The Good Life review: Take pictures, sip tea and solve mysteries

The Good Life is one of the most comfortable games to release this year. Hidetaka Suehiro, more popularly known as “Swery65”, had a lot of interesting projects under his belt in the past.

Be it the open-world survival horror game Deadly Premonition, the episodic graphic adventure game D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, and the puzzle-platformer The Missing, Swery’s games have featured memorable stories, beautiful settings, and some questionable technical issues.

The Good Life, however, is everything Swery has learned from his illustrious journey put together into a single game.

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Featuring memorable townsfolk, a big map to explore and enjoy, a beautiful art style, some simple yet necessary RPG elements, and a murder mystery to solve, the goal of The Good Life is simple: take pictures, clear debts, and uncover the dark mystery of the town.

Welcome to Rainy Woods in The Good Life

The Good Life follows Naomi Hayward, an American photographer sent by a newspaper company to uncover the dark secrets of the "happiest town in the world". Called Rainy Woods, Naomi is sent there to gather clues and secrets related to the English Town, all while she struggles to clear off her debt and live her life.

Players in The Good Life control Naomi as she starts doing jobs around the town, taking pictures and collecting money while getting entangled in a murder mystery.

Naomi got some, well, not so nice things to talk about the town (Image via The Good Life)

The tradition of having bizarre characters in Swery’s game continues, as The Good Life features some of the most lovable yet unconventional characters in the game. Each townsfolk has their own distinct character.

The Townfolks don't feel like they're random NPCs added to the game; they fit rather well into the setting. In fact, the town people in The Good Life added a lot of flavor to the game and certainly made it feel homely during the playtime.

Rainy Woods features some very interesting townfolks (Image via White Owls)

The voice acting is decent. Naomi’s voice actor does a good job portraying the frustrated and annoyed American girl trying to solve problems. Almost all the townsfolk have been voice acted since most of the story is told through text boxes and by a narrator, who is highly likable.

White Owls and Grounding Inc. made sure that the localization is done well since Japanese games have a history of having localization problems. Fortunately, The Good Life does not suffer from that issue.

The game, however, has no lip-syncing with any character's mouth because of the way the character models are made. The Good Life’s music, however, is easily one of the best I have heard from any video game this year. It just adds a lot of vibe to the game.

Take pictures, eat good food, and live a comfy countryside life

At its core, The Good Life is an open-world adventure game with added RPG elements. Players have a lot to do, and the developers made sure that players don't get bored. In fact, there is so much to do sometimes that it starts getting a bit tedious.

The core gameplay revolves around Naomi taking pictures and uploading them in the in-game imageboard called “Flamingo”.

Flamingo features a list of buzzwords updated every new day, so the pictures which are taken using the camera and follow the buzzword get more likes. The more likes an image gets, the more money Naomi makes. It is a good mini-game that allows for a lot of exploration around the town.

Apart from photography, Naomi can do gardening, take care of sheep, partake in fashion by having the ability to change her clothing, have some good food and drinks at the town’s cafe and bar, mine, and a few more things.

Changing clothes and having food is encouraged, as both of them give Naomi some perks and boost her abilities. Some food will replenish her stamina quicker, while some pieces of clothing will increase her defense. Players can also get new clothes made with the right materials and can cook food in her home.

But that's not all; players can go and talk with the town carpenter and get Naomi’s housing and garden upgraded using the in-game currency.

Eat good food, wear pretty clothes and enjoy the stay (Image via The Good Life)

The Good Life follows a day-night cycle with seasons added to it. The game has a 24-hour time format, and missions depend on what time they are done, adding a little bit of urgency to the tasks. Even though the player is not forced to do missions immediately, the quests do follow the day-night cycle and get affected based on the time.

Speaking of missions, The Good Life has a storyline the players need to follow. The game primarily has two quest systems apart from the main story. There are urgent quests which are time-sensitive and are a follow-up to the main quests. Then there are side quests in which a player gets talking with the people of the town. Each quest is well written, and even though the beginning hours are a bit tedious, it keeps getting better as the story progresses.

