The Good Life Reviews
The Good Life is a peculiar and endearing game that some will love and others won’t. I quite like it, as the setting, characters, and various activities are as pleasing as they are immersive. There are a few frustrating parts and performance issues, but they can’t hold back my overall enjoyment of The Good Life.
It may not be for everyone, but The Good Life is a celebration of all things SWERY.
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.
Looking past the obvious flaws in The Good Life, players will find a very unusual and engrossing mystery, with a lot of depth to the gameplay and witty characters. It’s a very personal game that presses the player to slow down and take it easy; to chill out and enjoy life.
The Good Life is Swery's first take on the Life simulators genre. While it incorporates all the features that made him a cult creator it also shows a disorienting mix of elements and mechanics that just don't work well together. The thin narrative line and the histrionic cast of characters fail to fully flesh out the social commentary that the creator intended to convey. The whole experience ends up feeling more like a list of chores rather than a smart and enjoyable experience in Swery's characteristic Troma-like fashion.
Review in Italian | Read full review
This surreal, multifaceted experience has its charms; but technical and storytelling snags that hold it back
Boring, pointless, and jammed with grating characters and obnoxious story beats, The Good Life doesn't live up to its name.
A hugely disappointing mess of a game that magnifies all of SWERY's worst tendencies and fails to compensate in terms of the unengaging characters and script.
The Good Life is a product plagued by major problems on the playful and structural side. An extremely lacking title from a technical point of view, which brings to the screen a series of decidedly questionable game design choices, at the base of an adventure that, while trying to tell a story in its own mature way, often expires in tedium and struggles to sustain the interest of the player.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Good Life is a play by Swery, for better and for worse. His personality emanates and shares particularities: outdated technical and mechanical problems, but with that magical aura. If you like the author, jump in without fear. Important: it is not translated into Spanish.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
There is just a lot to do in The Good Life, which means that players can potentially sink upwards of forty-plus hours taking pictures or running mundane, everyday tasks. And while I like life simulators, I don’t like them when they can barely run at over 3 FPS.
The Good Life is a bit of a mess, trying to be too many things and getting very little right, with weak characters and an unpolished plot.
Despite having some interesting moments, The Good Life feels and plays like a crazy mess.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Good Life does many things, but they never felt like they coalesced together into an experience that could stick with me. I certainly enjoyed parts of it, and some of its stranger moments really do land as big, enjoyable peaks. But there’s a lot of valley in-between, and while I arrived in Rainy Woods eager for a pleasant countryside escape, I didn’t feel like making a return trip after the credits had rolled.
When everything is flowing in The Good Life, it feels like a touch of Animal Crossing with alternatingly quaint and irreverent British pastoral television, all with a burgeoning murder mystery underneath. Unfortunately, some of its rougher edges seem possibly related to the Switch itself and, although loading times are usually on the shorter side, their frequent appearance interrupts the flow even more. The Rainy Woods residents are charming and strange and there’s a numbingly pleasant feel to smalltown life and chores, but stiff controls and muddled design make it hard to find a good rhythm in The Good Life.
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.
Though technically rough and uneven, The Good Life is memorable and anything but predictable.
Weird, good natured, and pretty funny with it, The Good Life stands apart, like most SWERY games.
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.