The Good Life

Now The Good Life isn’t the most visually stunning game of the year, but it has a certain pointy style to it that I can appreciate. The characters and locales are distinct, the animals are adorable, and the backgrounds are fairly scenic. The voice acting in The Good Life is hammy as hell, and I love it. I think Naomi could use a few more voice lines for the sake of variety, but otherwise, the performances are right at home in this delightfully weird little title.

While The Good Life still has some annoyances carried over from Deadly Premonition, it’s still a great time with some wacky characters. The transformations and photography are a lot of fun to mess around with, and the life simulation aspects compliment the more relaxed pace nicely.

The Good Life is another flawed yet fascinating gem from Swery65. It's a weird world full of unforgettable characters, and even when the gameplay grows a bit tiring or repetitive, it's worth all the photo quests and fetch missions in the world to see that next bonkers twist in the story.

The Good Life has been in development for a long time – it failed its initial funding campaign in 2017. But after several development pauses, funding attempts, and visual alterations, its bumpy development led to a bumpy gameplay experience. Despite that, The Good Life contains flashes of fun in the more absurd moments, and its slice-of-life aspects are unexpectedly engaging. However, these don’t offset the overall outdated design.

The Good Life is a weird and—most of the time—quite relaxing game made by Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro who also made cult classic Deadly Premonition. The Good Life is part-debt repayment sim and part-RPG, as well as being a bit of a murder mystery. It’s a quirky mash-up of genres and definitely has a unique sense of humor that helps to carry it through some of its less polished aspects.

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.

Tedious amounts of fetch quests, clunky controls, sloppy presentation/execution, outdated visuals, and a mediocre soundtrack are really hard things to ignore, especially when considering the $29.99 price point. All in all, I’ve heard a lot about SWERY’s games and was looking forward to this experience, so it’s a bummer it fell short.

While the daily ongoings of Rainy Woods and its surrounding environment can rustle up a brief oddity or two, Swery and co's latest round of eccentric antics with The Good Life sadly doesn't go far enough in its set-up to feel all that compelling. Let alone, excuse or perhaps mask the otherwise unpolished and mechanically-rough controls and design alike. But where the primarily-marketed pitch of cat-and-dog transformation seldom goes anywhere beyond the briefest of requirements, it's the reliance on overdrawn fetch-quests -- not to mention the ill-measured cost to access resources and landmarks...

Despite an interesting setting, tedious gameplay and poor performance makes The Good Life a disappointing outing for Swery.