“Demo Disk” – The Good Life (2021) [PC]

Demo Disk is a series of first impressions posts for new releases and quick opinions.

Video game director Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro’s games are known for three things. They are: 

1. Often cult hits more than mainstream successes.
2. Dark, strange, mysterious, and gruesome. 
3. Janky in ways you never imagined there’d be jank.

From Deadly Premonition to The Missing, SWERY’s games all have through-lines of exaggerated grotesquery, mysteries, and horror, so when the Kickstarter for SWERY’s The Good Life started in April 2018, it seemed like a game out of place. A not-so-mild mannered New York photographer in an idyllic British small town seems about as far out of left field for SWERY as possible.

It was bright, sunny, cartoony, and unlike anything we’ve seen from SWERY since his work on Tomba 2, and certainly not from anything he’s led. On Kickstarter, though, those cult horror fans came through. With an initial goal of around $600,000 USD, it ended with a grand total of over $700.000. Now, three and a half years later (and two years past the original anticipated date), the game eagerly awaited by over 12,600 backers is finally available.

The game quickly introduces us to Naomi Hayward, a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered journalist who looks every gift horse in the mouth and goes, “I don’t need your charity.” Except she does, because Naomi is deeply, deeply in debt. Like, a lot. She’s been hired to temporarily relocate to Rainy Woods, a quiet British village that was once known as The Happiest Town in The World (and to the people living there, it still is).

Once there, she’s to investigate all the town’s secrets and report to a mysterious benefactor who will pay her in exchange for any and all pictures she can provide. How some black-and-white photography and an off-brand Instagram account will pay off £30,000,000 is as of yet unknown. However, the town very quickly gives up a major secret: on full moons, the entire population turns into cats and dogs. With a little help from a local witch-hippie, Naomi soon joins them.

Very little of this is a surprise to anyone who’s been with the game since the Kickstarter. It’s quite interesting to see how the game evolved from the idea to the implementation. Originally, the shapeshifting was pitched as a once-a-month event where you’d have to choose between Team Cat or Team Dog, with the ability to change eventually. In the full game, you get both forms in the prologues (which were released as a demo), and you can change into them any time, any place. You can almost hear the meeting table discussions as this change morphed from the original item. “One or two nights once a month? That’s barely any time at all. Cat OR dog? It’s so limiting.” Now, you have cat form, your exploration shape, able to jump higher than human Naomi can and dog form, your fighting shape, lashing out against the wild angry badgers and other critters of the English countryside.

On top of photography and shapeshifting, the game also offers many of the amenities of quiet farm life sims: tending a garden, raising sheep, cooking, mining, fighting, drinking contests… that’s about it. What, were you expecting “forge friendships, find love?” Naomi isn’t here for that stuff. She’s got a job to do and she’s going to do it. She just has to adopt some more sheep while she does. Collect some bugs. Steal some lawn gnomes. You know, the usual English countryside things you do.

But Maggie, you say, what about the horror? What about the jank? You promised us jank! Okay, I’ll admit this is a Demo Disk. I’ve scarcely dipped my toes in the water, and so far…well, there’s a wee bit of jank. Mostly camera stuff thus far. And I mean the game camera, not the in-game camera, though snapping a photo of a red squirrel did seem to sap its soul as the critter vanished before my eyes. So, okay, game camera and in-game camera stuff. The game camera has a tendency to jerk around quickly and wildly before settling down and letting me focus on where I want, but it’s not enough to cause motion sickness and gets under control quickly. I just end up looking at the sky for a second before I figure out where I want to face. As for the dark and gory mysteries, well…they’re there, but that’s spoilers, and we don’t do that in this post. Just have faith in SWERY, it’ll be there for you when you get to it.

Now for the big question: was it worth the wait? Yes, I think it was. The atmosphere feels like every British village you’ve ever seen in film, the kind of place to cozy up with a scone and a cup of hot tea while you watch the world pass by. Even knowing there’s some darkness lurking somewhere unseen, you want to take it slow and appreciate all there is to see and do in Rainy Woods. I look forward to exploring beyond the village, taking photographs of hedgehogs, and maybe solving some mysteries in between becoming a hedgehog Instagram star.

Maggie Maxwell spends most of her days buried in her fiction writing, only coming up for air to dive into the escapism of video games, cartoons, or movies. She can usually be found on Twitter as @wanderingquille and @MaxNChachi or streaming on Twitch with her husband, also as MaxNChachi.