Accidental Aesop: If the majority of people in a society have severe mental health problems, leaving them untreated will result in widespread addiction, and the entire society ultimately crumbling. Given that Joy is supposed to be a metaphor for opiate medication, despite its effects being more along the lines of LSD crossed with amphetamines, this is definitely not the message the creators were trying to send.
The sidequest where you encounter "The Followers of the Yam." Very few hints are given to its existence otherwise, and no one mentions it after the quest is complete. This applies to most of the things that the Wastrels are on about.
During Sally's campaign, when you finally make the Blackberry Joy for the Bobbies, well, this happens. There are no words, other than that the song they sing is catchy as all hell.
Captain Obvious Reveal: The Very Bad Thing spoken vaguely and dreadfully of in early promotional material like it's a mystery that will drive the plot turns out to be the train incident. However, you'll start working this out within a few hours of play maximum.
Complete Monster: Dr. Anton Verloc is the creator of the happiness-inducing "Joy" drug. Abusing his subordinates during Joy's creation process, Verloc uses his coworker as a guinea pig and synthesizes the Joy by testing a purposefully bad batch on civilians, mutating them with a horrible plague. Also disposing of the bad batches in the river, when the residents of Wellington Wells complain about the contamination, Verloc resorts to lobotomizing the residents, leaving them completely euphoric and docile to his crimes.
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Upon its full release, the game was praised for its setting, aesthetic and narrative. Its gameplay, on the other hand, was found to be simple, repetitive and prone to glitching. Unfortunately, unless you watch a Let's Play video, you have to play the game to see the story.
Estrogen Brigade: For whatever reason, Arthur, the Bobbies, and Dr. Verloc.
Fan-Disliked Explanation: According to Word of God, Joy is mainly their commentary on anti-depressants (and/or opioids). This was criticized for feeding into the myth of how anti-depressants and other medications are nothing but no-good drugs made to produce artificial happiness. Ignoring how anti-depressants are, y'know, actually incredibly important (many cases of clinical depression are caused by defects in brain chemistry, so some people literally cannot control it without medication to correct said chemistry), the fan-preferred explanation is that Joy is a metaphor for how countries (particularly police states) cover up their atrocities and poor situations with propaganda instead of admitting the truth and compliance in these things—even fans who go with the drug addiction metaphor will point to opioids instead of anti-depressants.
The Reveal that Germany bluffed England into surrender with a massive army of paper-mache tank models is a spin on the reality of the Ghost Army, a British unit that used inflatable model tanks and other such deceptions to throw off German intelligence and manipulate the German army during World War 2.
The plague victims quote Beowulf... in the original Old English.
Good Bad Bugs: The "Corpse Nova", created by making an ungodly pile of corpses and picking one up off of the bottom. The bodies will start flailing all over the place with them ending up in walls, attached to your character model in T-pose, or end up in the skybox. Here's a good example.
It Was His Sled: Persons acquainted with the plotline and canon of We Happy Few will already know that the so-called "Very Bad Thing" was the incident with the children on the train. This reveal proved to be a significant let-down, as all the demos and trailers up to that point had implied the "Very Bad Thing" was what Wellington Wells did in response to having their children taken.
Misaimed Fandom: Sally’s story was detracted for having the main character be too weak to fight and run as well as the mechanic of having to take care of Gwen, even though the point is that each main character has a different style, so the player needs to adjust accordingly. Playing Sally is supposed to encourage the player to play more stealthily instead of barging around as they could as Arthur or Ollie. Additionally, Sally constantly having problems like taking care of Gwen are what make her story.
Narm: With Arthur having a wavering and feeble voice, a lot of his reactions to general scenes of horror can slip into this.
Nightmare Retardant: The Make Believes' Music Video is horrifying to watch at first when one of the band members crashes during it and reveal the studio to be in shambles, before the others force-feed him Joy to keep the music going. However, during that crash, you'll notice that none of them are playing actual instruments, among them the drummer "playing" a bowl of mush with hot dogs as drumsticks. Seems Patrick wasn't off the mark in asking if mayonnaise or horseradish were instruments.
Prior to this game, there was a film starring Ryan Reynolds called The Voices. In this video game, the player experiences paradise when they consume the Joy Pills. But if they don't, they will see the harsh reality. But in the film, it is inverted. If Ryan's character does not take his pills, he is in paradise of sort. But if he does, he gets to see the harshness and truth of reality.
The concept of a numbing, hallucinatory drug that masks the consumer from reality called "Joy" was also tapped into in a certainRPG Maker game.
Joy is basically soma, but with a ton of other negative side effects on top of its primary, dehumanizing one.
Signature Scene: Ever since Early Access, the most remembered part of the game is the prologue. Namely, when Arthur remembers Percy, and the piñata scene.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The E3 2018 trailer ended with Victoria seemingly making a Heel–Face Turn. In-game, it turns out she was just blindsiding Ollie. Though it can be argued that Victoria is the peak of how badly committed some Wellies are in wanting to forget.
The final DLC, which features Victoria as the player character, appears to amend this complaint however.
Promotional material made it sound like the Very Bad Thing would be a huge plot reveal and that the Wellies are trying to forget something they did in response to the Germans taking their children rather than it being the event itself.
There are no long-term/story consequences to taking too much Joy. Instead, the final ending is based off a last-second decision. It would make far more sense for taking too much Joy over the course of the playthrough to result in a Non-Standard Game Over due to repeated dosage, similar to choosing to take your Joy in the prologue. The kicker is that this is exactly what happened in the Early Access. However, this could make entire playthroughs Unintentionally Unwinnable.
Win Back the Crowd: We Happy Few had an incredibly shaky launch when it came to the playable alpha. Nearly every bug was game breaking and necessitated starting over from the beginning, the survival mechanics were so overbearing as to make the experience utterly unenjoyable, and the landscape did not have nearly enough variety to keep it from going stale. Many a person had written the game off as another case of an indie studio with more creativity than actual practical game development skills... until the November and Clockwork updates. The former added a huge amount of variety to the game-world and re-balanced the survival mechanics into something interesting (eating and drinking once a day is usually enough to get you by, meaning you still have to scrounge for supplies but it doesn't beat you over the skull with it). The latter refactored the entire game, meaning quests actually worked and people got to actually experience the game-world. Needless to say, people are once again excited, or at the very least cautiously optimistic, for release.
. There are no words, other than that the song they sing is catchy as all hell.