The Good Life is kind of a mess as gamers can see by looking at its Metacritic scores. That shouldn’t be that surprising for fans of the director’s other works. Swery, or Swery65, is most known for Deadly Premonition. That series is the very definition of rough around the edges. Despite the litany of glitches and other technical issues, that series gathered a strong fan base due to the wild story and characters.
That’s a highlight for The Good Life as well. It could use a lot of performance maintenance such as fixing the frame rate. Sometimes the game can look like a stop-motion animated feature due to the frame rate dropping. The technical issues will hopefully get solved with patches but there are some deeper mechanics that could use some tweaking as well.
8 Add A Save Button
The Good Life has two ways players can save the game. There is an autosave feature and then there is an option to save at home in bed. The manual save banks to the same area as the autosave data which is strange but not unheard of.
Another indie game from 2021, Eastward, did this as well. It would be great if the developers patched in a way to save anywhere and for these files to be separate from the autosave area.
7 Let Naomi Jump
One of the funniest features in The Good Life allows Naomi to skip instead of walk or run. Not many games come to mind with a dedicated skip button. There is a catch though. Naomi can’t jump. This looks a little ridiculous when she can’t climb or jump over fences that are barely at her knees.
Thankfully players can hop over walls as cats or dogs, but it would be nice if there was at least a “vault over” action prompt in Naomi’s human form as well.
6 Better Map Functionality
There are several things wrong with the map that can frustrate players. There is no way to zoom in which makes finding the best path la to take a bit tricky.
There is also no way to place markers around the world. It seems like an easy fix to patch in these two abilities. These two features go hand in hand with open-world games and not having either in The Good Life is a true mystery.
5 Better Fast Travel
There is fast travel in The Good Life but it is not as smooth as it could be. When on the map players can warp back home from anywhere in the game. This does cost energy but that’s a small price.
There are also shrines across the world which, when found, can transport players from shrine to shrine or back home as well. The trick is that each warp will cost money and it isn’t cheap either. The cost should get mitigated in an update or removed altogether.
4 Limit The HUD
The HUD is very busy in The Good Life. Many modern titles allow players to tone down what is and what isn’t displayed in the HUD. Sometimes the HUD will disappear and reappear with context. For example, that’s how it can work in Kena: Bridge of Spirits.
There are no options like that right now so adding them in with a patch would be much appreciated. It’s always a good idea to learn from the best.
3 Get Rid Of The Money Penalty In Death
There is a price to pay in death besides losing progress. Players will lose a part of the money that is on hand at the time of death. This is how the games in the Dragon Quest series work too. That series, and The Good Life, does have a solution to secure money though: banks.
Players can store money and access it via ATMs. The problem is having to backtrack to town every time players want cash for an objective. It would be nice if this death penalty could be turned off as an option or if players could access their money easier like through a debit card.
2 Improve The Quest System
If the developers don’t want to tone down the HUD then there is another solution to help mitigate screen clutter. Quests will always be displayed in the middle left corner of the screen. It doesn’t matter if it is a side quest or the main objective: they will always be there. It would be nice if quests didn’t take up that much space.
There is another quest-related issue. Only one quest can be highlighted at a time. This means if one objective is close to another, players won’t know that until it is too late. Tracking multiple quests at a time is a standard for open-world games in order to save time. The Good Life could learn from that.
1 Add A Subtitles Option
Most of The Good Life is told through speechless text boxes. There are voiced cutscenes too but these use the same style of text. These text boxes can’t be turned off, unlike subtitles in other games.
Some gamers may wish to experience these cutscenes without the clutter of text getting in the way. Adding in an option to remove them altogether would be great. Voicing more dialogue, in general, would also be a treat although that seems harder to produce in a short amount of time for a patch.
The Good Lifewas released on October 15, 2021, and is available on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
