The Good Life Reviews
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.
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.
If you love unorthodox japanese games, you should probably try The Good Life, especially given its low price point. Just be aware that's plenty of shortcoming here.
Review in Russian | Read full review
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 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.
The Good Life is a charmingly silly RPG with a little too much daily grind.
The Good Life is a grotesque experience with a weird story that a chosen audience might like.
Review in German | Read full review
An odd mix of a lot of exploring, taking photos, and trying to solve a variety of pretty unusual mysteries in a rural town
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
Good life with dogs and cats... but how long? Game is boring too soon.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
The Good Life isn't for everyone in the same way that Swery65 himself isn't for a lot of people. But I encourage you to ask if it's for you and go find out. When you give a game like this a chance, you just might sink into the oddities and fall in love with a world of animorphing British folk who ask absurd tasks of you. Undoubtedly, you'll find yourself upset with more than a few decisions made by Swery and his team at White Owls. But amidst the hodgepodge, you also might find something golden that fits you like a glove.
The Good Life can be summed up as one of the more polished SWERY experiences. For some, that explains all they need to know; for everyone else, it’s like a fun, repetitive, sweet and sour mixture between Little Dragons Cafe, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Pokemon Snap, No More Heroes III, and Katamari Damacy. So few games leave me at a loss for words like The Good Life did, yet this is somehow one of my longest articles. As a gamedev and reviewer, I’m confused. As a gamer, I’m content.
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.
Like any other game by Hidetaka Suehiro, The Good Life is a unique experience with simple yet engaging gameplay and solid story telling, offering a few hours of pure meditation.
Review in Persian | Read full review
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.
It may not be for everyone, but The Good Life is a celebration of all things SWERY.
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 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 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
The Good Life is another flawed yet fascinating gem from Swery65. It's a weird world full of unforgettable characters, and even when the gameplay grows a bit tiring or repetitive, it's worth all the photo quests and fetch missions in the world to see that next bonkers twist in the story.