Debut trailer of Swery’s new cat game, The Good Life, isn’t impressing me yet

Catatonic

The debut trailer for Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro’s newest game (and first at White Owls), The Good Life, is here, and it’s not exactly great. Set in a rural English village where everyone becomes cats at night, a photographer from New York (likely the protagonist) discovers the dead body of a young woman and must figure out who the killer is.

I reserve full judgement until gameplay is shown, but it definitely looks like a low-budget role-playing game, almost indie. Makes sense in a new start-up company relying on crowdfunding, but it doesn’t have any unique style to it. The art looks to me like it was made in Microsoft Paint, and I’m not getting that “what the fuck is going on” vibes Swery’s games are known for. The theme just appears to be cutesy cats and I’m frankly just not feeling this yet, which I hate to say because I absolutely love Deadly Premonition and D4.

The murder mystery of a dead girl in a rural town once again rings of Twin Peaks. Fair enough that all of Swery’s games have involved investigated the murder of a young woman, but D4 had its own identity beyond that.