Xbox Game Pass Hidden Gems (February 15): We Happy Few

Welcome to Xbox Game Pass Hidden Gems, our weekly look at titles on Microsoft’s on-demand subscription gaming service that you may not have otherwise taken a second look at.

While games like Palworld, Starfield, or Like a Dragon Gaiden get all the attention, there are plenty of others worth checking out once you're tired of collecting monsters in space as a former member of the Yakuza... or whatever those other games are about.

This week, we're looking at an open-world FPS that had quite a bit of buzz around it when it was first released. At the time, it garnered mixed reviews and has largely been ignored over the years. It's often been compared, fairly or not, to the BioShock series, as it presents dystopian themes in a semi-historical setting. It's also completely bonkers.

Let's take a look at Compulsion Games' We Happy Few.

Published in 2018, We Happy Few is set in an alternate mid-1960s Britain that lost World War II. For some reason, the residents of Wellington Wells aren't under German rule, however. This is due to an event the villagers only refer to as the Very Bad Thing. So Very Bad, in fact, that all the residents regularly ingest a hallucinogenic drug called Joy in order to remain blissfully ignorant as to what the Very Bad Thing actually was.

Taking a regular dose of Joy is compulsory in Wellington Wells, and failure to do so results in violence, arrest, and, well, other very bad things.

We Happy Few opens with one of the three main characters, Arthur, on the fence as to whether or not to take his regular dose. The player can decide to do so, which humorously sends the game directly to the closing credits. If they don't, however, the game begins proper.

The titleinvokes many of the themes seen in dystopian fiction,