I club him unconscious, which is an involuntary brand of forgiveness, I suppose. More attackers arrive to subdue me, but I beat them into tiny, crumpled piles of forgiveness too. Luckily, the combat is simple—maybe too simple. You can block, swing, charge up a heavy swing, and kick opponents to break their block. 

The stamina meter governs how much swinging and blocking and sprinting you're capable of before needing to back off and recharge, which itself is governed by your character's well-being. If you're too hungry, tired, or injured, your max stamina will shrink. Combat is easy to pick up, but just as clumsy and shallow as it is in Skyrim—at least early on. 

None of it's a problem until I finish off the remaining thugs and attempt an escape. I'm starting to get hungry and all I have is dozens of rotten carrots. What a wonder that the guards can't smell the fermenting garbage collecting in my pants. To get out I'll need to sneak by some guards in the dark, damp tunnels of the old bunker using basic stealth rules: don't be too loud, avoid light and vision cones, and throw objects to distract guards. The AI is pretty basic, so my escape is a breeze, up until I get too confident. Sneak up on a baddie and you can choke them out, though be careful or you'll generate too much noise. I perform this mistake once I get to the surface, and three guards attack me right away. I've managed to keep my pillow bludgeon intact and build my own pointy stick, so with enough patience and poking I murder them with ease. Weapons will break after enough use, so stealth will likely be the only option in cases where I'm strapped for supplies. 

Now I'm back out in the open meadow of the village ruins again, but without food and no idea where to find any. I figure my character would forage in empty houses and near verdant collections of vegetation, and it pays off. Eventually I find old jerky (not rotten) near a dying fire, thankful my aimless fetch quest is over. Back to exploring, hopefully without hunger as a constant irritation.

Survival systems like hunger, thirst, and sleep deprivation still exist, but they're not directly connected to your health. Ignoring these systems for the entire game is possible, and none of them will kill you, but they'll significantly debuff your max stamina and stamina recovery.

Digging through drawers and corpses to find scraps of food and salvage were my least favorite parts of Bioshock, and it's no more exciting in We Happy Few. Finding crafting items and food act as small tethers to unexplored areas, but the bespoke environments and embedded stories should be incentive enough. I'd rather look up at the people hanging in the rafters (gruesome as it sounds) than give the desk below them priority, and I'd rather feel more directly threatened by the world and the people in it than through abstract hunger systems and item scarcity. 

Thematically, We Happy Few's new incarnation approaches the character and quality of a Bioshock or Dishonored while playing like the inverse. In those games, you're a lithe, powerful hero. In We Happy Few, you play as a helpless nobody. I'm happy to be a nobody, I just wish there was a way to express your helplessness and struggle to survive that was as fun or complex as chaining plasmids is in Bioshock or combining abilities is in Dishonored. 

As it stands, We Happy Few borrows simple, mundane crafting systems from full-on survival games to express your fragility and desperation in an oppressive world. At least most of the survival elements will be customizable, or totally eliminated by playing on easy. But with so many survival games leaving Early Access that frame hunger, thirst, sleep, and so on around the same chore-like checklisting, I'd rather see We Happy Few try something completely new that didn't distract from such an intriguing world. 

We Happy Few was refused classification by the Australian Classification Board earlier this week, meaning it won't be available to purchase in the country. Since then, the board has issued a statement to us about why it was banned (more on that later), and today studio Compulsion Games has advised players how they plan to address the situation.

It's an especially tricky scenario for the studio because this was a Kickstarter-funded game, meaning Australians who contributed to its development may risk receiving nothing for their pledges. But Compulsion Games writes that it will issue refunds in the event that it can't work something out with the board.

"To our Australian fans, we share your frustration," a studio spokesperson wrote. "We will work with the ACB on the classification. If the government maintains its stance, we will make sure that you can get a refund, and we will work directly with affected Kickstarter backers to figure something out.  We would appreciate if you give us a little bit of time to appeal the decision before making a call."

It continued: "We Happy Few is set in a dystopian society, and the first scene consists of the player character redacting material that could cause offense to 'society at large', as part of his job as a government 'archivist'.  It’s a society that is forcing its citizens to take Joy, and the whole point of the game is to reject this programming and fight back. In this context, our game’s overarching social commentary is no different than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or Terry Gilliam's Brazil."

In other words, the studio is arguing that the use of the drug Joy in the game is not designed to glorify drug use: instead, it's a vehicle for the game's themes. 

"The game explores a range of modern themes, including addiction, mental health and drug abuse. We have had hundreds of messages from fans appreciating the treatment we’ve given these topics, and we believe that when players do get into the world they’ll feel the same way.  We’re proud of what we’ve created."

Responding to our queries earlier this week, the Australian Department of Communications and the Arts described the offending material, in reference to item 1(a) concerning games that "depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena".

Here's the full description (warning, it contains spoilers):

Gameplay consists of exploring the fictional English town of Wellington Wells in first-person as three separate playable characters, where non-playing characters consume the government-mandated, fictional drug “Joy” in the form of pills, which include side-effects such as euphoria and memory loss. When the player consumes Joy, surreal, psychedelic sequences including butterflies and brightly-coloured street-scapes appear. In keeping with the fantasy setting, character models and environments are brightly-coloured and stylised.

Players have the option to conform with NPCs and take Joy pills when exploring the Village or Parade District areas of the game. If a player has not taken Joy, NPCs become hostile towards the player if they perform behaviours including running, jumping and staring. An NPC character called the Doctor can detect when the player has not taken Joy and will subsequently raise an alarm. A player that takes Joy can reduce gameplay difficulty, therefore receiving an incentive by progressing through the game quickly. Although there are alternative methods to complete the game, gameplay requires the player to take Joy to progress.

In one sequence, an NPC is viewed on the ground, convulsing owing to a reaction from taking a Joy pill, which has subsequently turned bad. After several NPCs encourage her to take Joy and she refuses, fearing that it will have an adverse effect, they beat her with steel pots and a shovel, until she is implicitly killed. In another sequence, the player is seen in first-person view, entering a telephone box that contains three large pill dispensers, each holding a different flavoured Joy pill. The player consumes a Joy pill and a swarm of brightly-coloured butterflies appear as well as rainbows and coloured pathways on the ground, improving speed and visibility for the player.

In the Board’s opinion, the game’s drug-use mechanic making game progression less difficult constitutes an incentive or reward for drug-use and therefore, the game exceeds the R 18+ classification that states, “drug use related to incentives and rewards is not permitted”.

Therefore, the game warrants being Refused Classification.

In the past, studios have altered games in order to have them comply with the Australian Classification Board's guidelines. South Park: The Stick of Truth and Fallout 3 are both examples, while on the otherhand, Hotline Miami 2 was never adapted for Australia, leading Devolver Digital to delay releases for some of its other games including Genital Jousting.

" We would like to respond to the thematic side of We Happy Few in more detail at a later date, as we believe it deserves more attention than a quick PR response," Compulsion's statement said. "In the meantime we will be talking to the ACB to provide additional information, to discuss the issues in depth, and see whether they will change their minds."