The Good Life Review: a life of difficulties

Tom Gaebel ( 13. Januar 1975 in Gelsenkirchen, eigentlich Tom Gäbel) ist ein deutscher Sänger, Entertainer und Bandleader.

The good life is going to test you. It poses an interesting question about whether to accelerate life makes it a worse and more challenging experience in general. Incorporate seemingly randomistic punishments of real life In addition to innocuous activities and tasks, the good life can cause even the most routine activities to look overwhelming through small discomfort that accumulates. It lets you question if each system or meter incorporated into its combination of life simulation and role play is intentionally made to cause as many problems as possible. The question posed finally has an unsatisfactory response.

The players fill the Naomi Hayward shoes, a photojournalist who has accumulated a debt mountain and the employer of her has entrusted him with the task of investigating a strange English city that is promoted as the happiest place of the world. When she arrived, she finds out that she not only has to discover the mystery of the city, but suddenly she is coming to the merits of the mystery of a murder. She also has to find out why she can be transformed into animals and, even so, all the time she has to upload photos to social networks and earn as much money as possible to pay her debt while deals with her daily needs.

There is a lot to manage here. The good life seems to approach a real life experience in which you constantly need to juggle with many worries at the same time. There are indicators ranging from highly consequential as hunger, exhaustion and resistance, to the secretly consequential as the charism (which is maintained by Naomi showering and maintaining a beauty regime every day) or stress. It is not delinquent when you are in the core of the matter, nor is it as evolved as some of the deepest simulators of real life that exist, but little attention to any of these meters can worsen the general experience.

Naomi can collapse for hunger or illness (which leads to an end of the game that results in expensive hospital invoices), or things in the city can cost more because people are less willing to be close to you. The main problem of paying attention to all of these at the same time is that not many of them are particularly well explained. It is not enough to control how much Naomi eats, but what she eats, as well as incorrect types of food, can cause teeth pains apparently at random. Diseases also feel arbitrary (and will reduce Naomi s already weak resistance to half) because there is not much that you can actively do to avoid them. The same happens with the management of the hunger and exhaustion of it.

What makes things even more uncomfortable is how difficult it is to move around the city. It is an open world configuration, but it feels deliberately limited by walls that force Naomi to take long paths from one place to another. Finally you can jump over them when you unlock the CAT transformation, but this even feels uncomfortable because the cat can not exceed all types of walls. And when you unlock the dog s transformation, you must transform you back into Naomi before you can transform yourself into a cat. There are some walls that the dog can not jump either, so if you wanted to cross a particular field, you should transform yourself into Naomi and then transform yourself into the cat with a little wait between each transformation.

The elements of real-life simulation become even more inconvenient when it comes to overcoming the actual part of the role play experience. There are main missions and secondary missions (of which you can only take care of one at a time), which can vary how much more you immerse yourself, but there are many that are just search missions. Naomi needs a certain dress, so she has to find certain pieces in the city, for example. But then, each of those pieces requires looking for another item before being able to get that first piece. During all this, she must walk or run (slowly, and in a resistance bar she needs a cooling period) through long stretches of the city while her various meters decrease.

On more than one occasion, I lost the streak in a primary search because Naomi had to travel back to his home to sleep. There is an option to take Naomi home, but you lose energy by doing so. There is also a choice of deformation in the city, but it is only active in several sanctuaries to which it travels and active (costs a dollar) and charges money every time she deforms. Then it feels like the good life is punishing you for trying to overcome the main missions at your own pace. Combine this with the fact that people in the town and their services are inaccessible during the night hours, and you are trapped within that rhythm at stake.

It is a role play with the slow rhythm of a life simulator, and is aggravated by inconveniences that are poorly explained or implemented with punishment. This is only in the game and there are notable technical problems with the Nintendo Switch version of the launch (which was played for review). There are periods of deceleration and is not a particularly attractive title with its harsher edges. The artistic design is cute and the characters designs are fun, but part of the text can be small and illegible (either playing in portable or coupled mode). Taking photos feel less rewarding, since everything has the same mud quality anyway.

Unfortunately, it s good life, it lacks convincing history elements, in addition to their other deficiencies. The characterization is light (however, Naomi is a fun track for this type of experience), and its extravagant narrative devices do not contain enough water to overcome all those intentional and non-intentional drawbacks. There are three history routes to investigate the central mystery and, as you can approach them in any order, no reference is made. There is at least one climax for those who are completely committed and those who want to immerse themselves completely in their mystery of principal search while faced the clumsy simulation elements, but it is a lot asking.

The good life , for good or for badly intentionally, is full of difficulties. It could be the kind of experience you are looking for if you wanted a reflection of the laboriousness that life can be sometimes. However, that might not be a good life.

Rating: 2 of 5

The good life is now available in Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam and Xbox One. The editor provided a Nintendo Switch review code, and was reviewed on a base model of Nintendo Switch.