We Happy Few, a psychedelic riff on BioShock with survival game hooks, is one of 2018's biggest disappointments. It exits two years of early access development on Steam and Xbox One this week, alongside a launch on PlayStation 4. If you, like me, found yourself desperate for anything to scratch that BioShock itch, it's best to keep waiting. You're more likely to be frustrated by We Happy Few, a game flirting with interesting ideas, but whose cumbersome gameplay prevents it from doing much with them.

As it turns out, they weren’t trying to, really. We Happy Few was envisioned as a short but replayable survival game with "light" narrative elements dropped in , but primarily about managing health, energy, and other resources. The gulf was enormous enough that, midway through development, the gap in expectation forced them to rethink the game.

This should have made many people, myself included, immediately suspicious of We Happy Few. But my response to the trailer was “Oooh, BioShock,” and I definitely wasn’t alone. If major publishers with big pocket books weren’t making games like this, how is the developer of a totally fine but largely forgettable platformer from 2013 going to pull it off?

It'd been three years since BioShock Infinite, and even if you really disliked BioShock Infinite, there was plenty of appetite for more of, well, that. What that is, exactly, is a little ephemeral, but the best I can deconstruct a BioShock-y game is a first-person, story-driven experience with elaborate set pieces, insufferable but strangely appetizing philosophizing, and lots of tiny details to reward observant players. It usually involves being able to solve combat in a variety of ways, too. It’s almost a subgenre of the immersive sim. They are deliberately expensive games to make at all, and they’re even harder to pull off, which helps explain why they're so rare.

We Happy Few got on my radar a few years ago, after developer Compulsion Games debuted a trailer at E3 2016 during Microsoft's event. The nearly-five minute teaser— depicting a British dystopia where censorship is rampant, people pop pills to forget real-life, and everyone's wearing weird, horrific masks—was stylish as all hell:

Based on the interviews I've read about the game's development, the last few years have been spent polishing and rebalancing the survival parts of the game, while simultaneously building an enormous single-player story. The question: can you make BioShock on a smaller budget?

My objective: put on a tight latex suit and sneak into a sex club. (I'm trying to make it to the next area, and need a keycard from someone known to frequent this spot.) This should be easy; I found one such suit a few minutes ago, after picking a lock and, sorry not sorry, rifling through someone's things. The game says I'm wearing the suit, but the doorman says that's not true. Maybe if I take it off and put it on? This prompts a response from the doorman, so I try again. Nope. I take it off and put it on again. Nope. I explore the world a little more, find another suit hidden away, and try that one on. Nothing. Around the corner, the sex club's main attendant has glitched through the floor, her head just barely poking through the geometry.

There is definitely a story in We Happy Few now, but experiencing what it has to say is more tedious than fun, and you can see the game buckling under the constraints of its foundation. It's a story grafted onto gameplay that does not mesh particularly well, whose restrictions often prevent the player from seeing what they're there for.

The game opens just as the trailer does, with a government censor, Arthur Hastings, thrown into shock while reading a newspaper clipping about himself—and his brother. Arthur reaches for his bottle of joy, pills that keep everyone in the world artificially happy, but throws them in the trash. He decides to linger on this memory, and investigate why everyone is so interested in forgetting. Like its primary inspiration, it's a game about entering a foreign world, and figuring out what happened. There are countless notes to fill narrative gaps, and in true BioShock fashion, you thoughtlessly dig through desks, lockers, and trash for health, weapons, and items.

I barely bat an eye at the person melding with the floor tiles; I've seen this many times before.

By now, the meter measuring my level of joy, a happiness-inducing drug required to be taken by the citizenry, reads zero. There are no joy dispensers nearby, no spare pills in my inventory. If you aren't taking joy, your fellow citizens become suspicious. Within moments, the doorman begins yelling, eventually pulling out an electric weapon of some sort. He beats me with it, and I quickly die. The game places me outside the club, as if nothing happened. I walk back in, talk to the doorman, and he...admits I'm wearing the latex suit.

The problem, it turns out, was a glitch, one apparently fixed by dying and letting the world resort itself. I walked upstairs, and accidentally picked up an object that was marked "steal," prompting the whole world to attack me. You can't put the item back, you can't load an old save. You simply have to wait, die, respawn outside, and try again. At this point, I turned the game off, refusing to play further. I'd had enough of We Happy Few. And while glitches were rampant during my five hours with the PC version, glitches are hardly the game's only problem.

(The developers did issue a “day zero” patch with bug fixes. It’s unclear if it would have solved this issue, but as I mentioned, it was one of many bugs I ran into in the game.)