The Good Life Review – Raining Cats and Dogs (PS4)

The Good Life is a weird and—most of the time—quite relaxing game made by Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro who also made cult classic Deadly Premonition. The Good Life is part-debt repayment sim and part-RPG, as well as being a bit of a murder mystery. It’s a quirky mash-up of genres and definitely has a unique sense of humor that helps to carry it through some of its less polished aspects.

The Good Life’s protagonist is Naomi Hayward, a photographer from New York who has somehow managed to find herself in a humongous amount of debt—£30 million to be precise. Which is the reason she winds up in a small town in England called Rainy Woods, supposedly “the world’s happiest town.” By uncovering the secrets of its inhabitants Naomi hopes to pay off her ridiculously large debt.

The Good Life Review – Full Moon Party

One of the very first things you’ll discover is that during a full moon, all the residents seem to have the ability to turn into either a cat or a dog. As you may expect, Naomi is pretty shocked by this turn of events, and even more so when she gains this power too. While this should be a big enough scoop on its own without knowing how and why this is happening, you’ll still have plenty of investigating to do. The story ranges from silly through to downright absurd and while it might not wrap all its loose ends up neatly, the journey is quite the ride.

While the town is fairly small there are plenty of characters to meet who are quirky and larger than life; from the vicar who loves nothing more than a drinking competition, to the local carpenter who walks around in a full suit of armor every day. They all seem to see Naomi as their own personal gofer and will have a bunch of requests for you to complete. Some of these will have you using your photography skills and others will need your new animal transformation abilities. You’ll be climbing up buildings while in your cat form one minute and then running around barking at sheep the next.

It’s a shame that many of these quests just end up being simple fetch quests. How much you enjoy this game will depend very much on your patience with being sent back and forth across the village and its surrounding areas. Many of the rewards that you get for completing them also feel pretty paltry especially when you consider how much things cost in-game.

The Good Life Review – Rip-Off Britain

Everything costs money, even warping across the map will cost you a tenner a time. You’ll also need to regularly eat to keep Naomi’s energy levels up. You can cook using items you find on your travels but most of the time it’s easier to grab a bite in town instead of trying to hunt for the right ingredients. If you don’t look after Naomi then she’ll get sick and it can cost quite a bit to get her fixed up at the local veterinary hospital. I’m assuming that the reason that she can’t just go to a local NHS hospital for free is both because she’s a tourist as well as now being part canine/feline.

There are some ways to save money. If you don’t want to pay the fee to fast travel around Rainy Woods then there is always the option of riding a sheep. Yup, you have the option to tame your very own woolly little steed to get around town, as well as take part in races. Although with Naomi yelling “Yeah baybeeee!” every time you accelerate (which starts to grate pretty quickly) you might decide that paying ten quid is actually much better value.

If you do start to run low on funds then you can always try to make a bit of extra cash on the side by uploading your photos to the Flamingo app, which is kind of like Instagram. By paying attention to what topics are trending you’ll be able to get more likes on your photos which will reward you with more money. You won’t be able to pay off your debt with this, but you should be able to make enough for a couple of cheeky pints of ale down the local pub.

The Good Life – Side Quest Overload

As well as running around helping people and snapping photos of the local scenery, there are loads of different activities to get stuck in. Unfortunately the vast majority of them feel fairly superficial. Sure, you could spend your time mining ore to get materials to remodel your house, but you never really need to. You could also grow your own food or run around town marking your territory with seemingly endless amounts of pee while in dog form, but most of these tasks feel fairly repetitive. It feels like a lot of these optional activities were just thrown into the game to pad things out a bit. Sadly, they don’t really end up adding anything worthwhile to the experience.

There are some other issues that can cause plenty of frustration. Naomi is not the easiest to control and you’ll definitely feel this whenever you come across an angry badger or accidently annoy a sheep. You’ll be able to lunge forward and attack while in your cat or dog form but it feels really imprecise and clumsy. You’re also only able to have one quest active at a time which means that if you happen to come across a character needed for another quest, they won’t have the proper dialogue until you activate their specific quest in the menu.

There are also a number of annoying performance issues especially when playing on PS5. Buildings will randomly flicker in and out of view and there is a fair amount of pop up. Bizarrely these issues seem to happen a lot less frequently when playing on PS4.

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.

The Good Life PS4 review code provided by publisher. Version 1.02 reviewed on a PlayStation 5. For more information, please read our Review Policy.