The Good Life Reviews
It’s quite expansive and filled with things to do, the plot twists are intriguing and engaging, and Naomi does smooth her edges down the further along you get, though she never totally hits for me. If you need a good dose of high strangeness coupled with a lot of things to do, there’s no better time to move to Rainy Woods and get a peek into The Good Life.
The Good Life is a charmingly silly RPG with a little too much daily grind.
The Good Life is the new work by Yukio Futatsugi and Hidetaka 'Swery' Suehiro although we will see many more typical elements of the latter's games. We will have to uncover the secrets hidden in the British town of Rainy Woods while enjoying a whole country life simulator. Too bad the end result is clouded by an obvious lack of rhythm and somewhat debatable playable mechanics. Despite everything, The Good Life is worth a look, especially if we like Swery's work.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The Good Life is an experience that can be quite frustrating for some players. Representing the life of an ordinary worker in a bizarre setting, the game weighs its hand on elements of management that are sure to displease a fair amount of people. However, for those who manage to go further, taking advantage of all the charisma of the game and its unusual proposal, there is a beautiful experience to be found here.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
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.
If you already know and appreciate the work of director Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro, there's a big chance you'll enjoy The Good Life. If you don't, there are plenty of other titles in the market that are more capable of entertaining you.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
This RPG life-sim adventure game might be barking mad, but it's got an intriguing story with unique gameplay. Investigate a mystery as a New York photojournalist in rural Britain, complete with eccentric characters and activities to keep you busy.
While The Good Life has its charms, most of the gameplay just feels really sluggish. Many of the story quests will have you making your way to a point on the map to watch a cutscene, you'll then have to make your way somewhere else to watch the next one, and so on until the quest ends. The side quests also end up feeling repetitive and while it can be pretty relaxing to go through all the quests and slowly tick them off, for many players this will get tiresome pretty quickly.
The Good Life kept my attention longer than it should. I was willing to brave through the mundane just to see what unfolds and what bitchy retort Naomi has in store for the weirdos in Rainy Woods.
If you’re a fan of SWERY’s previous output or have a lot of patience for fetch quests, there is reason enough to check out The Good Life, but it is a hard sell for pretty much anyone else.
There is a ton of stuff to do in The Good Life, even multiple main storylines to pursue. Unfortunately, completing them and fulfilling the side missions is not very fun. Between the constant back and forth across the huge map and the fetch quests, I feel that more in-depth gameplay features would really help me enjoy this game.
For those who relish bizarre interactive experiences, The Good Life is an essential oddity that can't be missed. For everyone else, this is a barely functional chore that is all but guaranteed to frustrate and bewilder.
The Good Life comes with excellent narrative elements, but the entire experience is damaged by some weird design choices that result in mediocre gameplay. While this is hardly surprising for a game directed by SWERY, some of the ideas featured in The Good Life, like the cat and dog transformation mechanics, deserved a much better execution, as they feel shallow and not particularly interesting. With such flawed gameplay, only die-hard fans of the Japanese director will truly love The Good Life.
The Good Life knows where its strengths lie. Its functional open-world model and mostly-dated gameplay systems sit quietly in the background and allow its quirky charm to take the spotlight. That charm is piled on thick, with absurd characters (and absurd accents), a plot that digresses so wildly it seems unable to remember where it started and, lest we forget, the whole dog/cat transmogrification thing. The charm and atmosphere have to be seriously compelling if they are to excuse the well-worn mechanics, repetitive tasks and frequent slowdown and pop-in. If Japanese old-school gaming whimsy × twee Englishness isn't for you, then neither is The Good Life. But if you're a SWERY fan and that sounds like your cup of tea, get dunking.
The Good Life is a shambolic RPG that barely hold together, wrapped in the trappings of a rural life simulator. It's tonally stupid and structurally broken, but also surprisingly deep and occasionally self-aware.
After you get past the rather slow start, like all massive world RPG's you eventually get into the swing of things. You know how to deal with food, sleep, and sickness. You have a pretty good idea where the characters are and you are freely going out and exploring. This is when the Good Life really picks up. Once you get over that hump and really immersed in The Good Life Universe. It's so much fun! The world is massive with lots of NPCs. The character stories are detailed and interesting. Naomi starts evolving as a character. Unfortunately as can be seen by many game reviews, I imagine most game reviewers (and many players) do not get to this point.
A surprisingly generous and deep life sim from the mind of Swery, but a frustratingly creaky one too.
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.
Weird, good natured, and pretty funny with it, The Good Life stands apart, like most SWERY games.
Though technically rough and uneven, The Good Life is memorable and anything but predictable.