Do you think the clothing the main characters wear says a lot about who they are?
Of course. I think that's true of most games. But I do think it's sort of interesting the way that clothing is used as a mechanic in We Happy Few. I will talk about the outfits in a second, but first I wanna talk about how designed the characters are compared to how much of them you actually see... which is almost none.
We Happy Few's conformity mechanic uses clothing in a way not unlike Hitman, where you must be dressed appropriately for the occasion and location or people become suspicious of and angry with you. However, in Hitman, the act of changing disguises is a large part of the game's feedback and reward loop. As such, in most installments of the game, you're able to switch between first and third person, so as to admire your new fry cook outfit, for example.
Now Agent 47 does have a default outfit. Or rather, in later installments, a wardrobe of similar outfits that all fit the general idea of him. That he can easily take the suit that he came into a level with off to put on another outfit and become a waiter or a doctor or golf instructor or or or is integral to his character.
This is not really the case in We Happy Few.
There's a lot of reasons for this. First, the game only ever allows you to play in first person. The reason for that is probably practical first and design second. If you only ever have to model a character's arms to allow him to change outfits, then that cuts down a lot of work you have to do. It also allows a lot of clever reuse of assets. Consider that Arthur, Roger, and Victoria all share the same Proper Suit suit arms, just in different textures and with different hands attached. Victoria's hands are also Sally's Garden District hands cleaned up and given red nail polish and a darker skin tone. There's a lot of clever recycling in the game that benefits from only having first-person gameplay.
In terms of design, locking you to first person view means you never get to see your player character until the end of their act (or at all in the case of Roger and with the exception of Nick who's intro is in third person). What this ends up creating is a situation in which you are swapping outfits almost constantly, but your sense of a character's identity is attached to the outfit you never actually get to see in full til you're done playing them. Funny!
Contributing to this too is that even when your character is dressed in a disguise, the arms are only ever present on the screen for more than a second when you are in combat, which is an unnatural state that you're probably trying to get out of. Outside of that condition, your hands are only ever present in cutscenes when gesticulating and for brief moments in the gameplay. Practically, this is because your hands obstruct your view (another reason to get out of combat post haste) so hands appear, do their task, and disappear. Moreover, though the game doesn't want you getting too used to the idea of your character being malleable in an Agent 47 way. You are not a council worker, a maid, a bellboy, or a even a wastrel, even if you're dressed like and behave as one. You yam what you yam.
And the thing that keeps you grounded in this knowledge - the only time you get to see your character as they are to themselves - is here, in the inventory menu.
Because you're in here a lot, right? And while that graphic element of your character does nothing and never changes, that's the anchor to their sense of self. And you get a passive reminder of that every time you open your inventory to heal up in the middle of a fight or to put things in the pneumatic stash.
So. Arthur's outfit.
Arthur wears the prototypical Proper Suit. It looks quite stylish and bold on a glance with its white piping, but it is meant to evoke the rowing blazer issued to Number Six as part of his uniform on The Prisoner, a show about a former spy trapped on a surreal island where everything seems very nice but oppressive forces operate in the background. Mercifully, being black, the suit does not require a pocket protector for the pens Arthur keeps in his breast pocket like a fuckin' dork. To take some additional slickness of the ensemble off when he wears it, Arthur is also accessorizing with blocky black glasses (although these are also common among Wellies so not unfashionable in and of themselves).
Arthur's physical character model and the specific styling of his suit (double-breasted with abbreviated lapels) are unique, but the outfit itself is not. As evidenced by the fact that many other men in the Parade wear the same outfit, it is also mass manufactured for mass approval and so involves no real sartorial risk-taking, true to Arthur's character at the beginning of his Act. In fact, when you arrive at Deirdre's birthday party, Clive Birtwhistle and another unnamed male coworker are both there also wearing the same outfit.
While the Proper Suit is worn by the randomly spawned Wellies in the Parade, other notable wearers of the Proper Suit include Dr. Verloc, Robin Goode,Ugo Sassoon, Clive Birtwhistle and... Danny Defoe.
They've done something quite interesting here.
While you'll not get back to the Parade until the end of the game, that first scene at the birthday party shows you that literally every man in your office is dressed exactly like you. Later, you'll meet Dr. Verloc and he's also wearing the same outfit, despite having a prominent position in the town, a unique face and nearly unique hair and glasses models. Then you get to the design center and the models are wearing the same suit too. Point is, this suit is accessible, trendy, and common.
Danny Defoe, however, is the only Wastrel with a torn Proper Suit... except for Arthur, but we never actually see that, do we?
