The Good Life

While there’s still some ramshackle charm and memorable silliness to be had, The Good Life takes every opportunity to sell itself short and make playing it a frustrating, repetitive, and user-antagonistic experience.

I really wish The Good Life wasn’t a constant tug of war match. A series of steps forward, and equal steps back. I frequently would find myself loving the richness and detail of the setting, only to be taken out of it by an annoying gameplay mechanic. It overstays its welcome, and rides what it does well out thin. If you can get it on sale or on Game Pass, I’d say you might as well give it a shot. It’s not devoid of positives, but it ends up being painfully average at best. While I hope Swery’s supposed collaboration with Suda51 will be good, I don’t think I will be returning to Rainy Woods.

The Good Life has a name behind it in SWERY, and as such, the story brings all the insanity and the confusion one has come to expect from his previous titles. There is scope for the humour to work, but factoring in fighting with the camera and struggling with the controls the whole experience is just not worthwhile. In a self-fulling prophecy, Naomi points out a lot of faults in games that The Good Life just blithely repeats itself. Throwing a crazy ad-lib together and keeping fingers crossed the game works may have worked in the past, but this game has none of the fun or the charm to be successful nowadays.

The Good Life, for better or intentionally worse, is full of hardships. It might be the kind of experience you're looking for if you wanted a reflection of just how laborious life can be sometimes. That might not make for a very good life, though.

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.