It’s the groovy 60s, baby. A pop-bubblegum run of swinging British culture. Only, in this alternate dimension, the Germans won World War II and left the remains of its stead a plastic, complacent and terrifying place. This is the world of Compulsion Game’s We Happy Few.

The overlying result on society is a nightmare where everyone is perpetually in a hive state, drugged and under a fascist fear induced regime. Ahem, sounds kinda familiar, right?

The German’s victory during WWII lead to Britain being gutted and its residents sent to random locations via train. This left society in the doldrums, until the invention of a pill called Joy. The drug became required by law and allowed Britain to see nothing but the good, around them despite there being none.

In We Happy Few, you take on the role of three Wellington Wells residents, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. While some have more physical strength others are better at sneaking around or great at the science of chemistry. This makes for each character, being a different experience from the previous by forcing the player to craft and use wits as opposed to fighting, or having an all out brawl in some instances.

The word “dystopia” gets thrown around a lot but We Happy Few, seriously earns the description with its closely molded 1984 and The Prisoner similarities. Both the world and the quirky characters separate the game from anything in recent gaming history and holy smokes am I all about something new.

You first take on the timid mod ways of Arthur, a censorship employee who forgets to take his Joy meds and finds that the world is very dark when not looking through Joy stimulated rose-tinted glass. Arthur is instantly cast out of Wellington Wells and into the sewers and outskirts of the city where the ‘downers’ live. These folks, much like Arthur have stopped taking their meds and live in a real and depressed state, shamed and exiled.

After the withdrawal from Joy causes Arthur’s memories to flood back to him, his primary goal is to find his brother Percival, who he was separated from at a young age following the German’s WWII win. To do this you will have to use your noggin and skills to infiltrate Wellington Wells under the guise of a regular ole Welly.

A lot of the games suspense and unease comes from its ability to make you feel like an outsider throughout its runtime. Forcing you to sneak around and act try to fit in, is an experience that Compulsion Games didn’t shy from. These bits of the game are not nice, and skews the realms of ego and social norms. It’s well thought out and rooted in a feeling I think all of us have felt at some point, but here on a larger more threatening scale.

By taking the role of different characters the games narrative is thoroughly explored. Both voice acting and the games writing allows for a great amount of what you want to discover in this world. Good thing too, because there is plenty of the world to investigate and even more nooks and crannies to loot. Arthur’s story alone takes upwards of 30 hours.

Tired side missions do become tedious after a while but the central plot is enough to keep you engaged. Only a few open world sandboxes have cracked the code of making side missions seem less like chores and more like fun, unfortunately We Happy Few lands in the camp that didn’t quite crack that riddle.

Looting is a large part of the game that dips a toe into both survival and RPG pools. Crafting outfits to fit in, lock picks to open doors and other tools of the trade do require you to look around and loot frequently. Along the way, you are free to upgrade skill trees to help balance your character out. Survival elements are at play but aren’t so extreme that they can kill you. For example, being hungry or thirsty won’t cause death, so much as it will be a nuisance to properly accomplish other feats in the physical exertion department.

We Happy Few was in preview phase for a while before its final release. During that time, the game went through many changes to its survival approach, as well as ironing out some buggier issues. With a narrative pushed into the final mix, it’s impossible to not see the seams now. It’s a small complaint, because it probably only extends to people who had been playing it in beta, but still, I see the games cracks and at times I can see blatantly forced pieces of narrative being pushed into puzzle gaps it didn’t belong in. That being said, it doesn’t take away from the experience as a whole.

There are some terrifying socio parallels at work throughout this game, from its petrified masses that surrendered to paper tanks, to a society in denial that lies to itself in order to continue surviving. All those bits of disturbing content you see on the news currently, and Twitter working overtime is all illustrated in the characters, towns and story of We Happy Few in ultra-satirical ways.

I extremely enjoy this off the beaten path approach to a game, and the earnestness that comes with it. The cartoonish greens, blues and yellows scream, but not with excitability. Instead, this gem uses those colors to alarm us, similar to a poisonous snake in the wild. We Happy Few strives to be its own bizarre natured self, and it achieves it and earns it. Its Orwellian sensibilities combined with its Monty Python instances and The Prisoner peculiar dread puts We Happy Few in a class all its own and an experience that shouldn’t be missed.

We Happy Few is out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.