A new trailer was released, giving the game’s launch date for next month. You’ll get to see tidbits of the story here, and it begins with the game’s whimsical nature while showing off the photography and the gameplay when you’re both a cat and a dog. It then takes quite the dark turn halfway through before showing off the more fantastical elements your reporter will uncover.

The Good Life is now set to release on October 15th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch and PC.

It was last year when the legendary and quirky Japanese Director, Swery65, unveiled his next crowdfunded game, The Good Life. The game is a strange one about a mysterious England town claiming to be ‘the happiest place on Earth’ and a New York photographer who finds herself trapped there as she unravels a strange secret. Swery just finished up his last game, Deadly Premonition 2, which was… quite something, and now it seems we got a little more information on The Good Life.

It’s been roughly a year now since we last heard any significant update on the title, but today it was announced the title was picked up by a new publishing partner, The Irregular Corporation. The company is a fairly new one, having been founded in 2016 and has published several smaller indie titles. Alongside the announcement came a new trailer, which you can see below.

The Good Life is now set to launch in Summer of 2021 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. As it stands, there seems to be no native version planned for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, but the PS4 and Xbox One versions should be playable on their respective successors.

https://youtu.be/nrjGdHHXki4

When it comes to famous Japanese video game directors with quirky senses of humor and themes, you probably default to Hideo Kojima, which is natural, considering his big name, and that his new game is coming out soon. But when you get down to it, there’s one Japanese director who probably has ’em all beat on that quirky factor- and that’s Swery. And he’s a busy man, too.

In an interview with Wccftech, Swery mentioned that he was working on all these projects. First is his indie title The Good Life, as well as the post-launch content that will come after its release, while there’s also the much awaited sequel Deadly Premonition 2 that’s coming to the Switch sometime next year. There’s also the apparent horror project that he’s working on with fellowdDirector Suda 51. To top everything off, he also has a fifth project that’s going to be a secret for now.

So that’s five different projects across several different platforms Swery is involved with in some capacity. Does the man sleep at all? Well, either way, he’s a busy man nowadays.

The last generation of consoles tended to be a rough one for Japanese companies, big and small. As gaming itself exploded, both financially and technologically, a lot of even the behemoths of the Japanese industries struggled. Whether it was chasing trends, issues with internal engines, or the shifting tastes of consumers, many undoubtedly hit a lot of speed bumps.

Over the last few years, it feels like most have settled back into their groove, slowly but surely. Probably the prime examples are Capcom and Bandai Namco, both of whom have seen their primary franchises revitalized with sales and profits being steady. What’s led to this new outlook? Well, Japanese developer SWERY (Hidetaka Suehiro) has some thoughts- mainly that the Japanese industry finally got over some of its biggest flaws.

In an interview with Wccftech, SWERY was out to promote his upcoming game, The Good Life, but also mulled over the current Japanese game industry revival. When asked what he thinks led to that, he said it’s as simple as Japanese creators taking a hard look at the market share they’d lost and reevaluating what they needed to do to get back on track.

“This is the result of what Japanese creators have been doing for the past five years, which is realizing that they were starting to lose their status in comparison to the West,” he said. “The Japanese market, people in general populace didn’t realize that. The creators did. So they really started studying the new methodology for games, utilizing the West and that’s finally starting to come to fruition.”

Another aspect he thought was helpful was the fact that a lot of Japanese companies have gotten over the need for custom game engines, as many of the bigger companies have switched to using Unreal or Unity, which are both western standard engines. One issue that led to ballooning budgets last generation was seemingly every major Japanese company wanting its own custom game engine, something only Capcom still does by and large.

“Yeah, so that tends to be a thing in the Japanese game industry, where you want to make this exclusive tech and then hide it for yourself, then you get the advantage ultimately,” said SWERY. “But these engines that you’re speaking of, they started to become the big thing. So there was no more point in hiding your tech, you had to catch up with the rest of the world. So that’s why creators switched over to other engines.”

SWERY’s next game, The Good Life, is a Kickstarter project coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. You can check out more about it here.

Apparently, the D4 director Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro is not interested in making a season two of D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. Fans of the game probably remember it launching as an Xbox One exclusive- however, the title failed to gain good reviews or good sales, and in spite of a cliffhanger ending, there has been no indication of a sequel.

With Swery having announced a brand new game, The Good Life, which he is trying to get crowdfunded on Fig, there are many fans of D4 who are wondering if he will go back to finishing up D4‘s story, probably in a second season. However, lashing out at fans constantly harassing him on Twitter to make a second season of the game before he works on anything else, Swery has confirmed that he has no intention of making a follow up to D4, and that fans need to stop asking him about it.

So, basically, here’s the long and short of it- D4 is done. Swery is not interested in returning to the game for a follow-up. If you want to see more of that, you are out of luck. That said, Swery is going to be working on a brand new game that is likely to have the same style and tone as Deadly Premonition and D4 did, so if you are interested more in Swery’s aesthetic, go crowdfund that on Fig.

https://twitter.com/Swery65/status/918453005782999042

Sorry, Enough.
I have to Block you if you will continue this conbersation https://t.co/SJKIgdpoIW

— Hidetaka SWERY SueHERO (@Swery65) October 12, 2017