Danny's suit is actually a re-textured version of the male Wastrel outfit. Even the rope in place of a belt has been colored a darker gray, perhaps to obscure that this is not actually a Proper Suit come to ruin, but a unique recolor of the torn Village Wellie outfit all male wastrels share.
At the point in the game at which you meet Danny, you have either already torn up your Proper Suit or will have to soon. In either event, the big gate that comes down to separate the two halves of the Head Boy arena allows the player the space to reflect on Danny, in his unique outfit representing his old life he can't go back to, as the ghost of Arthurs Future. Now maybe you don't become a poor Danny Defoe, forced to kill others every night for his own life and dinner. That's what the otherwise meaningless choice of whether to pick a lethal weapon or not is about. This is the point at which you decide whether that wretched visage on the other side of the gate is a mirrored reflection or a cautionary tale.
One last thing to note about Arthur's outfit is that he quite likes it and it holds sentimental value to him. He tells Beryl Markham that his uncle bought it for him (Uncle Norbert almost certainly, not Uncle Henry). If the Proper Suit is Wellington Wells's answer to America's gray flannel suit, Arthur's happy to have been given a uniform that takes all the guesswork out of not only getting dressed, but his place in the world. Being given this suit is basically being given one's marching orders; it's a metaphor for how Arthur, like most Wellies, prefers not to have to think or make choices and just be told what they need to do. Having to destroy it and indeed start changing outfits as a habit is a metaphor for being forced into accountability and having to make choices for himself.
Sally's outfit is at once a garment and a piece of concept art. It's meant to evoke the minimalist modern designs that began cropping up in the 60's, specifically Courrèges' 1964 Space-Age collection and its use of vinyl and plastic (and jockey helmets). It's also designed to bring to mind Emma Peel and her catsuits from The Avengers. That Sally's shoes appear to be connected to her pants is strange and impractical, the design of someone who does not actually live her life.
I regret to inform you that these boots/pants exist in reality.
Unlike Arthur, Sally has always been quite bold and without worry for stepping out of line and her outfit reflects this. Arthur's suit might be flashy in a vacuum, but it does blend in both for its ubiquity and for its black color. You can go unnoticed in Arthur's Proper Suit. Sally's Proper Suit, on the other hand, is shiny and high contrast with a bright clean white block of color to draw the eye (most other whites in the game are grubby or lean yellow). It says "Look at me!" It being unique also dovetails nicely with the Not Like Other Girls aspects of her character, particularly in contrast to how every other girl in Wellington Wells wears one of only two kinds of outfit.
But a thing to bear in mind is that Sally... doesn't really dress herself. Her stock outfit (and the one below) are haute couture pieces that Davy Hackney designed. Even her utility outfits are designs Mrs. Pankhurst has come up with and reflect her apparent love of harlequin print and practical allusion to sequins. While Sally's outfits do impart her character, part of her character is being a mannequin that she allows others to project onto.
I do think, though, the the jockey helmet and goggles are her own addition. That both of outfits we get to see in full feature these accessories suggest they are something she likes. The artbook also says that the goggles serve as eye protection when she's doing chemistry experiments. Since we don't get to see her other ensembles in full, we can't know if her helmet and goggles are part of those outfits too, but I would like to assume they are. Even having just the pink and the white sets would go with most of her outfits we know of. The helmet offers no additional in-game protection, but narratively, it would be a good idea.
We do get unique icons for some of her outfit versions though as well as unique arm and hand models for most of them. Most of the items themselves are shared by Arthur and they coulda been cheap and reused his icons. Kinda baffling that they did put that effort in, honestly. I can't say I wouldn't have done that too, but at the same time, it's strange given how economical they are with assets otherwise. Maybe there were grander plans for it.
Which would be quite fun since Sally actually seems to resent fashion.
This is a thing that I think shows up broadly in her character, that she has these ideas and presumptions about how things are (life, men, her place in the world as a woman), but they all blithely ignore the realities in front of her. I say she allows others to project onto her, but she permits this because that's how she relates to the world herself. She projects the idea that has the most value to her, whether it's the reality of the thing or not. Men are obsessed with her... except Verloc rejected the chance to take her back and Byng's certainly got a life outside of her. Society has hobbled her for being a woman... if you don't look at all the other women making the most of the opportunity they've been given. She's been forced to care about parties and dresses... but if she didn't care about what she wears, then why argue about the gingham?
