We Happy Few [official site] is much less of a downer following a major update. The game, which is a fusion of crafting, survival and first-person narrative action adventure, was released into Early Access in July and my first experiences with it were disheartening. A short introduction has you control lead character Arthur Hastings at work, redacting history, and then escaping into the underground when the true nature of his colleagues and environment is revealed. He sees the truth when he stops taking his Joy, which is a more potent form of Huxley’s Soma, and swiftly ends up in the blitzed rubble at his home village’s outskirts with all the other downers.
On its initial release, I found the game as drab as Hasting’s surroundings.