The Good Life

The Good Life is a charmingly silly RPG with a little too much daily grind.

A surprisingly generous and deep life sim from the mind of Swery, but a frustratingly creaky one too.

Weird, good natured, and pretty funny with it, The Good Life stands apart, like most SWERY games.

This surreal, multifaceted experience has its charms; but technical and storytelling snags that hold it back

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.

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.

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 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.

Despite an interesting setting, tedious gameplay and poor performance makes The Good Life a disappointing outing for Swery.

The Good Life makes for a nice getaway, but don't plan on staying for too long.