Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory

Just announced. From Cyanide Studio, based on the tabletop RPG

I'm sold

Edited by Ghilz on Apr 4th 2019 at 10:14:01 AM

Hm... the ideas for the gameplay sound interesting, but the story seems to be laying it on a bit too thick with the authoritarian dystopia. It seems worth a look, at least.

I mean from what I understand that is pretty true to the source material.

Yeah. There's a pretty big gag in the source game that it's basically impossible to go 5 minutes without committing treason.

Like canned food being available at red clearance (second lowest), but can openers requiring blue clearance (4 levels higher).

Like all player characters are required to be both part of a faction, and a mutant. Both of which are considered treason and punishable by death if discovered.

One of the games staples from what I understand is that after completing a mission for the computer, is giving the report, were you to throw the other players under the bus as hard as you can for all the treason happening.

Edited by Envyus on Apr 3rd 2019 at 9:37:06 AM

"completing" a mission.

You there, go test these new grenades out for us at the weapons range. But bring them all back intact, we only have 5.

And half your party has orders from their secret society to steal them. And one other guy has orders to eat one.

I'd point out that the problem is that Friend Computer is kind of nuts...but that would be treason.

Like other have said, it's the point. Paranoia is based on themes of dystopianism mixed with Mc Carthy-era red scare dialed up to 11, then dialed up some more.

The entire premise revolves around the complex being a dystopia of contrary rules enforced by an insane bureaucracy ruled over by a malfunctioning AI and a team of programmers who are in a state of cold war with one another and with the AI itself. It's not a serious setting.

The tagline itself is based around one of the complex' highest law: Happiness is Mandatory. Friend computer was built to make sure the residents of the complex were happy. At some point it figured out that if it forced happines-inducing drugs or executed anyone who is unhappy whom the drug failed to fix, then it basically completed its role.

The other big rules is that communism is treason. But it's been centuries of isolation so no one really knows what Communism IS (Not even the Communists!) ^note Note that the complex is by many definition, communist, as all corporations answer to the computer and are basically state business, and private property doesn't really exist, so accusations of communism can be wild and are swiftly answered. As Friend Computer was programmed by staunch capitalists and anti communism, it has very little info on what Communism IS, and sort of has to take people's words on what is Communism.

Edited by Ghilz on Apr 3rd 2019 at 12:09:26 PM

I figured it would be the point, it just felt a bit much for me. Still, doesn't mean much until the game actually comes out. If they integrate it well into gameplay, that'll be fun. I was really just remarking that I felt it was a bit much in the trailer itself.

Yeah it's played for laughs, and a bit for chilling horror at the Kafka-esque nightmare that it is. Quite how you can even fit a plot in there I'm not sure. But would work well for a roguelike.

I'm interested, but I'm also really skeptical about how well Paranoia would fit into a more classic-style RPG game. I mean just about the entire point was to see how badly you could screw over the other players without being caught. I'm just not sure that's going to transfer over all that well.

I mean, this is a game where a simple mission to deliver a note from one guy to another just down the hall can result in the complete thermonuclear destruction of the sector.

...what? They never said how I was supposed to destroy the note...

Games like Monkey Island and Space Quest who themvelves revolve around inherently comical and silly premises work. I can see this being no different.

This just sounds like We Happy Few with a new coat of paint.

We Happy Few was an interesting idea that was poorly handled, so I'm not completely against that. But one of its major stumbling blocks was trying to turn a mostly linear story into a rogue-like, while this might end up being the opposite, trying to turn a story that is designed to have no reasonable end into something linear.

But we'll see.

Only this came first.

And We Happy Few is no an RPG.

I don't know much about the Tabletop game it's based upon (I know the basics). I can say the tone seems right. Paranoia appears to be what I call a "Shocklike Dystopia"-a retrofuturistic, stepford society wherein the cheery propaganda is contrasted with horror for some of bathos effect. Examples include Fallout, Bioshock, Portal, and We Happy Few.

Mind you, I suspect it might have the problem that such a dystopia is pretty common now a days, but it's hard to say.

Hoping it's good.

FYI - This game is now out on Epic Games Store.

I'm not seeing much in the way of reviews, but I had a chance to try it and had very mixed thoughts. Environment is very Paranoia, but the gameplay was quite poor in my opinion.

The game suddenly came back into existence, judging from the Steam reviews there was absolutely zero progress on it since the delisting. Shame, there could've been a lot of potential here. I'm trying to get a work page put together with what little information I can glean. Paranoia: Happiness Is Mandatory

Edited by stankykong on Dec 21st 2023 at 12:14:50 PM

Saying that this game is a buggy, half-finished pile of crap is treason, citizen. It's also accurate. Spoilers are above your clearance level. Please report for mindscrub after reading.

I’m interested in the evolution of how the idea of “being happy all the time” came to be seen as something horrifying. Like, in the Book of Revelation in the Bible, it’s explicitly stated that souls in Heaven have their very ability to feel “negative” emotions at all removed by God, which is clearly framed as a good thing, and similar stories can be found in other sacred texts. So it’s pretty obvious that, in the ancient world, many people felt negative emotions were unnecessary and permanent happiness was something to aspire to.

Nowadays? The concept will be played for Black Comedy at best (Ren and Stimpy, Earthbound), but more often than not as a Fate Worse than Death and a sign of a horrific fascist dystopia. And I wonder how that shift came about.

…sorry for getting all philosophical in a random video game thread.

Also “Friend Computer” is an amazing villain name.

Well, the tropes of Happiness Is Mandatory and Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul are separate things. The former is "be happy or we'll use you for reactor shielding," which is this game and it's pretty transparently not fun.

The latter being problematic, in the Western tradition^note in the dharmic religions, happiness is still an attachment to the world's illusions you're better off discarding, seems to be an Enlightenment thing, largely because the Enlightenment (by which I specifically mean John Stuart Mill) were the ones who really dug into the question of "what makes people happy," and Mill's definition of happiness explicitly said that he'd rather be "Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied."

We could get deeper into the weeds, but that'd be treasonously off-topic

Edited by Ramidel on Dec 21st 2023 at 12:21:51 AM

^{[citation needed]}

(The discovery of the endocrine system made it possible to talk about the processes by which one might "have their ability to feel negative emotions removed", but people have been aware that being chemically manipulated into happiness can be independent of whether you had your psychological needs in life satisfied since literally before the invention of writing.)

The line in Revelation is, I believe, “God shall wipe away every tear.”