A Taste of The Good Life
Swery and Yukio Futatsugi, along with their teams at White Owls and G-rounding have been busy creating The Good Life, an unique debt repayment daily life RPG that was successsfully backed on Kickstarter. Set in a beautiful town in the English countryside called Rainy Woods, life seems slow, peaceful and perfect…until a stranger comes to town.
Playing as Naomi, a journalist from New York, the player tries to pay off her massive debt by using her photography skills to capture captivating images to sell to the local paper or the game’s Instagram-like social media platform, Flamingo. You can also spend the money you earn on camera upgrades or on outfits for Naomi, because style is important to a New Yorker of course!
Beginning near the town square, I wandered amid the quaint old buildings and talked to the villagers. There was a woman that wanted me to get a picture of the vicar drinking at the pub, someone that wanted proof that a secret romance was happening, and a man that missed his red truck. Great! Three jobs to help me get out of debt or maybe I could buy that cute outfit I wanted.
Accomplishing these tasks was not as simple as just pointing the camera at a subject and clicking the shutter. The red truck was in motion constantly, always giving me a blurred shot. I needed a way to make the truck stop for a second…similarly the vicar would guiltily put down his mug of beer if he spotted my camera. I had to find a way to sneak up on him. The secret lovers were hard to find until I remembered my camera had a telephoto lens.
Completing these tasks led me all over the town square, and also helped me understand how to use the game’s camera well. It also led to a character taking me to the woods in search of someone, and then the central mystery of the game was revealed. A murder in this happiest town in the world! How can this be?
This is just one of the shocking secrets this sleepy town has to offer. The townspeople are very bizarre and quirky, and I laughed several times while playing at the dialogue and situations they put themselves in. Probably my favorite was the drunk vicar quest.
I was a little sad that the demo didn’t show the town’s biggest secret: once a month everyone turns into a dog or cat for the night! This of course would give the player all new access to areas as well as new quests, and of course, the best part, playing as a cat! I guess you dog lovers could be a dog too, if that’s your thing. Although I would have loved to see that part of the game, I guess that gives me something to look forward to when the game releases next year on PC and PlayStation 4.