She complains about fashion and being obligated to know about it because she's a woman. She sees it as a meaningless distraction from her chemicals. But is it actually? Like, if she didn't like being dressed to be admired and to appear special, than why not just grab the same dress every other girl is wearing and call it a day? In Wellington Wells, it is extremely easy to be fashionable without a thought. They've got it down to a uniform. For Wellie women, it's literally a Jackie/Marilyn dichotomy: are you a fun and flirty Village girl or a prim and proper Parade woman?
But it's more valuable to be the girl everyone wants and wants to be. And there's value in being the girl who can get away with Hackney's avant-garde outfits, being the one he chooses to bestow them on. There's value in having the avant-garde outfit because it necessarily marks her as different from and more special than all the other girls. But all of this has even more value to Sally if she can regard it as an imposition.
A thing they've done with Sally too that I think is very funny but also a bit of a tease is tell us that she's extremely fashionable - "outrageously" so - but not make wearing different outfits a large part of her Act. In fact, if you're not playing diligently and miss the cue for "Alterations", you may never even realize Sally has more outfits. To date, I don't think I've ever used any of Mrs. Pankhurst's outfits for her, even the rubber catsuit she gives you for free. You just don't really need different clothes as Sally; it doesn't come up that often. In fact, maybe that she is a local celebrity precludes her from the disguise element of the game in the way that being a local menace precludes Ollie from it.
As an aside, I think this is a good place to touch on one other related topic. I said that we never get to see our player character in third person until the end of their act, but that's not strictly true.
We do get to see them as other characters see them. And in Sally's Act, this serves a secondary narrative purpose.
When we meet Sally as Arthur, all of their encounters happen in the Village and so that she only ever looks impeccable and put together makes sense. It is not incongruent with the situation.
When, as Sally, we see Arthur in the alleyway conversation, this is also in the Village so him being tidy coheres with the scene. When we meet Arthur again in the Garden District though, he's still wearing his Proper Suit.
The thing about this is, while there are masked and unmasked models for our protagonists, they don't have Torn Suit models so they don't have a Garden District Arthur to use for this scene. But I do think it's also supposed to be that Sally is seeing Arthur as the idealized version of him that she's imagined since she left. She's not seeing his Torn Suit or the dirt under his fingernails; she's projecting the version of him that she left fifteen years ago and has kept in stasis in her memory. That's why the reality of him - that he exists outside of her and her priorities, her complications - hits her that much harder than having to choose to leave her behind hits Arthur.
And this projection is only really the case in Sally's Act, I think. In Arthur's act, he recognizes her as having grown up into a completely different person from the girl in the green gingham dress who left in the dead of night. Ollie also takes a moment before he recognizes Arthur, since he's also grown and changed since the last time they'd seen each other. It's only Sally who's projecting her vision of Arthur on to the real thing.
I suppose that Ollie's still wearing his No. 2 service dress fifteen years after the war ended is a bit telling. Where everyone else in town has elected to forget that time, Ollie can't move on from it and dresses accordingly. Which is to say, he has divested himself from the Army, but cannot necessarily divest the Army from himself. There's no place for him in the Memorial Camp (the past), but there's also no place for him in the Village (the present) either, thus he stays in a service uniform purgatory out in the Garden District.
Funnily enough, that he has this unique uniform of a specific rank (that apparently is no longer observed to judge by Corp. Cheeseman not having the title) marks Ollie as being himself, persona non grata, and does not conform in the military camp.
Olive(r) drab is also a good option for survivalist garb, so I can't fault him for practicality even if it's a bit of a badge of dishonor at this point and makes socializing difficult. Not like he has much need for it. Tons of pockets attached to jacket too (you can't really see them in his inventory image, but each of the main characters' menu images also show us where they're keeping all their stuff).
The pants are actually plaid, reading as a neutral brown at a distance, which is a subtle call to his being Scottish. Interestingly, at a very early stage in the game's development, pants were a separate inventory slot so you could mix and match them (there's a remnant of this in Arthur's Act, where you need both halves of the Officer's Uniform before you can wear it). Ollie's pants then are probably not the ones that came with his uniform.
Lastly, his pink ribbon tied around his wrist. Or rather, Margaret's pink ribbon. Ollie's gameplay is very combat oriented and you're meant to rely on his strength and brawn rather than Arthur's stealth and Sally's social graces to navigate the world. As such, Ollie's hands are actually on the screen quite a lot more in his Act, keeping Margaret's ribbon in view for much of the time. This helps keep her presence in the player's mind, as she would be in Ollie's, even if your individual gameplay hasn't given her much to say for a while.
Annnnd because tumblr won't let me use more than thirty images in one post, you can have the other three in a Part 2.
