Sometimes, it’s nice to allow yourself to be surprised by a video game. Heading into The Good Life, I didn’t know much beyond it other than it was a life sim from the fertile mind of Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro, the creator of cult classic Deadly Premonition and various other shabby, characterful delights, and that it’d enjoyed a couple of not-so-successful runs on crowdfunding before eventually crossing the line on Kickstarter. Beyond that there’s been little by way of previews or promotion before its multiplatform release last week.
Which works quite well, really, given its premise: you’re a highly strung New York photographer Naomi Hayward, who’s somehow inexplicably found herself in a mountain of debt to an English newspaper and so settles down into the town of Rainy Woods (a name that’ll be familiar, I’m sure, to fans of Swery’s wider oeuvre) to unearth its secrets and earn back some of that cash by taking photos of its people and places. Why exactly are you in debt to an English newspaper, and where exactly is this village whose genesis came from a press trip Swery once made to Hitchin yet that seems to be set somewhere in the imagined ether between Lancashire and Cornwall? Why does everyone in the village turn into a cat or dog on certain evenings?
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