The end goal of The Good Life is to clear off Naomi’s debts and uncover the mysteries of Rainy Woods. White Owls and Grounding Inc. ensure that while the players worry about it, they also enjoy the lovely countryside time of Rainy Woods.

It's raining cats and dogs

The unique point of The Good Life is the whole cat and dog storyline. Every full moon, the town people of Rainy Woods transform into cats and dogs. It's Naomi's job to uncover the reason behind it. Though there is no exact penalty if Naomi roams around the town at that time, she can, however, pet the townspeople in their animal form.

The Good Life also allows players to change into either a cat or dog on the fly, whenever they want. It may seem absolutely ridiculous at first, but it is charming in the context of the game.

Sniff people out by becoming a dog (Image via White Owls)

As a cat, Naomi can use Cat Eyes to scale certain walls in the world and hunt small animals which are fast. Hunting animals gives players items that can be used to build things.

Enjoy the wall-climbing as a cat (Image via White Owls)

As a dog, Naomi can scavenge for items from various places around the map, fight with big animals, and follow the scent of the individual townsfolk.

Naomi can either be a cat or a dog at a time and has to switch back to her human form to switch back to either animal form in The Good Life.

Janky movements and controller woes

Even though I didn't encounter major game-breaking bugs or glitches during the playthrough, I did notice some texture issues.

The computer textures, image previews, and few world items had low-resolution textures which made them look ugly and out of place. Silly glitches like Naomi’s hair looking incomplete and clipping through items made it look awkward. At one point, we found a Japanese register in an English Town (as of writing this review, it got patched out but it got some chuckles out of us).

This did make us chuckle for no reason (Image via The Good Life)

The movement animation doesn’t feel smooth, especially when playing on a keyboard, and the animation awkwardly changes from one point to another. The cat and dog movement in particular is very janky and could’ve been more polished. It just feels like a few movement animations switching from one stance to another based on player response.

Furthermore, there was no Dualshock support for The Good Life on the Steam version during the review. Players will have to turn on Xbox configuration support on Steam’s gamepad settings to make their Sony controller work. No actual option to rebind controller keys and no proper controller camera sensitivity option certainly makes the PC port very barebones with the minimum essentials added to it.

The biggest annoyance in this game is the constant appearance of the mouse cursor every time I press a button on my keyboard to take screenshots of the game. This is annoying and I hope the devs figure out something to fix it.

Performance and graphics

The review copy of The Good Life was played on Steam having the following system specifications:

Processor: AMD Ryzen 2600 running at base clock
RAM: 16 GB DDR4 running at 3000Mhz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 ti
Hard Drive Space: 1TB
No SSD

The game is not very demanding in terms of performance, so anyone who has a decent entry-mid level system can enjoy the adventures in Rainy Woods fairly easily, in uncapped frame rates.

There were no noticeable frame drops in any areas. However, we encountered two random frame dips at around 40FPS in two different stores, which got fixed after re-entering the place. The load times on the hard drive were short enough, as it took around 10 seconds for the initial load.

In terms of graphics, The Good Life is not the next big AAA game to push the RTX card with.

The game follows an art style where every character looks straight out of a folk-tail book. So if someone is expecting really gorgeous visuals, they would be sorely disappointed. The game looks pretty and certainly has a lot of love and heart poured into it, so go in with those expectations.

In conclusion

The Good Life is charming and beautiful with bizarre but funny characters, a big map to explore, and a lot of interesting quests. Top it off with beautiful music, and White Owls and Grounding Inc. have provided the players with a solid package with lots of SWERISM added to it.

Granted, few things can be fixed post-release and it would benefit the game a lot in the longer run. However, The Good Life is a great way to start ending 2021 with, and I definitely recommend it to players who want something laid-back and comfortable.

Still undecided? A demo for the game is available right now on Steam!